Is there a norm against inquiry into pseudo-questions?

  • Luis Rosa

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Intuitively, an inquirer should avoid inquiring into pseudo-questions. It turns out to be difficult to make more precise sense of that norm, however. According to one view, pseudo-questions are not legitimate questions at all. But that entails that it is not even in principle possible for an inquirer to inquire into a pseudo-question—for inquiry is always inquiry into some question or other. So if the target norm isn’t supposed to be one that every inquirer trivially abides by all the time, we better have another way of understanding what a pseudo-question is. In this paper, I explore different ways of drawing the distinction between legitimate and pseudo-questions, each of which leads to a different precisification of the initially formulated norm. It turns out that, whereas some of those precisifications are indeed norms of inquiry, others are not.

Original languageEnglish
Article number163
JournalSynthese
Volume206
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2025

Keywords

  • Inquiry
  • Instrumental rationality
  • Normativity
  • Pseudo-questions
  • Questions

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