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 language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 163 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 206 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2025 |
Keywords
- Inquiry
- Instrumental rationality
- Normativity
- Pseudo-questions
- Questions
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