Inquiry and the doxastic attitudes
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Inquiry and the doxastic attitudes Michele Palmira1 Received: 9 April 2018 / Accepted: 20 September 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. Keywords Inquiry · Suspended judgement · Doxastic attitudes · Belief · Credences · Acceptance · Normative profile · Intrinsic and extrinsic epistemic reasons · Disagreement · Division of cognitive labour
1 Introduction Lucy the scientist starts wondering about how to account for a given biological phenomenon F within cell theory. So, the question Lucy is after can be simply put as follows: How to explain F? Call this question FQ. Lucy has never worked on F, nor has she ever talked about F with her colleagues or heard anything about how others try to explain it. She is therefore genuinely open-minded about how to answer FQ. Lucy starts investigating into F by being neutral as to what the best explanation of F is, and she pursues her inquiry by applying usual standards and methods of scientific research.
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Michele Palmira [email protected] Department of Philosophy, BIAP/LOGOS, University of Barcelona, Carrer de Montalegre 6-8, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
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Synthese
The first thing Lucy does is trying to acquire more information about F. By doing so, she quickly realises that the available information is such that there are three possible candidate explanations for F: call them pf , r f , and vf . At some point in her inquiry, Lucy begins to think that pf is the best shot at explaining F. That is to say, she starts being more inclined towards pf than towards r f and vf . Her inclination is cognitive and inquiry-directed, that is, she starts assigning pf some inquisitive priority over r f , and vf . However, Lucy notices that the probative force of all the evidence she has collected needs to be assessed more thoroughly than she has so far done in order to establish whether that evidence will indeed favour pf over r f and vf . Moreover, the coherence of pf with other well-established biological truths has yet to be checked. So, Lucy is very well aware that the situation is still epistemically equivocal. Thus, even if Lucy takes pf to be the best way of answe
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