Inquiry and conversation: Gricean zetetic norms and virtues

Recently, philosophers have shown an increasing interest in the normativity of inquiry. For example, they discuss which doxastic or epistemic state makes an inquiry permissible or impermissible. Moreover, since our inquiries are typically considered goal-directed activities that aim at answering questions, philosophers have offered general principles to capture their instrumental normativity. However, it is notable that these principles – being general – lack specificity: They do not tell us how we should specifically behave to conduct an effective inquiry. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a first formulation of more specific norms of inquiry. To further this goal, I will consider the prominent theory of conversation promoted by Roberts (Roberts, C. (1996). Information Structure: Towards an Integrated Theory of Formal Pragmatics. In J. Yoon & A. Kathol, OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 49: Papers in Semantics (pp. 91–136). The Ohio State University., Roberts, C. (2006). Context in Dynamic Interpretation. In L. R. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 197–220). Blackwell Publishing. 10.1002/9780470756959.ch9), which describes conversation as an instance of inquiry. Based on this perspective and the idea that Grice’s maxims (Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press.) individuate the norms of effective conversation, I will reformulate Gricean maxims in zetetic norms and argue for their intuitive appeal in regulating our inquiries. Moreover, I will point out how these “Gricean zetetic norms” can be fruitful in opening new lines of research about the zetetic domain. In particular, I will show how they can be used to identify and ground the existence of some zetetic virtues – virtues of inquiry: Zetetic parsimony, reliability, focus, and lucidity. Finally, I discuss how compatible these “Gricean zetetic virtues” are with the intellectual virtues we can find in the epistemological literature.