Inquiry into the unfamiliar

Zetetic epistemology has been too narrowly focused on a limited class of inquiries, which has led to incorrect conclusions about inquiry in general. In this paper, I defend an activity-centered account of inquiry designed to accommodate a wider variety of inquiries. Within this account, I introduce two distinctions: (1) definite inquiries are concerned with a definite question having a determinate set of possible answers, while indefinite inquiries begin with an indefinite question and involve the development and refinement of their main guiding question as part of the inquiry process; (2) framed inquiries are concerned with a question that presupposes a settled conceptual framework, whereas framing inquiries are concerned with a question whose resolution requires the revision or refinement of the conceptual framework itself. By incorporating indefinite and framing inquiries, this expanded view of inquiry better captures the nature of inquiry as the activity through which cognitively limited agents move from ignorance to knowledge, from confusion to understanding. The paper concludes by examining some of the implications of fully integrating these inquiries into our view of inquiry for two debates in zetetic epistemology: the aim of inquiry and the norms of inquiry.