Nike Charlott Frings
Humboldt University of Berlin
With her proposal of a “zetetic turn,” Jane Friedman calls for a radical rethinking of epistemology and has made the debate of inquiry a hot topic. According to Friedman, true inquiry requires action and an interrogative attitude (short IA; Friedman 2019). By contrast, I will examine the phenomenon of fake inquiry, which are processes that look like inquiry but are not. Friedman demonstrates with her Morse-cases that IA is intuitively necessary for inquiry to be genuine, and in doing so, she also introduces a phenomenon where inquiry fails—namely, when IA is absent. Additionally, I develop cases in which the action necessary for inquiry is insufficiently performed. These cases demonstrate that Friedmans account does not clarify how much action we have to perform to satisfy the norm ZIP (if you want to inquire, take the necessary means) and thereby meet the action condition. The question arises as to whether intersubjective standards are needed to determine when the condition of action is met, since we wish to classify some instances of inquiry as fake inquiry, or whether subjective standards are needed, given that an epistemic agent acts within the limits of its own capabilities in any case. It will be shown that both approaches are problematic, which end with the conclusion that its difficult by now that inquirers can reliably satisfy ZIP and thereby the condition of action.
Chair: tba
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SOPhiA 2026 