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Inquiry and The Inquiring Way

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  • Gabby Xin Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis)

Abstract

Suppose Sally wants to know whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow and proceeds to answer her question by locking Matt in his office. Is this a case of successful inquiry? This paper develops the Right Way Account of inquiry that respects an intuitive “no”. According to the Right Way Account, the constitutive goal of inquiry is to acquire knowledge (or some related epistemic state) in the right way, specifically, the inquiring way. For a question-answering activity to constitute a case of inquiry, the inquirer must attempt to come to know the answer without intentionally causing an answer to be true so as to know. The upshot of my argument is that epistemology of inquiry has erred in assuming that the goal of inquiry is merely coming to be in a particular state. Instead, the goal of inquiry is coming to be in a particular state in a particular way. Accordingly, the inquiring way is indispensable to theorizing the nature of inquiry.

Keywords: Inquiry, Question-Answering, The Inquiring Way, Successful Inquiry, Goal of Inquiry

How to Cite:

Zhang, G. X., (2026) “Inquiry and The Inquiring Way”, Philosophers' Imprint 26: 21, 1–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.7778

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Published on
2026-07-01

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1. Introduction

Suppose Sally wants to know whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow. She looks up his schedule and sees that he will not be teaching tomorrow. She asks other people if he usually comes in on that day of the week. The evidence is inconclusive. Then she thinks: “Wait! He’s in the office today—if I lock him in there, he won’t be able to get out before tomorrow, and then I’d know the answer to my question!” She decides to lock Matt in his office so as to answer her question. She goes to talk to Matt in his office, surreptitiously takes Matt’s key during their meeting, and then locks him inside of his office as she leaves. Now, with the right details added, we can easily imagine that Sally now knows that Matt will be in his office tomorrow. Let’s call this case Office. Did Sally inquire about whether Matt would be in his office tomorrow, and if so, was her inquiry successful?

According to a familiar account of inquiry, inquiry is a goal-directed activity that aims at knowledge.1 Call this the standard account of inquiry.2 On this view, to inquire into a question Q is to attempt to come to know the answer to Q.3 Thus, on the standard account, an inquiry is successful when the inquirer comes to know the correct answer to their question.4 Call this the standard success condition. It then follows from the standard account that Sally is inquiring, and Office is a case of successful inquiry, since Sally indeed attempted to come to know and has come to know the answer to her question. Office, however, is intuitively not a case of successful inquiry, and indeed, perhaps not a case of inquiry at all. If so, the standard account is wrong: attempting to come to know the answer to a question Q is insufficient for inquiring into Q. Moreover, attempting to come to know the answer to a question Q and coming to know the answer to Q are insufficient for successful inquiry.

In this paper, I propose an alternative account of inquiry. This new view builds on the independently motivated observation that people can attempt to come to know the answer to a question without inquiring. I argue that for a question-answering activity to constitute a case of inquiry, the inquirer must attempt to come to know the answer to a question in what I call the inquiring way. On my view, attempting to come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way is to attempt to come to know the answer without intentionally causing an answer to be true so as to know the answer to the question. I call this way of coming to know the non-overriding way, and inquiring in this way the inquiring way. I then argue that it is the constitutive goal of inquiry to acquire knowledge in the inquiring way, so any case of inquiry must involve attempting to come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way. Thus, for an inquiry to be successful, one must come to know the answer in the right way, that is, the inquiring way. This view, which I call the Right Way Account, gives us a more encompassing picture of inquiry that highlights the importance of the inquiring way of question-answering, and also allows us to deliver a satisfying response to cases like Office. If my arguments succeed, their upshot is that the epistemology of inquiry has erred in assuming that the goal of inquiry is merely coming to be in a particular state. Instead, the goal of inquiry is coming to be in a particular state in a particular way.5

My discussion proceeds as follows. In Section 2, I consider a natural response for proponents of the standard account to the challenge posed by Office and show why such a response fails to save the standard account. In Section 3, I provide an account of the inquiring way of coming to know. In Section 4, I canvas two alternative solutions to the challenge posed by Office and argue that for these solutions to work, they must rely on my Right Way Account. In Section 5, I conclude that any plausible account of inquiry must give a key role to the inquiring way.

2. Is Office a Case of Inquiry?

A natural response to Office is to argue that it is not a case of successful inquiry because it is not a case of inquiry at all. Let’s call this response No-Inquiry. Proponents of the standard account might appeal to No-Inquiry to deflect the challenge posed by Office. While I agree that there is something wrong about calling Office a case of inquiry (given what happens at its last stage), I will argue that No-Inquiry is inconsistent with the standard account.

Recall Office. Sally attempts to come to know the answer to her question about whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow and considers different ways to answer the question before settling on locking Matt in his office. Once she locks Matt in his office, she comes to know the answer to her question. Sally has engaged in goal-directed actions to come to know the answer to her question and succeeded in achieving her goal. On the standard account, then, Sally was inquiring, and indeed, succeeded in her inquiry.

More forcefully, to claim that Office is not a case of inquiry is to concede that not all cases of attempting to come to know the answer to a question are cases of inquiry. This claim is inconsistent with the standard account on which attempting to come to know the answer to a question is sufficient for inquiry.6 Thus, if Office is not a case of inquiry, then the standard account is, again, wrong: attempting to come to know the answer to a question is insufficient for inquiry. Any satisfying explanation of why Office is not a case of inquiry requires revising the standard account of inquiry and taking into consideration the ways of question-answering, as I will show in the rest of this paper.7

The proponent of the standard account might grant that Sally was inquiring before a certain point, while insisting that she stopped inquiring after that point. On some views of inquiry, you can’t (at least rationally) continue to inquire once you know the answer to your question.8 Regardless of when exactly Sally stopped inquiring, the point is that Sally’s question-answering activities following the stopping point were no longer inquiry. On this view, Office is not a case of successful inquiry because Sally stopped inquiring.

Plausible as this potential response may be, in fact, it does not help the standard account to deal with Office. On the one hand, if the claim is that Sally stopped inquiring because Sally had come to know the answer to her question, then again, the proponent of standard account needs to answer why Office is not a case of successful inquiry. On the other hand, if the claim is that Sally stopped inquiring before she came to know the answer, then to claim that Sally stopped inquiring is to say that she stopped attempting to come to know the answer to her question. However, Sally was attempting to come to know the answer to her question the entire time and did come to know the answer. Either way, appealing to Sally having stopped inquiring cannot establish that Office is not a case of successful inquiry. More importantly, to tell a coherent story about why Sally stopped inquiring before she came to know the answer, the proponent of the standard account must concede that attempting to come to know the answer to a question is insufficient for inquiring.

In this section, I have argued that the standard account as such cannot rule out Office as a case of inquiry and therefore—by its own lights—needs to accept that Office is a case of inquiry and indeed a successful one. This verdict is intuitively implausible and thus calls either for a revision of the standard account or an alternative view. The remainder of this paper argues for an alternative view. With this, I turn to my proposal.

3. The Right Way Account

As a response to the challenge posed by Office, I propose and defend the Right Way Account, on which the goal of inquiry is coming to know the answer to a question in the right way. I argue that for a question-answering activity to constitute a case of inquiry, the inquirer must attempt to come to know the answer to a question in what I call the inquiring way. Further, for an inquiry to be successful, one must come to know in the inquiring way. In this section, I describe a range of cases of inquiry to illustrate what I take to be attempting to come to know in the inquiring way. On my account, to attempt to come to know in the inquiring way is to attempt to come to know the answer to a question without intentionally causing an answer to be true so as to know the answer. Coming to know in the inquiring way then is to succeed in such an attempt. Call this way of coming to know the non-overriding way.

Office provides a good illustration of how an activity of question-answering can fail to be a case of inquiry. Sally attempts to come to know the answer to her question about whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow. She comes to know the answer to her question by locking Matt in his office. Although she has come to know, how she came to know seems to render her question-answering activity not inquiry-like. So, what is exactly wrong with Sally’s way of coming to know?

An intuitive explanation of what’s wrong with the case is that Sally caused a certain answer to her question to be true. Sally made it the case that Matt will be in his office tomorrow and thereby determined the answer to her question. Thus, we might say that coming to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way requires not having caused a particular answer to that question to be true. Call this the Causal view.9

However, having caused a particular answer to a question to be true is compatible with inquiring. Consider Forgetful Chris.10 Chris is a forgetful person who keeps his keys by the door and a note on his phone about where he keeps his keys to aid his efforts in knowing where to find them. Whenever he inquires into where his keys are, he finds his keys by looking at the note and going to the spot where his note directs him. Although Chris has caused a particular answer to his question—the question of where his keys are—to be true, by keeping the keys by the door, it still seems that he is inquiring when he attempts to come to know the answer to his question.

One might think then that the issue is not merely having caused a particular answer to be true, but causing a particular answer to be true while attempting to come to know the answer to a question. Thus, we might say that coming to know in the inquiring way requires not causing a particular answer to that question to be true while attempting to come to know. Call this the Causing While Inquiring view.

Unfortunately, the Causing While Inquiring view has a significant drawback. It misclassifies good cases of inquiry. For example, imagine John is in the grocery store, noticing a trail of sugar on the floor. John wonders about the question: who is spilling the sugar? He follows the trail and tries to find the person. Unbeknownst to him, he is the one who is walking around with a torn bag of sugar.11 Although John is causing the answer to his question to be that he (John) is spilling the sugar and doing so while coming to know the answer to his question, his question-answering activity seems to be a perfectly fine case of inquiry.

Similarly, consider Office*. Sophie wants to know whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow. There is no other way to answer her question but by emailing Matt to ask whether he will be in his office tomorrow. She knows Matt is considerate and will likely come in if she emails him. Not wanting to influence his decision, she phrases her message so he will read it as a query rather than a request. After reading Sophie’s email, Matt decides to go to the office tomorrow, which he was not otherwise going to do. He then responds affirmatively to her question. In a sense, Sophie causes Matt to be in his office tomorrow, and she does so while attempting to come to know. Nevertheless, it seems like Sophie is inquiring when she attempts to come to know the answer to her question. If this sounds plausible, then we need to look beyond the Causing While Inquiring view for an alternative account.

Consider Office and Office* together. In Office, Sally locks Matt in the office so as to come to know the answer to her question about whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow. In contrast, in Office*, Sophie emails Matt to answer the same question. One informative way to understand the difference between Sally and Sophie is in terms of their goals. Although both Sally and Sophie attempt to come to know the answer to their questions, Sally intends to make it the case that Matt will be in his office, by locking him in the office, so as to come to know. Her goal is to come to know by overriding other relevant factors that might have otherwise made it the case that Matt would (or would not) be in his office. In other words, her goal is to come to know by intentionally causing a certain answer to her question to be true. In contrast, Sophie, while perhaps knowing that her inquiring might shape the outcome, does not intend to come to know in the same way that Sally did. That is, her goal is to come to know the answer to her question but not by overriding any relevant factors that would have made it the case that Matt would (or would not) be in the office, regardless of her inquiring.

Let’s agree that Sally was attempting to come to know the answer to her question but wasn’t inquiring. We can then draw a lesson from Sally’s activity of coming to know about what it is to attempt to come to know in a non-inquiring way: to attempt to come to know in a non-inquiring way is to attempt to come to know by intentionally causing an answer to a question to be true. Call this non-inquiring way the overriding way. Coming to know in the overriding way then is to come to know through succeeding in one’s attempt to come to know by intentionally causing an answer to a question to be true.

As I am using it here, the condition of overriding is a causal concept with a certain intentional structure. Coming to know by way of merely causing an answer to be true, without intentionally doing so, doesn’t make this way of coming to know overriding. A helpful way to think about the condition of overriding is in terms of direction of fit.12 If attempting to come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way is to attempt to come to know it by conforming one’s belief to fit the way the world is, then attempting to come to know in the overriding way is to attempt to know by shaping the world to fit the desire of the agent. More concretely, attempting to come to know the answer to a question in the overriding way is to attempt to intentionally cause a certain answer to be true in order to fit the desire of the agent: namely, the agent’s desire to know the answer to that question.

That overriding is distinctively characterized by an agent’s intentional structure can be demonstrated by cases in which one tries but fails to make an answer true. In such a case, one still attempts to come to know in the overriding way, even though they don’t succeed in making an answer true. To get clearer on this picture, consider:

Unsuccessful Office. Suppose Jane wants to know whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow. She does what Sally does in Office—looks up his schedule, asks around, and locks Matt in the office on her way out—as an attempt to come to know the answer to her question. Unbeknownst to Jane, the janitor cleans the office after working hours. When the janitor opens the door to clean Matt’s office, Matt leaves the office and decides not to come back the next day.

This case is clearly not a case of successful inquiry. This is entailed by the fact that Jane has not come to know the answer to her question. More importantly, however, Jane seems to have stopped attempting to come to know in the inquiring way because of how she attempted to come to know: by locking Matt in his office. Jane attempted to perform the same action for the same reason as Sally did in Office: she intentionally tried to cause an answer to be true so as to come to know the answer to her question. Despite the fact that Jane doesn’t acquire knowledge (or make an answer true), her attempt to come to know is still overriding due to the intentional structure that her attempt embodies: intentionally trying to cause an answer to be true in order to answer her question. To make this precise, the overriding condition can be formulated to be something like the following:

S attempts to come to know the answer to Q in the overriding way iff S attempts to come to know the answer to Q by intentionally causing an answer to Q to be true.

When someone succeeds in their attempt to come to know the answer to Q by intentionally causing an answer to Q to be true, like Sally did, they come to know the answer in the overriding way.

With this formulation of what it is to attempt to come to know the answer in a non-inquiring (overriding) way, we can also derive a plausible view of what it is to attempt to come to know in the inquiring way. That is, to attempt to come to know in the inquiring way is to attempt to come to know the answer to a question in a way that is not overriding. Likewise, someone comes to know the answer to their question in the inquiring way when they succeed in their attempt to come to know the answer to their question in a way that is not overriding. Call this the non-overriding way. Given the condition generated by the inquiring way of coming to know, a characterization of what it is to inquire can be fleshed out in the following:

S is inquiring into Q iff S attempts to come to know the answer to Q in a way that is non-overriding.13

For my purpose, what is essential for coming to know in any instance of inquiry is that it is non-overriding. Given that these ideas are motivated by what seems to be an important feature of Sally’s goal and the difference between Sally’s and Sophie’s goals, it seems plausible that the constitutive goal of inquiry is not just knowledge but coming to know the answer to a question in the inquiring—non-overriding—way.14

Here’s why. On some notions of the constitutive goal of a goal-directed activity, a participant of a goal-directed activity must be guided by the constitutive goal of that activity in order to count as performing the activity. Christine Korsgaard has argued that the constitutive goal of an activity gives rise to a constitutive principle that applies to that activity, such that if a participant of that activity isn’t guided by the principle, then they are not performing that activity at all.15 For example, she thinks that it is a constitutive goal of housebuilding that one builds something that “[serves] as a habitable shelter.”16 This goal of housebuilding gives rises to the constitutive principle of housebuilding—“build an edifice that will keep the rain and weather out”—that directs or guides the housebuilder in their housebuilding activity.17 On this view, a housebuilder is not building a house at all when they are consciously or intentionally trying not to conform to the constitutive principle of housebuilding.18 Similarly, we might say, if an inquiring agent is intentionally trying to come to know the answer to a question in a non-inquiring way, they are not inquiring at all because they aren’t trying to meet the constitutive goal of inquiry. If this is the case, then it follows that the constitutive goal of inquiring is not just knowing the answer to a question or coming to know the answer to a question in any way. The goal of inquiry, instead, is to come to know the answer in the inquiring—i.e., non-overriding—way.

We can now explain why Office is not a case of successful inquiry. To have a successful inquiry, one must achieve the constitutive goal of inquiry. Given that Sally comes to know the answer to her question in the overriding way, she has failed to achieve the constitutive goal of inquiry, and thereby rendered her case not one of successful inquiry.19 We can also make sense of the idea that Sally stopped inquiring when, for instance, she decided to lock Matt in the office. As soon as Sally adopted the relevant intentional structure—decided to come to know the answer to her question by intentionally making it the case that Matt will be in the office tomorrow—she stopped inquiring. This is because she was no longer attempting to answer her question in the inquiring way and, was therefore no longer inquiring.

Before moving on, it is worth highlighting an interesting upshot of my account. There are certain cases of question-answering in which someone attempts to come to know the answer to a question about their own not fully formed mental states. It is unclear whether such cases are cases of inquiry. For example, Luis might ask himself, “who do I believe will win the mayoral election in NYC this year?” without antecedently having a fully formed belief. In this type of case, the process of coming to know the answer to the question plays a causal role in the actual formation of belief. On both the Causal view and the Causing While Inquiring view, this type of case would be ruled out as cases of inquiry, since the agents in this type of case are, in some sense, “making up their mind” while attempting to come to know. In contrast, my account is well-positioned to recognize the unique nature of this type of case and has the potential to accomodate some of them as cases of inquiry.

Although it is not part of my account that this type of case is a case of inquiry, my account does not preclude cases like Luis’ from being cases of inquiry. On my account, whether a case of a question-answering activity is one of inquiry depends on how one attempts to come to know the answer to their question. If one attempts to come to know the answer to their question in the overriding way such that they attempt to intentionally cause an answer to be true in order to come to know, then on my account, they are not inquiring. However, it is not obvious that cases like Luis’ always involve the agents attempting to come to know the answer to their question in the overriding way.

Imagine two versions of the Luis case. On a good version of the case, Luis first tries to come to know the answer to the question, “who will win the mayoral election in NYC this year?” according to all the evidence he has. For example, he considers the poll results he read earlier, what people have said on social media, the status of the economy, and so on. Then he concludes that candidate A will win the election and thereby comes to believe that candidate A will win the election. By coming to this conclusion, Luis also comes to know the answer to the original question, “who do I believe will win the mayoral election in NYC this year?” In contrast, on a bad version of this case, Luis, without reflecting on any evidence, decides that he believes candidate A will win the election because he likes candidate A, thereby coming to know the answer to his question.

Although in both cases Luis “makes up his mind” while attempting to come to know, there is a notable difference about the ways in which Luis brings about the answer to his question. In the good case, Luis attempts to come to know the answer to his question by reflecting on the evidence he has regarding the question, “who will win the mayoral election in NYC this year?” In the process of doing so, he forms the belief that candidate A will win the election.20 By contrast, in the bad case, Luis attempts to come to know the answer to his question by crudely deciding to adopt the belief that candidate A will win the election in NYC this year. This difference between Luis’ two ways of bringing about the answer is nicely captured by Richard Moran’s observation about taking a stance toward one’s belief. As Moran notes, “one [orienting] oneself toward the question of one’s belief by reflecting on what’s true” is hardly the same thing as “the free or arbitrary adoption of beliefs for reasons of convenience, fear, or fashion.”21 Similarly, deciding to adopt a belief out of hope to come to know the answer to one’s question is fundamentally different from reflecting on the evidence and thereby coming to know the answer to one’s question. My account only rules out Luis in the bad case as inquiring due to the overriding feature that his attempt to come to know manifests.22

In this section, I have explained why Office is not a case of successful inquiry and why Sally (in Office) stopped inquiring. Furthermore, I have established a necessary condition for an inquiry to be successful: one must come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring—i.e., non-overriding—way. I leave open whether achieving the goal of inquiry is sufficient for a token inquiry to be successful for an inquirer. One might think that in some cases of inquiry, in addition to achieving the goal of inquiry, the inquirer’s own personal preferences over how the inquiry should be conducted might also need to be satisfied for these token inquiries to be successful.23 Regardless, as this section has shown, for an inquiry to be successful, one must come to know the answer to it in the non-overriding way.

4. Competing Explanations

The challenges posed by Office to the standard account are two: first, that attempting to come to know the answer to a question and coming to know the answer to that question, taken together, don’t seem sufficient for successful inquiry; and second, that attempting to come to know the answer to a question doesn’t seem sufficient for inquiring. In this section, I consider two promising responses on behalf of the standard account and conclude that for these responses to be plausible, they must invoke the notion of the inquiring way that my account highlights.

4.1. Answering a Question

Proponents of the standard account might agree that attempting to come to know is insufficient for inquiring but maintain that attempting to answer a question is sufficient for inquiring.24 Here’s one such proposal. Answering a question is a matter of coming to know the answer, not just in any way, but in a particular epistemic way that avoids cases like Office.25 On this proposal, coming to know the answer to a question is insufficient for answering a question. To inquire is to attempt to answer a question.26 By distinguishing the notion of answering from coming to know, proponents of the standard account can claim that Office is neither a case of inquiry nor successful inquiry because Sally didn’t attempt to answer the question, even though she came to know. This proposal tries to fix the standard account and respond to my purported counterexample by appealing to a familiar term used in the literature. Call this the Answering Approach.

However, note that this proposal doesn’t save the standard view. Rather, it proposes an alternative to it, replacing the notion of coming to know the answer with the notion of answering a question. Moreover, to say that we need a substantive notion of answering is to concede to my point that inquiring is more than attempting to come to know the answer to a question (in just any way). In other words, the standard account is wrong. At the very least, to distinguish coming to know from answering a question is to acknowledge the ambiguity of the notion of coming to know, which in turn speaks to the incompleteness of the standard account that my argument pinpoints.

More importantly, once this proposal is properly developed, it seems to be equivalent to my view. Specifically, for the Answering Approach to be plausible, the pressing matter for the proponent of the standard account is to explain what answering a question in a particular epistemic way means on their account. It is not enough to say that answering a question means coming to know in a particular epistemic way, because we still need this notion to be explicated so we can explain why this proposal avoids the type of problem cases I identified. Presumably this particular way cannot be explicated in terms of the Causal view nor the Causing While Inquiring view, as I have shown in this paper. I suspect that the best account of answering a question will be one according to which one answers a question insofar as one comes to know the answer to that question in a non-overriding way. This is because our account of inquiry must rule out cases like Office while accommodating cases like Office* or Forgetful Chris. So regardless of whether we try to rescue the standard account or not, the Right Way Account I have argued for in this paper is necessary both for spelling out an adequate notion of answering, and for having an adequate view of the nature of inquiry as an activity.

4.2. Apt Inquiry?

One of the challenges posed by Office to the standard account is that attempting to come to know the answer to a question and coming to know the answer to that question, taken together, don’t seem sufficient for successful inquiry. It is worth considering if there’s a plausible response that maintains that they are sufficient but concedes that the inquiry described in Office is deficient in some other way. Here’s one such proposal. In virtue epistemology, there is a distinction between successful and apt performance. One might accordingly try to argue that Office is a case of successful but inapt inquiry. By positing the notion of apt inquiry, this solution can validate the verdict of the standard account on Office, accommodate our intuitions that something goes wrong in this case, and make room for ways of question-answering in the evaluative framework. Call this the Apt Inquiry Approach.27

In virtue epistemology, success has to do with attainment of an aim, whereas aptness is about the relation of success to competence.28 Take Ernest Sosa’s example. If an archer hits the bullseye by luck, their hit is successful because it has attained its aim: hitting the bullseye. However, their hit is not apt because its success is not due to the archer’s competence. Sosa notes, “the aptness of a performance is thus supposed to block an important sort of luck or mere coincidence.”29 In other words, the success of an apt performance must manifest the performer’s relevant competence. Similarly, one can make a distinction between successful and apt inquiry. On this approach, an inquiry is successful when its goal has been attained; and an inquiry is apt when its goal has been attained through competence. Since Sally in Office has come to know the answer to her question, her inquiry is successful. However, her inquiry may not be apt, depending upon whether her way of coming to know manifests competence.

While a picture along this line may be promising in explaining why some cases of inquiry are inapt—if their success in coming to know the answer to their question is not owed to their competence—it cannot explain why Office is inapt. Specifically, the distinction between success and aptness is meant to capture the relation between competence and luck. A performance can be successful by luck, whereas an apt performance excludes the role of luck from its success. But Sally does not come to know the answer to her question out of luck in Office. By locking Matt in his office, Sally came to know the answer to her inquiry through her own competence. Her way of answering a question is efficient, reliable, and non-lucky. Indeed, it seems that, on this view, the outcome in Office is apt. So, making a distinction between apt and successful inquiry cannot save the standard account.

One might revise the Apt Inquiry Approach by placing further constraints on competence to account for Office.30 That is, to have an apt inquiry, the success of an inquiry must be owed to the inquirer’s relevant competence, namely, zetetic competence.31 On this approach, there is a difference between zetetic competence and the general competence of question-answering. And it is zetetic competence that is relevant to the aptness of an inquiry, not the general competence of question-answering. Thus, if Sally’s success in coming to know the answer to her question is not owed to zetetic competence, then her inquiry is successful but inapt.

Making such a distinction, though illuminating, concedes my point that inquiry is more than attempting to come to know the answer to a question. This is because, if the Apt Inquiry Approach is to be plausible, it needs to explain how zetetic competence differs from the general competence of question-answering. I suspect that any plausible explanation of this distinction would have to adopt a framework like mine, namely, referring to the inquiring way. Further, the need to bring in a concept of zetetic competence shows that the notion of apt inquiry doesn’t by itself have the explanatory power to help us evaluate various cases. Rather, what is needed is a conception of the inquiring way that accounts for when coming to know the answer to a question amounts to apt (or successful) inquiry.

5. Conclusion

This paper has defended several substantive conclusions. First, it has defended a new account of inquiry, the Right Way Account, on which the goal of inquiry is to come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way. On my account, the inquiring agent must come to know the correct answer to their question in the inquiring way for their inquiry to be successful. If my arguments succeed, their upshot is that we need to revise our understanding of inquiry. Specifically, the goal of inquiry is not merely some epistemic state but, rather, to acquire some epistemic state in the inquiring way. So too, to inquire is to attempt to come to know the answer to a question in the inquiring way. Second, this paper has offered a plausible account of coming to know in the inquiring way. On my account, to attempt to come to know in the inquiring way is to attempt to come to know the answer to a question in a way that is non-overriding, that is, to attempt to come to know the answer to a question without intentionally causing an answer to be true so as to know the answer. Coming to know in an inquiring way is to succeed in such an attempt. Third, it has shown the indispensability of the inquiring way for theorizing inquiry by exploring two promising alternative responses to the challenge posed by Office. The point is that we cannot plausibly deal with cases like Office without placing the inquiring way at the center of our theory of inquiry. Even if readers disagree with me on some details of my account, it should be clear that fixing the standard account, or to have an adequate view of inquiry, requires invoking something that does the same work as the “inquiring way.” Thus, my argument serves not only as a response to the inadequacy of the standard account, but also as an invitation to give the inquiring way its due attention in our accounts of inquiry.32

Notes

  1. See (Kelp 2014; 2021c; 2021b; 2021a), Whitcomb (2017), Sapir and van Elswyk (2021), Millar (2011), Rosa (2024). Note that nothing I say here depends on construing the goal of inquiry as knowledge, as opposed to epistemic improvement (Falbo 2023; Archer 2021), or maximizing the epistemic value of our credences (Beddor 2024). For those who are skeptical about the idea that inquiry has an aim, see Friedman (2024) for a critical discussion of this widely held assumption. ⮭
  2. For non-standard accounts of inquiry, see (Dover 2022; 2024) and Siegel (Forthcoming). ⮭
  3. For example, Friedman (2017, 322) argues that the point of inquiring is “to settle a question and to come to know.” Following Friedman, McGrath (2021, 476) says that to inquire into Q is to “[aim] to figure out/know the answer to a question.” Kelp (2021a, 3) also argues that inquiry into specific whether questions “aims at knowledge that p (not-p).” Similarly, Rosa (2024, 97) defends the view that “inquiry into Q is aimed at knowing Q.” This way of characterizing the standard view is bolstered by how Beddor (2024) describes the view that inquiry aims at knowledge, that is, “[the] aim of inquiring into a question Q is to come to know the answer to Q.” ⮭
  4. Although different authors formulate this idea differently, versions of this view can be found in Kelp (2021b, S1583), where he argues that “when you inquire into a certain question, you aim to settle that question and your inquiry is successful if and only if you settle that question,” and Kelp (2019, 301), where he endorses that “if one’s inquiry into whether p leads one to knowledge that p (not-p), then one’s inquiry into whether p is successful.” It can also be found in Carter and Hawthorne (2024, 655) who state that “where Q is a question, your inquiry into Q succeeds if and only if you come to know a complete answer to Q,” and Falbo (2023, 309) who states that “all inquiries aim at, and hence are successful upon achieving, some epistemic improvement.” ⮭
  5. My discussion of inquiry is restricted to theoretical inquiry—inquiry directed at a question whether P—that concludes in a judgement, and thus excluding cases of practical inquiry—inquiry into whether to φ—that conclude in a formation or endorsement of an attitude to φ (Hieronymi 2009; Moran 2001, 58). This is because, based on the characterization of practical inquiry, the goal and success condition for practical inquiry seem to be fundamentally different from that of the theoretical one. ⮭
  6. One might think that the proponent of the standard account can rely on a notion of answering or settling a question to exclude Office as a case of inquiry. Although I did not read proponents of the standard account in a way that distinguishes coming to know from answering or settling a question, this interpretation is worth considering. I address this issue in Section 4.2. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for pressing me to consider this option. ⮭
  7. While No-Inquiry is not a plausible response to Office, it is a convincing response to a case in Teague (2025), in which the agent takes a pill that automatically generates questions and potential answers to those questions. The idea is that being forced to consider questions and potential answers to those questions is insufficient for wondering. The difference between Office and the type of case that Teague is interested in lies in the agent’s attempt. While the agent in Teague’s case does not attempt to consider questions and responses to those questions, Sally in Office attempts to come to know the answer to her question. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting comparing these two cases. ⮭
  8. For example, Jane Friedman has argued that one is not inquiring unless they have an “interrogatory attitude,” which is a cognitive attitude that is “goal-directed, questioning, with epistemic satisfaction conditions” (2019, 299). One might think that if Sally knew the answer to her question when she locked Matt in his office, then she would’ve correspondingly dropped her questioning attitude and stopped inquiring. For other norms governing question-asking, see Rosa (2024), Willard-Kyle (2023a), Falbo (2024), Whitcomb and Millson (2024). ⮭
  9. See Steglich-Petersen (2024, fn. 17) for a view like this in response to a case of the same kind. ⮭
  10. Thanks to Chris Willard-Kyle for this example. ⮭
  11. This is John Perry’s classic example (1979). ⮭
  12. For discussion on the idea of direction of fit, see, for example, Anscombe (2000) and Frost (2014). ⮭
  13. While I am advancing necessary and sufficient conditions on inquiry here, I am open to the possibility of replacing the claim with a weaker one in terms of the necessary condition: S is inquiring into Q only if S attempts to come to know the answer to Q in a way that is non-overriding. ⮭
  14. Some might think that it is too quick to conclude that the goal of inquiry is coming to know in an inquiring way. Instead, they might think that the inquiring way should be built into the success condition of inquiry, while insisting that the goal of inquiry is knowledge. For these readers, I will point out that although this offers an alternative route to the conclusion that Office isn’t a case of successful inquiry, it cannot explain why Sally stopped inquiring, which my view can. Nonetheless, it is a line of thought that is worth developing. Thanks to Sandy Goldberg for raising this alternative. ⮭
  15. Korsgaard (2009, 28–30). ⮭
  16. Korsgaard (2009, 27). ⮭
  17. Korsgaard (2009, 28). ⮭
  18. Korsgaard (2009, 27–34). There is a stronger interpretation of Korsgaard’s view on which a housebuilder is not building a house at all when they are not intentionally trying to conform to the constitutive principle of housebuilding. This raises a question about whether we need to either intentionally try to conform to the constitutive principle or merely lack an intention that is inconsistent with the constitutive principle of a goal-directed activity in order to count as performing that activity. For inquiry, this raises the question if one must attempt to answer a question in the right way or just not in the wrong way. Answering this question is beyond the scope of this paper. But this question is worth exploring, especially if we want to avoid highly intellectualizing inquiry and thereby exclude animals from inquiring. Thanks to Jeremy Fix for a discussion of Korsgaard’s view. ⮭
  19. If one inadvertently comes to know the answer to a question, even though they are inquiring, their inquiry would not be successful for they have failed at their attempt to achieve the goal of inquiry: acquiring knowledge in the inquiring way. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to highlight this upshot. ⮭
  20. This is what Moran (2001) calls “the Transparency Condition.” ⮭
  21. Moran (2001, 64). ⮭
  22. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point. ⮭
  23. Preferences may constrain inquiry in other ways. See Willard-Kyle (2023b) and Archer (2021) for a discussion of personal preferences regarding the specific epistemic state that closes inquiry. ⮭
  24. My discussion in this section will focus on answering a question. However, what I will say also addresses other terms that proponents of the standard account might prefer, such as ‘settling’ a question. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for suggesting this potential way to fix the standard account. ⮭
  25. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for supplying this way of interpreting ‘answering’. ⮭
  26. See (Friedman 2019; 2020), amongst others. ⮭
  27. Thanks to Will Fleisher for raising this objection. ⮭
  28. Sosa (2015).  ⮭
  29. Sosa (2015, 24).  ⮭
  30. Sosa (2021, 11) has argued for placing further constraints on competence in discussing firsthand knowledge. On Sosa’s account, to attain firsthand success aptly, an agent must reach the answer through “competence seated in [themselves], not through sheer deference to others.” ⮭
  31. I borrow the term “zetetic” from Friedman (2020), which means “related to inquiry.” ⮭
  32. For discussion of and comments on this paper, I am indebted to Derek Anderson, Tez Clark, Will Fleisher, Sandy Goldberg, Luis Rosa, Jonathan Vogel, Dan Weiskopf, audiences at the Inquiry Network, the Epistemology Group at Washington University in St. Louis, and two anonymous reviewers at Philosophers’ Imprint. My deep thanks to Lidal Dror, Allan Hazlett, and Matthew McGrath for invaluable comments and conversations. ⮭

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