1. Introduction
Lani Watson has championed the view that epistemologists must pay more attention to the practice of questioning and its associated intellectual virtue, inquisitiveness. She says, “I have argued that questioning is an epistemic practice and, moreover, one of significant social and societal value. If this is right, then questioning should be a topic of interest within contemporary epistemology” (Watson Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 436). Taking heed of this call, I investigate the virtue of social inquisitiveness.
Particularly, in this paper I claim that there is a significant distinction between individual and social epistemic virtues: individual epistemic virtues are attributed to individuals and determined by the quality of their cognitive powers, while social epistemic virtues are attributed to epistemic communities and determined by the quality of the social epistemic relations within the communities. This distinction implies that, while Watson discusses the social practice of questioning and its related social virtue, her account seems to focus on an individual practice and an individual virtue – that nonetheless hold important social reverberations. Building upon this claim, in this paper I offer a characterization of the epistemic virtue of social inquisitiveness, highlighting some of its key norms and contrasting it to its individual counterpart. As I will make clear, my approach involves analyzing virtues through the standards or norms that constitute them.
I will proceed as follows. First, I will present Watson's characterization of the (individual) practice of questioning and its corresponding intellectual virtue, inquisitiveness. Initially, she seems to present both the practice and the virtue in terms of individual attributions. Recently, however, she has championed the view that questioning is a social epistemic practice (Watson Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022); I will reconstruct her argument and defend that her employment of the term ‘social’ can be further developed, having in view the possibility of collective attributions, as her account does not explain what would be the social virtue of inquisitiveness. I will then argue that there is in fact a possible robust notion of social inquisitiveness that is substantially different from individual inquisitiveness, and this distinction can be elucidated through a normative analysis. I will present two possible objections to my account and conclude by highlighting some additional issues that warrant attention regarding social questioning and inquisitiveness.
Before proceeding, it is pertinent to provide a brief explanation of the normative approach employed in this paper. Virtues of any nature are excellences, certain qualities that make their possessor excellent in a certain practice, activity, or broad area of human affairs (cf. MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981; Wood Reference Wood and Snow2018). Epistemic virtues are no exception, and even virtue epistemologists from different branches would agree that epistemic virtues allow their possessors to perform epistemic practices in an excellent manner (Sosa Reference Sosa2007; e.g. Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996).Footnote 1 Thus, an epistemic virtue can be aptly described by the standards or norms that must be satisfied for the performance of the virtuous practitioner to be considered excellent.Footnote 2 A similar method of analysis is employed by Boult et al. (Reference Boult, Kelp, Schnurr, Simion, Kelp and Greco2020), who propose the thesis of Normative Charge of Virtues (NCV), according to which “One's actions and states T-ought (morally, epistemically, etc. ought) to manifest T-virtuous (morally, epistemically, etc. virtuous) character traits.” They comment that “there is a type correspondence between virtues and associated norms”, implying that “virtues of a certain type are associated with oughts of the same type” (Reference Boult, Kelp, Schnurr, Simion, Kelp and Greco2020: 45). While they employ a normative approach to distinguish moral from epistemic virtues, I use it to differentiate between individual and social epistemic virtues.
2. The practice of questioning and the virtue of (individual) inquisitiveness
2.1. Overview
While it is possible to ask questions to oneself – as we often do when wondering, reading, or simply thinkingFootnote 3 – questioning is a communal activity that involves at least two individuals: the questioner and the person who is questioned. In this context, questioning entails a dynamic interaction between the two parties, where the questioner seeks to obtain information or some kind of clarification from the other person.
There are, however, many ways by which a question can fail. It can be ill-formulated; it can be asked at the wrong time; it can be directed at the wrong conceptual target. Imagine a person who, while genuinely curious about something, is unable to formulate clear questions about it. Or consider the case of a student who is, in fact, able to formulate concise and clear questions, but who constantly interrupts a teacher by asking too many questions during the class, disrupting the flow of the professor's thought, and hindering the transmission of knowledge for the overall community. Also, consider a scenario in which an individual possesses the competence to formulate clear questions but frequently delivers them in an excessively ironic or sarcastic manner, that makes the person being questioned feel defensive and unwilling to give a constructive response. These examples highlight the inherent normative nature of questioning and shed light on what sort of trait its corresponding virtue would be.
2.2. Characterization and epistemic norms
To get a more precise depiction, I will follow Watson's (Reference Watson2015, Reference Watson and Battaly2019) portrayal of the virtue of good questioning, or inquisitiveness. She adopts Linda Zagzebski's model (Reference Zagzebski1996) which posits that intellectual virtues are constituted by two components: a motivation component and a success component. Regarding motivation, Watson stresses that all intellectual virtues share an underlying meta-motivation, which is the drive to improve one's epistemic standingFootnote 4 (Reference Zagzebski and Battaly2019: 156). The inquisitive person is motivated to improve her epistemic standing by sincerely engaging in questioning, where ‘sincerely’ indicates a genuine desire to acquire epistemic goods through questions.Footnote 5
The success condition, in turn, pertains to a cognitive ability the possession of which makes one reliable in achieving the proper end of the virtue (cf. Baehr Reference Baehr2007, Reference Baehr, Mi and Sosa2016). Watson states that it is not necessary for the inquisitive person to always arrive at the right answer to her questions – because, patently, this outcome does not depend solely on her cognitive abilities – but that the questioning itself must be good, as she says, “it must be questioning that is likely to improve epistemic standing, if the correct answers are forthcoming” (Watson Reference Watson and Battaly2019: 160). From these two conditions, she presents the following definition, “the virtuously inquisitive person is characteristically motivated and able to engage sincerely in good questioning” (Reference Watson and Battaly2019: 161 emphasis on the original). These conditions thereby establish the normative demands on the practice of questioning. As she says, “this draws attention to the normative dimension of the skill” (Watson Reference Watson, Fricker, Graham, Henderson and Pedersen2020: 440).
From this broad characterization, we can distill two main epistemic norms or standards:
SINCERITY: to be inquisitive, a person must sincerely aim at improving her epistemic standing through her questions.
SKILL: to be inquisitive, a person must ask questions skillfully articulated, i.e., if the person addressed by the questioner is well positioned to answer, the questioner will get the right answer to her question.
The SKILL norm is fairly vague. In another passage, however, Watson provides a more fine-grained analysis. She seems to break down SKILL into three components, which I identify as norms:
TARGET: good questioning requires “targeting worthwhile information”, i.e., it must be able to specify clearly what the questioner wants to know.
CONTEXT: good questioning requires “identifying the appropriate context for one's questions; one must ask at the right time and place, and identifying the right source of information.”Footnote 6
CLARITY: good questioning requires “the ability to formulate questions well; one's questions must be well articulated and appropriately communicated” (Watson Reference Watson and Battaly2019: 165).
The virtue of good questioning – or inquisitiveness – can, thus, be characterized by these four epistemic norms,Footnote 7 namely SINCERITY, TARGET, CONTEXT, and CLARITY, that pinpoint the appropriate standards that must be met for questioning to be virtuous, i.e., competently or excellently performed and thus plausibly able to enhance the questioner's epistemic standing. The person who consistently and habitually fulfills these four norms in her questions is virtuously inquisitive.
3. Assessment of Watson's social questioning and social inquisitiveness
Recently, Lani Watson has put forth an account of questioning as a social epistemic practice and good questioning (or inquisitiveness) as a social epistemic virtue (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022). She offers a rich exploration of the social dimensions that permeate every instance of questioning. To get a grip on this, let us review her approach.
For her, questioning has a pivotal role in epistemic communities, which she defines as “a group of individuals that produces, shares and consumes epistemic goods, such as information, knowledge and understanding” (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 427–28). This broad definition allows for virtually any human arrangement to be considered an epistemic community, from families to complex research organizations. The crucial point, for her, is that it is paramount for epistemic agents to find themselves in environments where epistemic goods can be shared, as many if not most of our epistemic goods are acquired by transmission from other agents rather than by the exercise of our own individual cognitive powers. Epistemic communities, thus, in order to fulfill their purpose, need to provide sound mechanisms that facilitate the sharing of epistemic goods. A prime mechanism for that, argues Watson, is questioning (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 435).
Based on this, Watson states that questioning is a social epistemic practice, a set of social interactions with the purpose of sharing epistemic goods. In a more fine-grained explanation, she defines social epistemic practices as socially established activities that aim at some epistemic end. Drawing from Alasdair MacIntyre (Reference MacIntyre1981), she understands practices to be social when they are developed through time, when they have some meaning attached through social repetition, and when they involve standards of good or excellent performance. Imagine, for instance, the social practice of raising a hand when a student wants to ask a question; “raising a hand” is only intelligible because this activity has through time been associated, by various communities, as a signal of wanting to ask a question. By “aim at some epistemic end” Watson points to the element which differentiates epistemic practices from other kinds of practices, i.e., that they aim at some epistemic good, such as knowledge, justified belief, understanding, or something else. Finally, while it is not explicit in her characterization, practices have a strong normative component, by which the success of the practice in achieving its end may be assessed.Footnote 8
After defending the view that questioning is a social practice Watson proceeds to offer a genealogical discussion of it.Footnote 9 She concludes that the proper goal of questioning is that of eliciting information. She says, “questioning provides an effective and efficient means of accessing the information that we need at the time that we need it, often by reaching out to others who already have the information at their disposal or can more easily acquire it” (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 431).
I want to highlight two issues in her account, namely the “social” aspect of the social practice of questioning, and the meaning of this for the correlated virtue of inquisitiveness. Addressing the first issue, as I interpret her, (1) questioning is a key element for epistemic communities to function properly, i.e., to allow a good flux and sharing of epistemic goods, and since communities are social bodies, questioning is therefore a social practice; and (2) it necessarily involves multiple people – at least the questioner and the one who is addressed by the questioner, and this social interaction implies that questioning is a social practice (Watson Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 433).Footnote 10
Further, as I've sketched in section 2.2, Watson has presented a robust characterization of inquisitiveness, the intellectual virtue of the good questioner, a characterization which I presented through four epistemic norms. A natural conclusion that one could draw from Watson's argument that questioning is a social epistemic practice is that inquisitiveness is a social epistemic virtue – and indeed, the title of her paper – “The Social Virtue of Questioning” – might be read in this sense. But it is important to get clear on what this means. For Watson, inquisitiveness is a virtue attributed to individual persons, and thus an individual intellectual virtue. The fact that its exercise involves other people beyond its possessor is a characteristic common to several individual intellectual virtues, which also involve, benefit, or require other persons beyond their possessors. Open-mindedness usually involves opening one's mind to the opinions of others. Intellectual humility, at least on two influential views, often involves being able to receive critical feedback from others (Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts, Wood, Zagzebski and DePaul2003; Whitcomb et al. Reference Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr and Howard-Snyder2017).
In the next sections, however, I want to explore whether inquisitiveness can also be a virtue in an even more robust social sense, namely one that is possessed by epistemic communities rather than individuals. Is there a virtue of social inquisitiveness distinct from individual inquisitiveness?
4. Social epistemic virtues: a normative proposal
Virtue epistemology is a burgeoning and diverse field (see, e.g., Baehr Reference Baehr2011; Battaly Reference Battaly, Chienkuo, Slote and Sosa2015, Reference Battaly2019; Greco Reference Greco2010; Pritchard Reference Pritchard2012; Sosa Reference Sosa2007, Reference Sosa2015; Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski, Greco and Sosa1999, Reference Zagzebski and Battaly2019). In recent times, there has been a growing interest in the social aspects of intellectual virtues (de Ridder Reference de Ridder, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022; Kidd Reference Kidd, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022; e.g. Lahroodi Reference Lahroodi2007; McHugh Reference McHugh, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017), since the acquisition, exercise, refinement, and development of epistemic virtues inevitably occur within communal contexts and social environments (Tanesini Reference Tanesini, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022).
One of the issues in this literature is whether there are genuinely social or collective intellectual virtues and, if so, how they can be understood. Following de Ridder, I embrace a pluralist stance on this matter, stating that there are different kinds of social epistemic virtues. For instance, Byerly and Byerly have advanced the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding virtues, the latter being “social” as they primarily benefit other people, and not the possessor of the virtue. On a different approach, authors such as Fricker (Reference Fricker, Gendler and Hawthorne2010) and Lahroodi (Reference Lahroodi2019) have proposed analyses of group or collective intellectual virtues, virtues possessed by groups rather than by individuals. Their approach to group virtues involves finding a model able to explain how groups could possess virtues (or vices) in a non-summative manner, i.e., when their members themselves lack the virtues.
What I am seeking is a model to conceptualize social epistemic virtues in a way that makes the ‘social’ non-trivial. One relevant sense of social epistemic virtues is intellectual virtues attributed to epistemic communities, and not to individuals. Such social virtues must be assessed through distinctive social epistemic norms.
Let's clarify the difference between individual epistemic norms and social epistemic norms first. As stated before, for Watson an epistemic community is “a group of individuals that produces, shares and consumes epistemic goods, such as information, knowledge and understanding” (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022: 427–28). This fairly broad definition does not provide many elements to understand what sort of group an epistemic community is. In the literature various authors have offered their own accounts, connecting the notion of epistemic community to concepts as varied as entitlement (Kusch Reference Kusch2002), epistemic injustice (McHugh Reference McHugh, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2017), objectivity (Koskinen Reference Koskinen2017), epistemic expectations (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2021), epistemic norms for acquiring and transmitting knowledge (Greco Reference Greco and Battaly2019), practices of accountability (Oliveira Reference Oliveira, Oliveira and Silva2022), trust (Greco Reference Greco2021), among others.
Although different in their approaches, two elements stand out. First, epistemic communities perform epistemic practices. One may say, for instance, that Oxford's cosmic ray department is researching such and such topic, or that a group of Brazilian philosophers is investigating a certain theme, or that a tutoring class reads together a certain paper. As we've seen, practices, in turn, possess an intrinsic normative nature, as long as they are governed by certain standards or norms for excellence. Such norms provide a basis for assessing how excellent Oxford's department research is, how well the group of philosophers investigates, and how well the class reads. The second element is that epistemic communities and their practices include various kinds of epistemic relations. Some practices involve a complex division of cognitive labor (Bird Reference Bird and Lackey2014), while simpler tasks are sometimes conducted through joint action (Greco Reference Greco2021). Either way, epistemic relations are a key feature of any kind of epistemic community, since it is through such relations that practices are performed and intellectual ends pursued.
This brief characterization of epistemic communities makes it clear that social epistemic virtues have social norms that govern social epistemic relations and collective intellectual motivation.Footnote 11 Such social norms provide a basis for thinking about robustly social intellectual virtues, as distinguished from individual virtues. To develop this approach further, I will explore a characterization of the social virtue of inquisitiveness, as distinct from individual inquisitiveness.
5. Social inquisitiveness and its norms
When can we say that an epistemic community, and not merely its members – or even absent any individual virtues among members – possess the virtue of social inquisitiveness? There are two options. First, one may frame social inquisitiveness as a collective virtue: in this approach, one first must explain how a community would pose questions, and then theorize about how a community could excel at asking questions. While it is not obvious what it would mean for a community to pose a question, one possibility is to think of it in terms of members discussing and consenting to a certain question being asked by one of the community members. Thus, members of an epistemic community would go through a process of cognitive negotiation until, through some mechanism, they find a verdict to state that the community itself has some question.Footnote 12
Another option – the one I will pursue here – is to frame social inquisitiveness as a virtue of an epistemic community in the sense that, while the questions are still posed by individual members of the community, (i) it is the whole community that enhances its epistemic standing through questioning, not only the questioners, (ii) at least in some contexts, members may be able to ask good questions despite an individual lack of inquisitiveness, and (iii) the assessment of the practice of social inquisitiveness is done through the evaluation of social epistemic relations and shared epistemic responsibility, and not through an evaluation of individual cognitive powers.Footnote 13 It is in this sense that I will now characterize social inquisitiveness. First, I will discuss cases in which members of an epistemic community are inquisitive but the community itself is not; second, I will point out cases where members of an epistemic community are not inquisitive but the community itself is inquisitive. Such scenarios will provide the elements necessary to identify the distinct social norms we need to characterize social inquisitiveness.
One caveat. Social relations can be better characterized when we understand the epistemic roles performed within the practice we seek to evaluate. In terms of questioning, we can postulate at least three relevant roles: that of questioner – who asks the question – the questioned – the one to whom the question is addressed, and the audience – other people who are part of the community and who share the same cognitive space and stand to benefit from the question.Footnote 14 A paradigmatic example of an epistemic community where questions typically play a large role is a class setting, such as a high school or a college class.
5.1. Cases in which members are inquisitive and the community is not
The intellectual profile of individuals influences the epistemic communities they are part of. Inquisitive individuals are a great help to make a community inquisitive. But this is not always the case. To see that, let's retrieve two claims that I've made. First, in appraising social inquisitiveness,
(i) it is the whole epistemic community that enhances its epistemic standing through questioning,
(ii) at least in some contexts, members may be able to ask good questions despite an individual lack of inquisitiveness, and
(iii) the normative assessment of social inquisitiveness is done through the evaluation of social epistemic relations and shared epistemic responsibility.
Second, the norms of individual inquisitiveness are SINCERITY, CONTEXT, TARGET, and CLARITY.
Let's begin with CONTEXT, which is associated with the capacity of practical wisdom (phronesis)Footnote 15 through which an inquisitive person knows where, when, and to whom it is appropriate to pose questions: “one must ask at the right time and place and identify the right source of information” (Watson Reference Watson and Battaly2019: 165). There are, however, ways in which a community can fail in this respect even when members have such practical wisdom. For instance, in a research group where the environment is extremely competitive, or when the supervisor ridicules his students' questions, the questioners may lose the ability to identify appropriate contexts for posing questions. Further, finding the right timing for asking a question is in some occasions a matter of shared epistemic responsibilityFootnote 16 rather than an issue of mere individual practical wisdom, as the epistemic community has a responsibility to provide cues and hints of when a question is appropriate (cf. iii). For example, in a classroom setting, a professor must frame her exposition in a manner that indicates when questions are appropriate, such as when transitioning between topics or concluding an argument.
Consider now a case where a student is competent to pose clear and well-formulated questions (satisfies CLARITY), capable to identify when is appropriate to ask them (satisfies CONTEXT), able to specify exactly what she wants to know (satisfies TARGET), and sincere in her questions (satisfies SINCERITY). This student is, therefore, individually inquisitive. Now imagine that, in one of her classes, she asks a question without having done the assigned readings for that class. In this case, the professor is forced to spend valuable time explaining things that could have been easily understood from the readings, thus preventing the class from engaging in more interesting and intellectually stimulating discussions. While this questioner may learn something new and improve her personal epistemic standing, the epistemic community is hindered in improving its own epistemic standing (cf. i).Footnote 17 Also, consider a case where all students excel in asking questions, but the community is filled with prejudice against some social identity from a minority group. When a person from the minority group asks a question, the audience does not pay attention and actively ignores the question. Such a toxic epistemic environment may unleash several epistemic harms: minority inquisitive students may lose their appetite for asking questions, even if they are curious; they can lose their ability to communicate well or to express their thoughts clearly (cf. Medina Reference Medina and Medina2013), thus losing opportunities to improve their epistemic standing. Further, even if they keep asking good questions, the audience may not learn from these questions, since their prejudice results in an unwillingness to learn with them (cf. Alcoff Reference Alcoff, Fricker, Graham, Henderson and Pedersen2020). The audience fails to perform its expected role (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2021) and does not fulfill its epistemic responsibility (cf. iii). These two examples serve to highlight that inquisitive individuals do not, necessarily, constitute an inquisitive community. Thus, while norms of individual inquisitiveness are being satisfied, the epistemic community itself is not socially inquisitive – which suggests that some specific social epistemic norms are not being satisfied. I will now introduce other cases in order to characterize some of these social epistemic norms, namely SOCIAL SINCERITY, DISTRIBUTION, and FREQUENCY.
First, in terms of SOCIAL SINCERITY, we can see that although individuals can be sincere in the questions they ask (and thus satisfy SINCERITY), various contextual factors may either impede or enhance this motivation. A toxic environment or a community with systematic cases of epistemic exclusion may diminish or impede the sincere motivation for questioning of those suffering exclusion. This introduces an important constraint: for an epistemic community (and not just its individual members) to be sincere in its motivation for questioning, its members (or at least a relevant subset of them) must collectively share the value of enhancing epistemic standing through questioning. By this, I mean that they, together as a community, must value questioning as an instrument for improving epistemic standing. As Battaly says, “two or more individuals count as sharing values or goals whenever they in fact have the same evaluative beliefs and commitments – whenever their evaluative beliefs and commitments are in de facto agreement” (Battaly Reference Battaly, Alfano, Ridder and Klein2022: 307). We can thus state the following norm:
SOCIAL SINCERITY: virtuous social inquisitiveness requires members of an epistemic community to sincerely aim at improving the community's epistemic standing; this requires the questioner, the questioned, and the audience to share the value of good questioning.Footnote 18
The difference between SINCERITY and SOCIAL SINCERITY is that, while the former governs individual intellectual motivation, the latter governs group motivation. I will elaborate below that SOCIAL SINCERITY can be satisfied even in cases where individuals lack the capability to satisfy SINCERITY on their own.
To introduce the norm of DISTRIBUTION, let's imagine a community full of inquisitive members, i.e., they all sincerely value good questions and have developed cognitive competencies to pose clear questions, target worthy and precise issues, and have the related phronesis to know the right context. However, because of mutual differences in epistemic power and psychological profile, only one or a few members actually ask questions, while others are sidelined in the role of the audience. In such a case, the community lacks the virtue of inquisitiveness. So with this case in mind, we can formulate the following social norm:
DISTRIBUTION: virtuous social inquisitiveness requires that a relevant subset of members of an epistemic community be encouraged to, and actually, ask good questions.
The importance of DISTRIBUTION is patent for an intellectually flourishing community. At the personal level, if one person in a class asks several questions, that's fine for him and his epistemic improvement. However, if only this person asks questions and no one else does, it may indicate a vice rather than a virtue at the community level, and for a variety of reasons. Some members may have doubts without the opportunity to get answers, thus remaining ignorant about relevant matters and discouraged to engage in the community's epistemic practices – which amounts to a failure in the epistemic relations and shared epistemic responsibility (cf. iii). Furthermore, the community as a whole may miss out on opportunities to hear and learn from questions posed by diverse voices and individuals from different social locations – which constitutes an impediment to the improvement of its epistemic standing (cf. i).
One may object to this norm on the grounds that, in some communities, it does not make sense to require equal sharing in the practice of questioning among all members. For example, why is it a community where everyone asks questions better off than one in which only some members do but the others pay proper attention and learn from the questions? My answer is: yes, contexts vary enormously from one community to another, and the right balance of distribution will vary correspondingly. The proper way of satisfying DISTRIBUTION depends on contextual factors such as the personality and goals of members, their level of instruction and knowledge, their personal epistemic skills, among many others. Nonetheless, for each community DISTRIBUTION holds; what fluctuates is the specificities of its operation.Footnote 19
Finally, let's imagine a classroom where students satisfy CONTEXT, since they have the requisite phronesis to recognize where, when, and to whom it is appropriate to ask questions, and they, actually, display this competence in all but one community they are members of. This community has a strong competitive culture where asking questions results in extra points, which pressures them to ask too many questions, constantly interrupting the flow of the class, and thus frustrating the professor's ability to teach important topics. Here we see a case where, despite individuals being inquisitive, the epistemic community fails to improve its epistemic standing through the members' questions (cf. i). One could object by arguing that these students are not individually inquisitive, insofar as they do not, actually, satisfy CONTEXT and SINCERITY. Since they ask too many questions, it seems that they are not able to find the right moment to ask questions (contra CONTEXT), and since they pose the questions to get extra points, they seem to ask them for the wrong reasons (contra SINCERITY).Footnote 20 Let's quickly consider each one of these individual norms. In terms of CONTEXT, imagine that each student in this class asks two questions. If this class has twenty-five students, then they will ask with fifty questions in total! Such a high number of questions could impede the epistemic well-functioning of the class, and thus obstruct the community's enhancement of its epistemic standing. However, from the point of view of each individual student, it seems reasonable to ask two questions. In terms of SINCERITY, having a virtuous motivation does not require that no other motivations are present; in this scenario, it is reasonable that each student has something valuable to learn from their two questions – the questions are really a fruit of their curiosity and eagerness to learn. But the competitive culture adds extra pressure for them to ask the questions (instead of looking for answers outside the class, for example). It seems that, from a purely individual point of view, the students are not violating any epistemic norm, and thus can be considered as individually inquisitive; what is needed are distinct social norms to lay the standards of virtuousness at the social level.
This can be seen in another scenario as well. Imagine another classroom with students who also satisfy CONTEXT, but who are discouraged from asking questions, maybe because the professor humiliates questioners, or because the audience mocks questioners. Here we encounter a case in which the shared epistemic responsibility is not fulfilled either by the questioned or by the audience (cf. iii). From these examples, we can state the following social norm:
FREQUENCY: virtuous social inquisitiveness requires that an appropriate number of good questions are asked, not too many and not too few.
The appropriate number of questions for an epistemic community is highly contextual; nevertheless, this social norm makes explicit an important element for an epistemic community to meet the requirements of social inquisitiveness. In a certain setting where questions are relevant and can help in the sharing of epistemic goods, and, nonetheless, no one in the community poses them, it signals a collective failure; yet, if members pose too many questions, other important epistemic practices may be harmed.
The overall upshot is that in certain communities, despite individual members possessing their own intellectual virtues, the community itself may prevent individuals from manifesting their virtue, so that the community ends up failing to have the social virtue.
5.2. Cases in which members are not inquisitive while the community is
Imagine a college class where most students lack the necessary phronesis to know when it is appropriate to ask questions. They don't satisfy CONTEXT – and not only in this classroom but in many other epistemic communities they are part of. Their intellectual habits are still being shaped. In this specific class, however, the professor creates a culture where cues, signals, and other indications make it clear when questions are appropriate, such as when she is switching topics or concluding an argument. Here, even though individual members do not possess the required phronesis, the community satisfies what we may call SOCIAL CONTEXT:
SOCIAL CONTEXT: virtuous social inquisitiveness requires identifying the appropriate context and timing for good questions to be posed; questioners must be attuned to when and where to ask questions; the questioned and the audience must provide cues and indications for when and where questions are appropriate.
In this norm, we encounter an explicit shared epistemic responsibility: the task of discerning when it is appropriate to ask questions should not rest solely on the questioner's shoulders. Such sensibility involves an interplay among the agents within the community, where cues and feedback regarding the appropriate timing for questions are provided through various social mechanisms. These may include facial expressions, pauses, or hand gestures among other things, depending on the context and social habits of the community.Footnote 21 This makes this epistemic norm social rather than individual.
Now, let me add another social norm and explain its relevance, especially in a community where members are not inquisitive:
ACCESSIBILITY: virtuous social inquisitiveness requires that questions be formulated in a way that can be easily understood and followed by the other members of the community (the audience).
First, an important caveat: this norm differs from CLARITY because CLARITY governs only an individual agent's capacity to make herself clear when asking questions to the questioned. It is entirely possible for a community to have some members who possess this competence, while others are unable to comprehend the questions and consequently fail to improve their epistemic standing, even when the questions are clear to the questioned. What comes into play with ACCESSIBILITY is a specific intellectual motivation to frame questions in a manner that allows the audience to understand and benefit from them (cf. i and iii).
Furthermore, it is possible for an epistemic community to possess this motive even when the individuals in the community lack the motivation (cf. ii).Footnote 22 In the literature we have several models postulating cases of non-summative instances of group good motivation. One can get inspiration from Gilbert's plural subject (Reference Gilbert2004) where members jointly commit to a motivation that they individually lack, or Brady's account of affective conformity and group emotion (Reference Brady, Brady and Fricker2016), or some inspiration from de Ridder's model of a group's culture providing a motivation that members lack (Reference de Ridder, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022).Footnote 23 I do not intend to commit to any specific model here but simply want to point out that there are reasonable scenarios of epistemic communities where members may not be individually motivated to make sure their questions are understood by all community members but, in a particular community, become motivated to honor ACCESSIBILITY. For example, taking inspiration from Gilbert, we can imagine a classroom filled with students who are not particularly motivated to formulate questions with the aim of promoting class understanding. But they make a social pact – a joint commitment – to make an effort during classes to ask accessible questions so that everyone can learn more. My issue here is not to defend the joint commitment account but to point out that in ACCESSIBILITY we have not only a norm that regulates social interactions but one that can be satisfied at the community level even when individuals by themselves wouldn't satisfy it.
A similar case can be made for the already postulated norm of SOCIAL SINCERITY. While I have explained how, in some cases, individuals who typically conform to SINCERITY may not, in a certain community, be thus motivated, the opposite is also conceivable: individuals who are not sincere in their questions in other settings but who, in a certain community, do satisfy SOCIAL SINCERITY. For instance, taking inspiration from de Ridder's notion of culture, it is possible that when the audience of a certain epistemic community actively listens to and supports the questioner, it creates a collaborative and inclusive environment providing motivation that the questioner would lack otherwise.
These cases of communities that are inquisitive while their members are not have a valuable pedagogical upshot. In many of our ordinary epistemic communities, most members may not be (fully) intellectually virtuous – some might even possess intellectual vices. If a certain epistemic community can, to some extent, display epistemically virtuous behavior despite its members' initial lack of competence or motivation, it may result, in the long term, in an improvement of its members' epistemic character. Participating in a socially inquisitive epistemic community is conducive to the development of individual inquisitiveness.
5.3. Fuller characterization of social inquisitiveness
It is not my aim to provide an exhaustive list of all epistemic norms governing the practice of social questioning and the virtue of social inquisitiveness. Depending on their purposes, methods, intellectual traditions, and contexts, epistemic communities may have a different set of relevant epistemic norms. Instead, I am shedding light on the fact that the virtuousness of a community cannot be understood solely in terms of the virtuousness of its members but must take into account epistemic relations in the community, shared epistemic responsibilities, and the overall improvement of the community's epistemic standing.
With that in mind, I tentatively state that a virtuously inquisitive epistemic community is a community that is conducive to good questioning and thus able to consistently improve its epistemic standing through the questions of its members. Thus,
Social inquisitiveness: An epistemic community is virtuously inquisitive when (i) members share the value both of good questioning [SOCIAL SINCERITY] and collective understanding [ACCESSIBILITY], (ii) the questioners, questioned, and audience members all contribute to an environment that makes it clear when questions are proper [SOCIAL CONTEXT], and (iii) the pattern of questioning is appropriately distributed across members [DISTRIBUTION] and across time [FREQUENCY].
Moreover, an epistemic community characterized by the social epistemic virtue of inquisitiveness may facilitate the cultivation of the individual virtue of inquisitiveness among its members. Members will learn with each other's questions – learning both the competence to formulate good questions (according to the norms of CLARITY, TARGETING, and CONTEXT) and – through the content of the questions, as questions open up new avenues of inquiry – expand understanding, provoke insights, and uncover connections among different ideas.Footnote 24 Questioning is a crucial epistemic practice for the flourishing of communities. We must pay as much attention to its individual components as to its social norms and standards.
5.4. Social epistemic phronesis
Two of the five social norms discussed above seem to involve a kind of phronetic disposition of the socially inquisitive epistemic community.Footnote 25 The norm DISTRIBUTION involves the community figuring out “the right balance” of questions across members, and the norm FREQUENCY involves “an appropriate number” of good questions. There is no single rule that determines the correct distribution and frequency of questions in an epistemic community; they are highly contextual norms, and their meaning may vary from one community to another and even in the same community in different circumstances. How can an epistemic community find such balance and the appropriate number of questions? Epistemically virtuous individuals have phronesis to fine-tune their virtues to the particulars of each situation (cf. Baehr Reference Baehr, Mi and Sosa2016; Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts and Wood2007; Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996), where phronesis is a trained personal cognitive disposition. In the individual virtue of inquisitiveness, for instance, the norm CONTEXT requires such phronesis so that the questioner may discern in each particular situation, among other things, the right moment to ask a question. But how can a community have a disposition to judge like that?
This is a very important and complex question, an answer to which is beyond the scope of this paper. But I will offer a few suggestions on how to make sense of a kind of social epistemic phronesis as opposed to individual phronesis. The first thing to point out is that I do not claim that social epistemic virtues are totally independent of the individual intellectual dispositions of the members of the virtuous community. Rather, I have defended that individual dispositions are not sufficient or necessary for social epistemic virtue; individually inquisitive members are neither necessary nor sufficient for a socially inquisitive community. But that does not imply that members' judgmental capacities are not important to make up the community's judgmental capacity.Footnote 26
De Ridder, mapping collective intellectual virtues, claims that some communities have a certain culture or ethos that disposes members to behave in virtuous ways even when they, individually, are not so disposed. He says “The formal structure of a group and the operative rules and responsibilities can encode intellectually virtuous practices by stimulating or prescribing actions and procedures that constitute virtuous behavior and by making non-virtuous behavior more difficult” (Reference de Ridder, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022: 373). He then exemplifies how the culture of a community can prompt intellectually virtuous behavior, such as if there are opportunities for out-of-the-box thinking, if members give each other credit, and if questions are welcomed (Reference de Ridder, Alfano, Klein and de Ridder2022: 375). There are two main ways, I argue, by which the culture of an epistemic community can produce something like social epistemic phronesis.
The first is when a certain epistemic community has official, publicized, and enforced protocols or procedures that encode social epistemic phronesis. In a classroom setting, for instance, procedures such as “if you have already asked one question, you should only ask another if no one else has questions” and “let the instructor point out the appropriate moment for questions, and only ask in those moments,” if respected and embraced by the class, would help to promote DISTRIBUTION and FREQUENCY.
To achieve social phronesis, however, official protocols are not enough. A more subtle and organic process is vital so that the context-sensitive character of the norms can be accounted for. For that, I suggest a framework in the extended cognition literature that can provide some insight: the notion of integrated distributed cognitive systems, which offers a theoretical and empirical explanation for how groups can possess cognitive abilities and skills that go beyond the cognitive capacities of their members (e.g. Barnier et al. Reference Barnier, Sutton, Harris and Wilson2008; Heylighen et al. Reference Heylighen, Heath and Van Overwalle2004; Theiner et al. Reference Theiner, Allen and Goldstone2010). In such systems, “the requirement is that the contributing members (…) collaboratively perform a cognitive task by interacting continuously and reciprocally to each other” (Palermos and Tollefsen Reference Palermos, Tollefsen, Carter, Clark, Kallestrup, Palermos and Pritchard2018: 121). Palermos and Tollefsen offer as an example a jazz band, in which each musician regulates the performance of the others by various subtle mechanisms, and the skill of the band to perform a certain piece cannot be explained merely by the individual skill of each musician. Similarly, in an epistemic community, such as a classroom, members are constantly interacting and contributing with each other, as, I have argued, in practices of questioning.Footnote 27 Further, Palermos and Tollefsen argue that the group as a whole is the one responsible for the activity, which resonates with my claim that social norms involve shared epistemic responsibility. In such a community,
The reciprocal and continuous interactivity between the members of the group allows them to keep monitoring each other's performance, such that were there, at any given time, something wrong with the overall process, then it would become noticeable to at least one member of the group, allowing the group to respond appropriately (Palermos and Tollefsen Reference Palermos, Tollefsen, Carter, Clark, Kallestrup, Palermos and Pritchard2018: 123).
Thus, an integrated distributed cognitive system acts as a single epistemic agent, with cognitive capacities that emerge at the group-level, giving rise to epistemically virtuously behavior, in which members constantly monitor each other, thus promoting the group's epistemic goals. Further, individual members are capable of refraining from certain behaviors that are reasonable from the individual point of view but that do not promote the group's ends.Footnote 28 This picture provides a feasible image of how social epistemic phronesis could work. For the social norms of DISTRIBUTION and FREQUENCY, members in an epistemic community need to constantly monitor each other (who is asking? Is it the time to ask?), offering subtle cues to regulate each other's performance. Some members will need to refrain from asking questions that could be reasonable for the individual but that would not be the best move to advance the epistemic standing of the community; they would instead allow others to ask questions, or simply not ask anything since too many questions were already posed.
My aim in this section was not to provide a robust characterization of social epistemic phronesis, but rather to offer suggestions of how the literature on extended cognition provides useful theoretical solutions helping to explain some of the epistemic community's phronetic properties.
6. Two objections
Now I will discuss and reply to two possible objections to my account. The first objection challenges my claim that the account I offer is essentially social instead of individual; I will call it the social-individual objection. The second objection argues that what I am characterizing as social inquisitiveness is not a single intellectual virtue, but rather a family or cluster of virtues; I will call it the cluster objection.
Social-individual objection: My account is based on the claim that one relevant notion of social epistemic virtues is that they are virtues attributed to epistemic communities, and not to individuals. However, in describing this virtue I refer to various personal dispositions that must be in place and manifested for the community to possess the virtue of social inquisitiveness. The norms of SOCIAL SINCERITY and ACCESSIBILITY, for instance, seem to be an amalgam of the members' particular motivations to be sincere in questioning and to consider other members as worthy epistemic agents. SOCIAL CONTEXT, in turn, seems to be rooted in the individual's practical wisdom and perceptive capabilities. So, the objection goes, this account isn't really an account of a robust social virtue.
In reply, I've shown that these norms can be satisfied even in communities where members lack the individual virtues. In other words, if my account was really an account of an individual virtue, agents by themselves should be virtuous and the community could be virtuous only if its members were. But, as I have argued, this is not the case. Second, I have emphasized that the relevant social norms cannot be understood solely in terms of the cognitive dispositions and powers of individual members. For social norms, things such as social relations (e.g. SOCIAL CONTEXT) and shared epistemic responsibility (e.g. FREQUENCY and DISTRIBUTION) are the relevant normatively regulated factors. As these factors have to do with social interactions, there is a difference between the normative constraints on communities and those on individuals.
By arguing for distinct social epistemic virtues, however, I am not suggesting that these virtues float free of individual agents' dispositions and traits.Footnote 29 The social norms that I have described can only be satisfied when members cooperate in certain ways, but the norms are not only concerned with individual dispositions.Footnote 30 A similar point is made by Heather Battaly's account of the virtue of solidarity. In her account, this virtue is imminently social because only social bodies can possess it – one isolated individual cannot be solidary. At the same time, solidarity is made possible by the community members' dispositions to satisfy certain social norms (Reference Battaly, Alfano, Ridder and Klein2022: 304).
Cluster objection: My account of social inquisitiveness may seem to be an account of multiple intellectual virtues. To satisfy the norm of ACCESSIBILITY, for instance, questioners are required to be intellectually generous, as they must be motivated by the epistemic well-being of others; DISTRIBUTION, in turn, requires that some members strive for a kind of epistemic justice by making room for others beyond themselves to ask questions; SOCIAL CONTEXT requires attunement and thoughtfulness, etc.
My reply is that success and excellence in every epistemic practice involve the exercise of many intellectual virtues. When an epistemic subject poses a question, for instance, it involves an act of intellectual humility, as she is acknowledging a lack of knowledge or understanding (cf. Whitcomb et al. Reference Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr and Howard-Snyder2017). It also may involve an act of intellectual courage, as she exposes herself to reproval, mocking, or some other kind of social censure from the audience (Watson Reference Watson2018). As emphasized by Roberts and Wood, individuating various virtues serves analytical and pedagogical purposes, yet it is unlikely that any virtue exists in isolation within real-life practices (Reference Roberts and Wood2007: 81).
7. Broadening the analysis of social questioning and inquisitiveness
I began this paper concurring with Watson's contention that questioning is a practice of great epistemic importance that deserves more attention from epistemologists than it has received so far. In this last section, I want to suggest topics for further research.
The first topic is about the epistemic ends of questioning. Watson argues that the only characteristic end of questioning is eliciting information. She says that other possible ends, such as irritating or mocking the questioner are not epistemic, and thus do not impinge on the epistemic practice of questioning (Reference Watson, Alfano, Klein and Ridder2022). Yet it seems that there are other important epistemic ends beyond eliciting information. A question can be posed to seek clarification, challenge an argument, explore an idea in greater depth, or signal gaps in a lecturer's understanding. If underpinned by a motivation for the epistemic goods, all these ends are proper for good questioning. Watson could reply that all these other ends are but subtypes of eliciting information (cf. Watson Reference Watson2018: 358). Even if her claim is valid, I think that a more fine-grained description of the kinds of epistemic goods achieved through questioning enriches our understanding of it.
The second topic is an exploration of the different ways of framing a question and its epistemic significance. Questions can be closed-ended, eliciting a straightforward answer (yes or no; blue or red; yesterday of the day before; etc.); or open-ended, inviting deeper reflection and exploration. What kinds of epistemic goods do each of these types of questions produce? Are the abilities required to ask them the same? What kinds of connections do each of them bear to other epistemic practices? These questions seem worth pursuing.
The third topic are the motivations involved in practices of questioning. According to Watson, the motivation involved is that described by the norm SINCERITY. But we can distinguish a range of more fine-grained motives. For instance, a student can pose a question:
1. Because she doesn't currently understand an exposition on a certain topic
a. because the exposition is ill-conceived or ill-performed;
b. because she lacks the minimum knowledge required to grasp the ideas and concepts of the exposition;
2. Because she perceives new avenues of inquiry that the topic or idea under discussion opens up.
3. Because she wants to connect the topic of the lecture with other themes, authors, and concepts, and by doing so, she perceives inconsistencies or differences in conclusions about the same issue. This realization can prompt the student to pose a question to clarify the matter, deepen understanding, or challenge the existing assumptions and beliefs.Footnote 31
4. Simply to get a token piece of information she's in need of.
Exploring these different kinds of motives that drive people to ask questions can widen our understanding of the cognitive and affective possibilities behind the practice, and can also give us a greater grasp of what kinds of dispositions are at stake.
Fourth and finally, while questioning may seem to be relevant only when it elicits information from the person to whom the question is addressed, we may conjecture that questioning, in some circumstances and under certain conditions, has intrinsic epistemic value – a value that is gained even when no answer is provided and no information is elicited. Barbara Montero, wondering about the practice of philosophy itself, says, “Indeed, the aim of philosophy – and, here, perhaps, more so than other disciplines – is not so much to find answers to questions but to formulate the questions themselves” (Reference Montero2022: xxi). A good question can reveal something significant, can provide an understanding of what is at stake in a certain field, may expose what that field has not yet been able to answer, may draw attention to something crucial that was previously neglected, and even highlight the limitations of an entire field of inquiry. A good question thus may enhance a whole community's epistemic standing even when no answer is forthcoming.
8. Conclusion
Questioning is an epistemic practice that is inherently relational and context-dependent, where the quality and effectiveness of the questions are determined by the interplay between the individual questioner and the broader community within which she or he operates. It involves a collective motivation and effort to create an environment that is conducive to the exploration and development of ideas, where all members of the community are committed to fostering a culture of inquiry and learning.
Thus while inquisitiveness, the virtue of good questioning, possesses strong social reverberations, I have argued that there is an important distinction between individual inquisitiveness and social inquisitiveness. Individual inquisitiveness, like other individual intellectual virtues, is an individual excellence and follows norms that regulate individual cognitive habits and motivation. Social inquisitiveness, in turn, is an excellence of an epistemic community and follows norms that regulate epistemic relations and shared epistemic responsibility. I have described social inquisitiveness through five social norms – SOCIAL SINCERITY, ACCESSIBILITY, SOCIAL CONTEXT, DISTRIBUTION, and FREQUENCY – norms that, while they do not exhaust all normative dimensions of this social virtue, provide a broad and consistent picture of some of its main elements. In this sense, a virtuously inquisitive epistemic community is a community that is conducive to good questioning and thus able to consistently improve its epistemic standing through the questions of its members and the community's interaction with the questions.Footnote 32
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