UC Irvine

In chapter 1, I develop an account of inquiry I call “naive inquiry”. This approach to defining inquiry simply takes the aim of the activity (answering one’s question) to be the sole defining feature of the activity. I contrast my approach with views of inquiry which look to the attitudes of inquirers to define inquiring activity. In chapter 2, I turn to wellbeing. I first argue that inquiry contributes finally to wellbeing when it is an achievement. I then outline the three predominant theories of wellbeing (hedonism, desire satisfaction, and objective list), and contend that none of them adequately account well for the final value of inquiry. In chapter 3, I turn to perfectionist theories of wellbeing. According to perfectionist theories of wellbeing, activities that develop or manifest the capacities or skills of a kind are final contributors to wellbeing. I argue that perfectionist theories of wellbeing are well equipped to account for the final value of inquiry. A full perfectionist theory requires that one identify a kind, the relevant capacities, and the relevant activities. Having already shown that inquiry is finally valuable, I use the majority of chapter 3 to identify the relevant kind and capacities. I identify “Rational Being” as the relevant kind as and “rationality”, understood as a capacity for understanding, as the relevant capacity. The result is that inquiries are finally valuable when they are manifestations of the capacity for understanding. The set of inquiries identified as valuable is also shown to be similar or identical to the set of inquiries that are achievements. In chapter 4, I join my naive view of inquiry to Margaret Gilbert’s social ontology in order to offer the a basic account of joint inquiry. I argue that while any number of approaches to social ontology could be used to generate a theory of joint inquiry, Gilbert’s provides a very natural way to scale up every aspect of individual inquiry to the joint level.