Abstract:

The formation of cognitive attitudes (beliefs/suspensions of beliefs, etc.) seems to be governed by two distinct kinds of norms. On the one hand, there are the “classical epistemic norms”. An example of this first type: believe that p only if you have sufficient reason to believe that p. On the other hand, there are norms that tell us what should be the case of the investigation that leads to our having these attitudes. For example, don’t investigate about p if you know that p. Or to take a much-discussed example (Friedman 2020, 503): if one wants to figure out Q, then one ought to take the necessary means to figuring out Q. One of the questions that seriously troubles epistemologists is how to account for the relationship that the former “classical epistemic norms” hold with the latter “inquiry norms”, also called “zetetic norms”.

In this article I would like to show that these two kinds of norms are not, contrary to what Friedman (2022) thinks, incompatible, that is, that they do not give rise to contradictory injunctions. It is simply that the epistemic norm is a synchronic norm, whereas the zetetic norms are diachronic. If this is true, there is no longer any reason to worry about their cohabitation.