Among the requirements essential to the proper pursuit of our intellectual endeavours, there is the requirement to seek additional evidential reasons beyond those that one currently possesses when one asks oneself a question. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this ‘questioning requirement’ in greater detail. After considering and dismissing accounts that take the questioning requirement to be either a practical or an epistemic requirement, I put forward my own view, which holds that the questioning requirement arises from the very nature of the illocutionary act of self-questioning. Just as the illocutionary act of promising generates obligations, asking oneself a question generates a requirement to seek evidential reasons to answer the question one has posed.
This paper develops an account of information as possible knowledge. What it is for a signal T to carry the information that p is for T to have a disposition to generate knowledge that p in some agent S: upon reception of the signal T by S, S in a position to know that p based on it. We argue the account is strongly superior to probabilistic competitors on both extensional adequacy and prior plausibility.
Anne Meylan is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Zurich and leads the ZEGRa research group, which primarily focuses on the rationality of beliefs. Her most recent and significant papers deal with the nature of ignorance and the norms of suspension of judgment. She has also published extensively in the field of the ethics of belief, for example on the issue of weighing practical reasons against epistemic reasons.
Christoph Kelp is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Cogito Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. His work is in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and ethics. He is the author of The Nature and Normativity of Defeat (CUP 2023), Inquiry, Knowledge, and Understanding (OUP 2021), Sharing Knowledge (CUP 2021, with Mona Simion), and Good Thinking (Routledge 2018), and co-editor of Virtue Theoretic Epistemology (CUP 2020 with John Greco). He is the winner of the Young Epistemologist Prize 2017. He has led major research projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Research Foundation Flanders.
Mona Simion is Deputy Director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are in epistemology (epistemic norms, social epistemology, knowledge first epistemology), philosophy of language (assertion, conceptual engineering, contextualism), moral & political philosophy (wellbeing, blame, trust, distributive justice, voting, media ethics), and feminist philosophy (epistemic injustice, gender concepts). She is the author of Shifty Speech and Independent Thought; (Oxford University Press 2021) Sharing Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2021, with C. Kelp), Resistance to Evidence (CUP 2024), and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Defence (CUP 2025). She is the winner of the Young Epistemologist Prize 2021.
