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:

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:

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.

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,

1. (i) it is the whole epistemic community that enhances its epistemic standing through questioning,

2. (ii) at least in some contexts, members may be able to ask good questions despite an individual lack of inquisitiveness, and

3. (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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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,

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,

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.