Questions

I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defective and (...) permissible from an epistemic point of view? The first solution I consider maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are always impermissible but can be excusable. The second solution maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are bad inquiries that can be conducted by inquirers we can legitimately trust. I argue against the former and in favor of the latter. (shrink)

To appear in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVI. Ithaca, NY: CLC.

Conditional perfection is the phenomenon in which conditionals are strengthened to biconditionals. In some contexts, “If A, B” is understood as if it meant “A if and only if B.” We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmatic accounts of conditional perfection. This is the idea that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification—that is a strengthening to an exhaustive reading, triggered by a question that the conditional answers. If a speaker (...) is asked how B comes about, then the answer “If A, B” is interpreted exhaustively to meaning that A is the only way to bring about B. Hence, “A if and only if B.” We uncover evidence that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification, but not that it is triggered by a relationship to a salient question. (shrink)

Stegenga (forthcoming) formulates and defends a novel account of scientific progress, according to which science makes progress just in case there is a change in scientific justification. Here we present several problems for Stegenga’s account, concerning respectively (i) obtaining misleading evidence, (ii) losses or destruction of evidence, (iii) oscillations in scientific justification, and (iv) the possibility of scientific regress. We conclude by sketching a substantially different justification-based account of scientific progress that avoids these problems.

Philipp Koralus' "Reason and Inquiry" presents a questioning or erotetic theory of reasoning. This review connects ideas from the book to the broader philosophical literature on inquiry and questions, as well as providing a simplified overview of the theory.

Recent scoreboard models of conversation, in addition to modeling update effects of assertions and questions, also make sense of how one may react to such discourse moves. An account of acceptance and rejection is captured by Farkas & Bruce (2010), while Bledin & Rawlins (2020) have recently made sense of how one may resist an assertion too. For rejection and resistance of assertions, truth comes out to be a crucial notion. Between X and Y, if Y doesn't believe p to (...) be true, then Y might resist or reject X's assertion of p. For questions however, truth cannot serve this purpose. A complete model of discourse would seek to offer explanation of resisting questions. Much like Bledin & Rawlins, one can non-exhaustively enumerate a class of resistance moves. In many ways, one can resist a request to make a particular question QUD. In this paper, we raise following question: which notion can serve to explain question uptake in discourse? In our paper, we show how the expected utility value (EUV) of questions can serve this role for questions. EUV is used by van Rooij (2003) to give an account of interpretation of questions; we think it can serve our intended purposes too. To demonstrate plausibility, we build a workable formalism. (shrink)

A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work (...) on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

When a person commits a testimonial injustice, the unjust thing they do consists in their reaction to an assertion (theorists diverge on the details; paradigmatically the relevant unjust thing consists in prejudicially refraining from believing the assertion). Whatever reactions to questions are analogous to these reactions to assertions, those things are "interrogative injustices". I explore some models of those things and apply them to some non-ideal cases. One of the models appeals to mental states like curiosity and wonder, telling us (...) that interrogative injustice occurs when hearers prejudicially refrain from adopting those mental states. Other models appeal to common conversational goals – these goals including the answering of questions. On these models, interrogative injustice occurs when a person asks a question, and another person prejudicially blocks the answering of that question from joining the common goals. Or, if they don’t block said answering, perhaps they believe that it should be thus blocked. Or perhaps they merely resist the question, not fully blocking its answering from joining the common goals but instead pushing back against it in some other way. Or perhaps they merely believe that they should resist the question. I endorse a pluralism on which each of these things can be an interrogative injustice. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential erotetic logic, inquisitive epistemic logic, and contemporary zetetic epistemology) all converge on (...) the evoked questions norm. Second, we show that suitably interpreted, the evoked questions norm correctly predicts several underappreciated kinds of bad questions. It does this, in part, by recovering versions of previously defended ignorance and knowledge norms. Some of those bad questions cannot be predicted by either norm singly, but only when corporately taken to reflect a common normative category. We identify this category as evocation. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new account of bounded or minimal doxastic rationality (in the sense of Cherniak 1986), based on the notion that beliefs are answers to questions (à la Yalcin 2018). The core idea is that minimally rational beliefs are linked through thematic connections, rather than entailment relations. Consequently, such beliefs are not deductively closed, but they are closed under parthood (where a part is an entailment that answers a smaller question). And instead of avoiding all inconsistency, minimally rational (...) believers only avoid blatant inconsistencies (where some beliefs are blatantly inconsistent when they contradict one another on a particular question). Rather than cohering into a single overall world view, beliefs are more loosely connected in what is best described as a web of questions. This view of minimally rational belief naturally gives rise to an account of deductive inquiry on which deductive reasoning is a matter of posing new questions. (shrink)

Dummett, Hanks, Künne, and Bobzien have all stated or implied that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Frege believed that the sense of a sentence-question was not a thought. I present the passage of ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ which is relevant to the evaluation of that proposition. I then present and evaluate an argument which I assume to be the best argument based on that passage for that proposition. I argue that the argument is likely to be unsound. I (...) also address the question whether Frege believed that sentence-questions could be true or false and discuss what Frege did say and what he should have said about logical-alternative questions. (shrink)

Various philosophers have recently defended norms of inquiry which forbid inquiry into questions which lack true answers. I argue that these norms are overly restrictive, and that they fail to capture an important relationship between inquiry and our position as non-ideal epistemic agents. I defend a more flexible and forgiving norm: Epistemic Improvement. According to this norm, inquiry into a question is permissible only if it’s not rational for one to be sure that by inquiring one won’t improve epistemically upon (...) the question. This norm illuminates the significant role that inquiry plays in our lives, given our epistemic nonideality, and it also motivates a robust understanding of the value of inquiry, as encompassing epistemic improvements which go beyond figuring out the answers to questions. (shrink)

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents’ informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, (...) linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved. (shrink)

Much has been written on whether practical knowledge (knowledge-how) reduces to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). Less attention has been paid to what we call deliberative knowledge (knowledge-to), i.e., knowledge ascriptions embedding other infinitival questions, like _where to meet_, _when to leave_, and _what to bring_. We offer an analysis of knowledge-to and argue on its basis that, regardless of whether knowledge-how reduces to knowledge-that, no such reduction of knowledge-to is forthcoming. Knowledge-to, unlike knowledge-that and knowledge-how, requires the agent to have formed (...) certain conditional intentions. We discuss the philosophical implications for knowledge-how, deliberative questions, and virtue. (shrink)

In light of the problem of logical omniscience, some scholars have argued that belief is question-sensitive: agents don't simply believe propositions but rather believe answers to questions. Hoek (2022) has recently developed a version of this approach on which a belief state is a "web" of questions and answers. Here, we present several challenges to Hoek's question-sensitive account of belief. First, Hoek's account is prone to very similar logical omniscience problems as those he claims to address. Second, the link between (...) belief and action he proposes is too rigid. We close by sketching a generalization of the account that can meet these challenges. (shrink)

This book concerns the nature and the norms of inquiry. It tackles not only philosophical issues regarding what inquiry is, but also issues regarding how it should and should not be executed. Roughly put, inquiry is the activity of searching for the true answers to questions of our interest. But what is the difference between empirical and armchair inquiry? And what are the right and the wrong ways to inquire? Under what conditions should one start inquiring? Which questions are such (...) that one should not inquire into them? The book offers answers to these questions. It argues that competent armchair inquiry only makes explicit what was already implicit--the inquirer already had the answer to her question before inquiring into it, though this was not explicit to her. It also argues that we should avoid inquiring into questions whose answers are unknowable to us, in the instrumental sense of 'should', and that different modes of inquiry are called for, depending on which type of information is available to the subject. These answers are rigorously argued for, and they stem from a unified framework for modeling the activity of inquiry. (shrink)

A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might *prohibit* having certain inquiring attitudes (``norms of restriction''), while ignoring those that might *require* having them (``norms of expansion''). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that generates norms of expansion for inquiring attitudes. (...) The framework draws on inferential erotetic logic, which we explain and augment with some theorems. We explore several of the norms that it yields - some sympathetically, others unsympathetically. (shrink)

The verb 'imagine' admits of perspectival modification: we can imagine things from above, from a distant point of view, or from the point of view of a Russian. But in such cases, there need be no person, either real or imagined, who is above or distant from what is imagined, or who has the point of view of a Russian. We call this the puzzle of perspectival displacement. This paper sets out the puzzle, shows how it does not just concern (...) language, but also states of imagining themselves, and then presents a solution. The solution draws on the idea that many reports of imagining conceal a distinctive kind of question, and such concealed questions have an extra argument place for (what we will call) an experiencer from whose perspective things are imagined. This solution has a range of advantages over other proposals in the literature, and helps to advance two debates concerning perspectival engagement with fiction. (shrink)

Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between an agent, a content proposition, and a contrast, and it explains that a binary knowledge ascription sentence appears to be context-sensitive because different contexts can implicitly fill the contrast with different values. This view is purportedly supported by certain linguistic evidence. An objective of this paper is to argue that contrastivism is not empirically adequate, as there are examples that favor its contextualist cousin. Thereafter, I shall develop a contextualist (...) account for the relevant linguistic data. The account consists of a contextualist semantics and some rules of pragmatics. The two parts combined show that contrastivism is neither sufficient nor necessary as a satisfactory theory of knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Inquisitive first-order logic, InqBQ, is a system which extends classical first-order logic with formulas expressing questions. From a mathematical point of view, formulas in this logic express properties of sets of relational structures. This paper makes two contributions to the study of this logic. First, we describe an Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game for InqBQ and show that it characterizes the distinguishing power of the logic. Second, we use the game to study cardinality quantifiers in the inquisitive setting. That is, we study what (...) statements and questions can be expressed in InqBQ about the number of individuals satisfying a given predicate. As special cases, we show that several variants of the question how many individuals satisfy α(x) are not expressible in InqBQ, both in the general case and in restriction to finite models. (shrink)

There are norms for asking questions. Inquirers should not ask questions to which they know the answer. The literature on the norms of asking has focused on such speaker-centered norms. But, as I argue, there are addressee-centered norms as well: inquirers should not ask addressees who fall short of a certain epistemic status. That epistemic status, I argue here, is knowledge.

Identifications, diagnoses, and treatments of pseudo-problems form a family of classic methodologies in later nineteenth century philosophy and at least partly, as I shall argue, in the philosophy of science. They were devised, not by academic philosophers, but by three of the greatest of the philosopher-scientists. (Later, the idea was taken up by academic philosophers, of course. But I will not discuss that development). Here I show how Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann each deployed methods of this general (...) kind, how they identified different pseudo-problems, how they gave different diagnoses of such problems, and how they suggested quite different treatments for them. I argue that it was Mach who really first developed the idea of a pseudo-problem, that he did so in a relatively focused way on the basis of two kinds of examples. Hertz’s contribution was much more limited, identifying two specific pseudo-problems concerning physics, and suggesting a way in which they might be treated. Boltzmann’s conception of pseudo-problems, though, was far less focused, being applied to a very wide range of problems in philosophy and physics. However, his conception was certainly more influential in philosophy, and perhaps ultimately more fruitful and suggestive. I argue for the originality and continuing interest of such approaches, and I try to dissociate them from any problematic ‘positivism’. (shrink)

Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...) complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world. (shrink)

Carter (Noûs 55(1):171–198, 2021) argued that while most simple positive numerical sentences are literally false, they can communicate true contents because relevance has a weakening effect on their literal contents. This paper presents a challenge for his account by considering entailments between the imprecise contents of numerical sentences and the imprecise contents of comparatives. I argue that while Carter's weakening mechanism can generate the imprecise contents of plain comparatives such as `A is taller than B', it cannot generate the imprecise (...) contents of comparatives that quantify the difference between their arguments, such as `A is exactly n times as tall as B'. I then propose an alternative theory on which intervals serve as both thick degrees on a scale and denotations of numerical expressions. I argue that the alternative theory can account for the imprecise contents of both forms of comparatives as well as the data that motivate Carter's theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that questions can be bullshit. First it explores some shallowly interrogative ways in which that can happen. Then it shows how questions can also be bullshit in a way that’s more deeply interrogative.

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

This paper takes a stand on Hamblin semantics and its relation to the semantics-to-pragmatics interface. Biased questions, where the speaker finds one of the options more likely and expects the confirmation that p is true, raise a concern about the limits of Hamblin semantics. I argue that biased questions have modified Hamblin semantics, while unbiased questions have unconstrained Hamblin semantics. The optional bias feature explains compositionally. It is triggered by likelihood presuppositions ranging Hamblin sets and highlighting the preferred alternative(s). Biased (...) effects are exceptionally possible in alternative and wh-questions, but only in polar questions, they can be encoded lexically and grammatically. I argue that Hamblin semantics covers all core types of questions, while some of its applications for non-questions are problematic. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

Upward monotonic semantics for necessity modals give rise to Ross’s Puzzle: they predict that □φ entails □(φ ∨ ψ), but common intuitions about arguments of this form suggest they are invalid. It is widely assumed that the intuitive judgments involved in Ross’s Puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that the truth of each disjunct (φ, ψ) is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I introduce two pieces of (...) data that this analysis fails to explain. Analyzing this data, I argue, suggests that necessity modals with embedded disjunctions license ‘Independence’ inferences: from the truth of □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that φ-without-ψ and ψ-without-φ are each compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I outline a bilateral inquisitive semantics for necessity modals that predicts the validity of the Independence inferences. I then argue that the resulting theory should be understood as one on which disjunctions denote pluralities of propositions, and necessity modals behave like collective predicates applied to these pluralities. (shrink)

Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing accounts of group (...) action face problems dealing with large-scale group actions, and propose a minimal alternative account. In the second part of the paper, I draw on an analogy between inquiry and conversation, arguing that work by Robert Stalnaker and Craige Roberts helps us to think about the division of labour. In the final part of the paper I put the accounts of group action and inquiry together, and consider how to think about group knowledge, deep ignorance, and the different kinds of division of labour. (shrink)

How should we measure knowledge? According to the Counting Approach, we can measure knowledge by counting pieces of knowledge. Versions of the Counting Approach that try to measure knowledge by counting true beliefs with suitable support or by counting propositions known run into problems, stemming from infinite numbers of propositions and beliefs, difficulties in individuating propositions and beliefs, and cases in which knowing the same number of propositions contributes differently to knowledge. In this paper I develop a novel question-relative and (...) contextualist version of the counting approach, which measures an agent's knowledge by counting the number of complete answers of a contextually salient issue they can rule out. The question-relative and contextualist version of the Counting Approach avoids the issues for the proposition and belief-based systems, and offers a general, systematic, and explanatory system for measuring knowledge. (shrink)

Choices confront us with questions. How we act depends on our answers to those questions. So the way our beliefs guide our choices is not just a function of their informational content, but also depends systematically on the questions those beliefs address. This paper gives a precise account of the interplay between choices, questions and beliefs, and harnesses this account to obtain a principled approach to the problem of deduction. The result is a novel theory of belief-guided action that explains (...) and predicts the decisions of agents who, like ourselves, fail to be logically omniscient: that is, of agents whose beliefs may not be deductively closed, or even consistent. (Winner of the 2021 Isaac Levi Prize.). (shrink)

Number and Count Sentences like ‘The number of Martian moons is two’ and ‘Mars has two moons’ give rise to a puzzle. How can they be equivalent if only the truth of Number but not that of Count Sentences requires the existence of numbers? Proponents of Linguistic Deflationism seek to resolve this puzzle by arguing that on their correct linguistic analysis the truth of Number Sentences does not require the existence of numbers. In this paper, I argue that Katharina Felka’s (...) recent attempt to vindicate this strategy by analysing Number Sentences as so-called specificational sentences is philosophically dissatisfying and sketch a promising alternative. (shrink)

Since Kripke, philosophers have distinguished a priori true statements from necessarily true ones. A statement is a priori true if its truth can be established before experience, and necessarily true if it could not have been false according to logical or metaphysical laws. This distinction can be captured formally using two-dimensional semantics. There is a natural way to extend the notions of apriority and necessity so they can also apply to questions. Questions either can or cannot be resolved before experience, (...) and either are or are not about necessary facts. Classical two-dimensionalism has no account of question meanings, so it has to be combined with a framework for question semantics in order to capture these observations. It is shown in [14] how two-dimensional semantics can be combined with inquisitive semantics, in which questions are analyzed in terms of information. The present paper investigates the logic of two-dimensional inquisitive semantics, and provides a complete proof system. (shrink)

Before even getting to do science, basic principles need to be established, such as what is it that we want to achieve by science. In this paper, I will argue how the ultimate question of science is the “Who Am I?” question, which also acts as an ontological principle of creation, bringing into existence all the possible experiences that consciousness can have.

The aim in this paper is to define an Abductive Question-Answer System for the minimal logic of formal inconsistency \. As a proof-theoretical basis we employ the Socratic proofs method. The system produces abductive hypotheses; these are answers to abductive questions concerning derivability of formulas from sets of formulas. We integrated the generation of and the evaluation of hypotheses via constraints of consistency and significance being imposed on the system rules.

In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of language, thought, and communication. Based on these considerations, I argue against the Fregean view that analyzes questions as distinguished only at the level of force. Questions, I argue, are associated with specific semantic objects, which play a distinctive role in thought and in compositional semantics, stand in logical relations to one another, and can act as contents of multiple speech acts. In the second (...) part of the paper, I present a recent approach to the semantics of questions – inquisitive semantics – and discuss how the notion of question content it provides can be fruitfully put to use in the different roles we identified. (shrink)

Questions are everywhere and the ubiquitous activities of asking and answering, as most human activities, are susceptible to failure – at least from time to time. This volume offers several current approaches to the systematic study of questions and the surrounding activities and works toward supporting and improving these activities. The contributors formulate general problems for a formal treatment of questions, investigate specific kinds of questions, compare different frameworks with regard to how they regulate the activities of asking and answering (...) of questions, and situate these activities in a wider framework of cognitive/epistemic discourse. From the perspectives of logic, linguistics, epistemology, and philosophy of language emerges a report on the state of the art of the theory of questions. (shrink)

The question of how to arrive at questions is ambiguous. I will concentrate on two readings: (i) How should one set up a formal syntax that accomodates questions? (ii) How does one, while working in a suitable formal language, arrive at a situation where one is allowed to or even must ask a certain question? In other words: How is the asking of questions regulated within a given formal language? I will propose an answer to question (i) and consider the (...) field of possibilities of answering (ii). (shrink)

Vendler’s :161–173, 1979) puzzle about imagination is that the sentences ‘Imagine swimming in that water’ and ‘Imagine yourself swimming in that water’ seem at once semantically different and semantically the same. They seem semantically different, since the first requires you to imagine ’from the inside’, while the second allows you to imagine ’from the outside.’ They seem semantically the same, since despite superficial dissimilarity, there is good reason to think that they are syntactically and lexically identical. This paper sets out (...) the puzzle and offers a novel solution. Our proposal is that, just as there is knowledge-wh, there is also imagining-wh and that the inside/outside distinction Vendler points to is properly understood as a distinction within imagining-wh. In particular, to imagine swimming from the inside is to imagine what it feels like to swim, while to imagine swimming from the outside is to imagine what it looks like to swim. We show that this proposal is well grounded in both the semantics and syntax of ‘imagine.’ We also argue it makes better sense than its rivals of the data Vendler found so puzzling. (shrink)

A puzzle arises when combining two individually plausible, yet jointly incompatible, norms of inquiry. On the one hand, it seems that one shouldn’t inquire into a question while believing an answer to that question. But, on the other hand, it seems rational to inquire into a question while believing its answer, if one is seeking confirmation. Millson (2021), who has recently identified this puzzle, suggests a possible solution, though he notes that it comes with significant costs. I offer an alternative (...) solution, which doesn’t involve these costs. The best way to resolve the puzzle is to reject the prohibition on inquiring into a question while believing an answer to it. Resolving the puzzle in this way makes salient two fruitful areas in the epistemology of inquiry which merit further investigation. The first concerns the nature of the inquiring attitudes and the second concerns the aim(s) of inquiry. (shrink)