What is the relationship between inquiry and doubt? Understanding this relationship involves confronting a range of questions. These include: what is required to motivate inquiry, what does it take to legitimately settle inquiry, and what is the goal of inquiry (is this just whatever legitimately settles inquiry, or can it be something distinct)? These questions will be approached via the consideration of an influential proposal regarding the relationship between belief, doubt and inquiry offered in recent work by Jane Friedman. In critiquing this proposal we will be able to better understand what motivates a certain knowledge-based conception of the goal of inquiry, and also clarify the role of truth and doubt in inquiry.

The main thesis of this paper is that we have an irrational tendency to be over-impressed by success. The thesis is discussed mainly with reference to examples drawn from sport, where the role played by luck is crucial; but a brief attempt is made to generalize the thesis to other areas of life.

Consider a language incorporating a mirror-image form of assertion, where the norm is to express what you take to be false rather than what you take to be true. Why aren’t ordinary languages like that? Why do we generally assert what we take to be true rather than what we take to be false? If Lewis (1975) and Massey (1978) are right, there is a sense in which the question is based on a mistake, and in which English (etc.) could be described either way. I explore that idea, which centers on the role of duality in language. One of the main questions in the air is whether the symmetry of duality can be used as a guide to ‘real structure’ in semantics and pragmatics. I try to think through it with an analogy to relationism about space.