Inquiry and reasons

Knowledge, certainty, and understanding are all plausible candidates for constituting aims and setting the norms for genuine inquiry. However, a mere pluralist account of aims and norms of inquiry that lacks a more fundamental theoretical motivation might strike us as ad hoc. The aim of this paper is to provide further motivation for a pluralist approach. The key to the solution is to regard finding sufficient reasons to believe as a more general, indeed unifying, aim of theoretical inquiry.