Impartiality and Inquiry

Impartiality is often cited as a virtue of inquiry, but it is not clear what it means for an inquiry to be impartial. In this paper, I draw on ground-breaking work on the epistemology of inquiry and epistemic rationality to introduce and argue in favour of a novel account of epistemic impartiality. In my view, epistemic impartiality is ultimately a matter of fairness. According to this new account, which I call the positive account, an inquiry is impartial if and only if its design and execution are appropriately influenced by fair consideration of the interests of the parties that will be affected by the outcomes of the inquiry. Contrary to our pre-theoretical expectations, I argue that epistemic impartiality is not a matter of setting people’s interests aside; rather, it requires us to take people’s interests seriously when we make our inquiries.