Hilpinen's Theory of Inquiry

Risto Hilpinen’s name is associated with seminal contributions to many areas of analytic philosophy, including influential work on deontic logic and the theory of artifacts, as well as important early investigations into inductive logic and indefeasibility analyses of knowledge. A somewhat lesser known body of Hilpinen’s work concerns the theory of inquiry, whereby the central questions are how to conceptualize and understand human investigations from a general epistemological perspective. The present contribution traces the development of Hilpinen’s theory of inquiry through his main contributions to the topic in the 1980s and 1990s with special attention to how the problems in the initial formulation of the theory were eventually given more detailed and convincing solutions