Concept

Community of inquiry

Overview

The community of inquiry (CoI) is a concept first introduced by early pragmatist philosophers C.S.Peirce and John Dewey, concerning the nature of knowledge formation and the process of scientific inquiry. The community of inquiry is broadly defined as any group of individuals involved in a process of empirical or conceptual inquiry into problematic situations. This concept was novel in its emphasis on the social quality and contingency of knowledge formation in the sciences, contrary to the Cartesian model of science, which assumes a fixed, unchanging reality that is objectively knowable by rational observers. The community of inquiry emphasizes that knowledge is necessarily embedded within a social context and, thus, requires intersubjective agreement among those involved in the process of inquiry for legitimacy.

While Peirce originally intended the concept of the community of inquiry as a way to model the natural sciences, the concept has been borrowed, adapted, and applied in many different fields such as education (by Matthew Lipman in Philosophy for Children movement) and public administration.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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But the two questions are not disconnected. The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality. Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
John Dewey, The public and its problems
States what Community of inquiry is; the author is tied to Community of inquiry in the knowledge graph.
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And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of meanings. 1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356. 2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically different sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Community of inquiry is; the author is tied to Community of inquiry in the knowledge graph.
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His challenge, however, to point out which of the four methods are exemplified in certain important cases of scientific inquiry, is easily answered. "The planetary paths," as far as they are a case of induction at all,[43] fall under the Method of Agreement. The law of "falling bodies," namely that they describe spaces proportional to the squares of the times, was historically a deduction from the first law of…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
Close in meaning to Community of inquiry; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Community of inquiry

Charles Sanders Peirce

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Pragmatism.

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