Inference in the context of enquiry

Much contemporary epistemological work is affected by two interconnected problems caused by the dissociation of its analyses from the context of enquiry. First, key epistemological notions like knowledge, reasoning and inference are presented in a manner that tenaciously eludes explication and proliferates puzzles. Second, the materials of scientific enquiry prove powerless to offer insight yielding solutions to puzzles or the desired explications. In this paper I show that these difficulties vanish when epistemological work is reconstructed along the lines set out by Dewey’s pragmatism, focussing in particular on a contrast between the insuperable difficulties attending a standard epistemological analysis of inference and the significant philosophical progress made possible by a pragmatist outlook on inference. In the process, I introduce a novel application of Dewey’s study of inference in scientific practice to mathematical enquiry.