If You Ask Yourself a Question, Seek the Answer!

Abstract Among the requirements essential to the proper pursuit of our intellectual endeavours, there is the requirement to seek additional evidential reasons beyond those that one currently possesses when one asks oneself a question. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this ‘questioning requirement’ in greater detail. After considering and dismissing accounts that take the questioning requirement to be either a practical or an epistemic requirement, I put forward my own view, which holds that the questioning requirement arises from the very nature of the illocutionary act of self-questioning. Just as the illocutionary act of promising generates obligations, asking oneself a question generates a requirement to seek evidential reasons to answer the question one has posed.