Conflicts pave the road to knowledge. Not all conflicts concern what we believe. Many arise over which questions we prioritize. In Questions in Conflict: On the Role of Attention in Inquiry and Communication, Harish Pedaprolu examines such conflicts using contemporary philosophy of attention, which is informed by psychology and neuroscience. The dissertation argues that attention—rather than beliefs, goals, desires, or preferences—structures inquiry by imposing a hierarchy on our questions. This “inquiry structure” determines whether a question is prioritized, treated as a sub-inquiry, or ignored. So, conflicts over inquiry structures are attentional conflicts.
Attentional conflicts are ignored in traditional philosophical work on disagreement, which struggles to explain cases where people share the same inquiry and similar beliefs and values yet disagree over how the inquiry should be structured. For example, two people may ask why hip-hop music is misogynistic and homophobic but disagree over whether this question belongs within a broader inquiry into misogyny and homophobia among men of color, or within an inquiry into the genre’s popularity among white audiences.
Using relevant work in linguistics, the dissertation argues that the better inquiry structure is the one that connects shared questions to more questions in ways that yield more fine-grained and accurate answers. This norm can help negotiate attentional conflicts in domains like political organizing, consciousness-raising, and personal relationships, where communicative cooperation is sought even in the face of conflicting social positionalities.
Harish Pedaprolu succesfully defended his thesis on February 10.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Norms of Inquiry
Time and place: Monday 9 Februray 2026, 15.15 PM, Helga Engs hus, auditorium 3
Evaluation committee
- Associate Professor Jessie Munton, University of Cambridge (first opponent)
- Associate Professor Jessica Keiser, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Nicholas Howell Hughes, University of Oslo (committe administrator)
Chair of the defence
Supervisors
- Professor Sebastian Watzl, University of Oslo