Abstract
People sometimes argue for questions, as can be verified by a Web search using as search terms phrases consisting of a conclusion indicator and an interrogative particle (such as “so why” or “how then”). These arguments provide a reason for asking the question and thus try to establish that it needs to be answered. Typically, they do so either in order to motivate interest in discovering the answer or in order to challenge addressees or a third party to explain their behaviour. The “inferential erotetic logic” of the Polish logician Andrzej Wiśniewski provides a basis for evaluating the inferences in such arguments. For an inference from one or more statements to a question to be valid, the statements and the context must entail that the question has a true answer without entailing that any particular answer is true. Further, there must be a point to asking the question, such as the addressees’ ignorance of the correct answer(s) to it; this requirement may be a pragmatic rather than a semantic constraint. Wiśniewski’s logic also covers inferences from questions (possibly supplemented by declarative sentences) to questions, but humans rarely articulate such inferences; this part of his logic is applicable to problem solving and proof theory rather than to arguments for questions.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the examples came from a call to a radio station’s phone-in program; the others were found on the Web.
- 2.
Eric Andrew-Gee, The Globe & Mail, 2018 01 06; available at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/; accessed 2019 01 09.
- 3.
Edward Keenan, The Star, 2017 12 19; available at https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2017/12/19/mayor-john-tory-has-got-plans-so-when-is-the-time-for-action.html; accessed 2019 01 09.
- 4.
The question was posted in September 2012 on Quora, a website on which anyone can submit a question and invite answers from volunteers. It is available at https://www.quora.com/What-value-does-conciousness-add-and-therefore-why-did-it-ever-come-into-existence; accessed 2019 01 09.
- 5.
Nor do speakers and writers who ask a question always do so by uttering an interrogative sentence. One can ask a question, for example, by means of an imperative sentence like “Tell me how you are feeling”.
- 6.
For simplicity, I restrict the list to the major oils in Wikipedia’s list of vegetable oils (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils; accessed 2019 01 09). It would be longer if all the cooking oils mentioned in that article were listed, and longer still if disjunctive answers (e.g. “canola or sunflower oil”) were included.
- 7.
This is the title of an article by Jasper Hamill, Metro, 23 Nov 2017 (available online at http://metro.co.uk/2017/11/23/scientists-say-there-are-four-types-of-drunks-so-which-are-you-7103363/; accessed 2019 01 09).
- 8.
An initial variable-binding universal quantifier “FOR EVERY x” is implicit in the use of the letter “x”, which by algebraic convention is a variable rather than a constant.
- 9.
The formalization takes the liberty of treating the word “you” in the context as a proper name of whoever is reading the passage.
- 10.
Bromberger (1992) on the other hand seems to regard the class of unexplainable facts as quite large, so that judging that a why-question is sound requires knowing that the fact for which an explanation is requested actually has one. Further, as he points out, the structure and content of a why-question do not provide a basis for this knowledge. Hence “what we don’t know when we don’t know why” (the title of his article) is what we must find out to know whether there is anything to know at all (p. 168).
- 11.
Not all interrogative sentences beginning with “how” express a how-question. The sentence “How could you do that?”, for example, is typically not a request for a description of the process that made it possible for the addressee to do “that”. It is a reproach, calling for a justification or an excuse or an apology.
- 12.
There were also two arguments for what-questions, which however were not open-ended. One was the question “What kind of oil should you cook with?”, which as discussed earlier can be represented as a request to choose from a finite set of direct answers.
- 13.
I thank Marcin Selinger for raising this question in conversation and for further discussion of it in correspondence.
- 14.
In the logical theory of questions developed by Kubiński (1980), questions of many forms have a single syntactically constructed presupposition, whose truth entails the question’s soundness. This alternative conception of a question’s presupposition does not apply to open-ended questions, which cannot be represented in the formal language constructed by Kubiński.
- 15.
This question is the conclusion of a preceding example with two statements as premisses: (1) If John writes three books during one year, then John is a monk or a bachelor or has a very patient wife. (2) John writes three books during one year.
- 16.
The question was posted in September 2012 on Quora, a website on which anyone can submit a question and invite answers from volunteers. It is available at https://www.quora.com/What-value-does-conciousness-add-and-therefore-why-did-it-ever-come-into-existence; accessed 2019 01 10.
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Hitchcock, D. (2020). Arguing for Questions. In: van Eemeren, F., Garssen, B. (eds) From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild. Argumentation Library, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28367-4_11
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