On the ”tell me truly” approach to the analysis of interrogatives

Abstract

In their 1975 Theoria review of Raymond Olson and Anthony Paul (eds.) Contemporary philosophy in Scandinavia —hereafter referred to as Lewis (1975), see the bibliograpy at the end of the present paper—David and Stephanie R. Lewis give a very perceptive critical and constructive account of my theory of interrogatives as summarized in Åqvist (1972) and first set forth in Åqvist (1965). Most interestingly, they propose to replace the imperative-epistemic analysis of questions by an imperative-assertoric one, obtained from substituting throughout the assertoric operator ”You tell me truly that…” for the epistemic operator ”I know that” used in my original translation scheme for interrogatives of various types. The Lewis convincingly show that such a revised analysis is preferable to mine for a number of reasons; it leads e.g. (1) to a better treatment of certain interesting problem cases discussed on pp. 48–51 in Lewis (1975), (2) to a way of handling examination questions that is clearly superior to the rather ad-hocish treatment proposed in Åqvist (1969), and (3) to a useful application to questions in police interrogations for the purpose of eliciting confessions—a topic that seems so far to have been fairly neglected by interrogative theorists.