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tags:eroteticslogicquestionsanswers
NOTE
It seems every book on this topic is $100+
Erotetics or erotetic logic is a part of logic, devoted to logical analysis of questions. It is sometimes called the logic of questions and answers.
R G Collingwood
Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in the answer to a question.” By way of explanation, he wrote “In proportion as a man is thinking scientifically when he makes a statement, he knows the statement is the answer to a question and he knows what the question is.” In this sense, when thinking is scientifically ordered, a question is logically prior to its own answer.
For most of the time, researchers concentrated on the relation between questions and answers. Recently, more attention is given to the way questions come from sentences or other questions, similar to entailment…
In the interrogative model, questioning is seen as game played between two parties. One of these parties may be reality.
So one imagines that of the domain of questions there will be no end, and the horizon of our knowledge will always hold the edge of question-space at least a little farther out than the edge of answer-space (or inchoately superimposed upon each other, and changing, so that definitely the space of settled questions and solved problems appears subsumed at the edges in a greater space of open questions and unproven solutions).
On the Reducibility of Questions (link)
ABSTRACT. The concept a question is reducible to a non-empty set of questions is defined and examined. The basic results are: (1) each question which is sound relative to some of its presuppositions is reducible to some set of binary (i.e. having exactly two direct answers) questions; (b) each question which has a finite number of direct answers is reducible to some finite set of binary questions; (c) if entailment is compact, then each normal question (i.e. sound relative to its presuppositions) is reducible to some finite set of binary questions.
One can speak of reducing a single question to a single question of another kind, or reduce a single question to a kind of set of questions of some kind or kinds.
A question merely frames something implicit and unknown. It’s like a gift-box: you can guess at what’s inside by looking at the size and shape, or by shaking the box a bit, but you don’t know what’s inside until you open the box up and start rooting around in the packing peanuts. It isn’t precisely correct to say there are more questions than answers. The issue is that the universe is always bigger (by far) than the language we use to describe it, and a question merely marks off some corner of the unknown universe for exploration.
[Jokes - Control Language - Islands]
Incidentally, this highlights some of the menacing aspects of question-asking. Many people use the act of question-asking to imply an answer while simultaneously cutting off any avenues for investigation or exploration. Sometimes this is innocuous moralizing, like asking a teenager why he thought it was smart to do such a stupid thing. Sometimes it’s malicious and manipulative, an effort to get someone to believe the wrong thing for one’s own benefit. We have to be clear whether someone is using the question format properly to frame a lack of knowledge, or improperly to create active ignorance. If we can’t see that difference, we will suffer for it.