Questions

Questions

Suppose you come home and find the kitchen window open.

You remember closing it.

For a moment there may be no question. You simply notice the open window.

But then questions begin to nag.

Did I really close it?

Did someone open it?

Was somebody in the house?

The questions do not erase everything else you take to be the case. You still recognize the kitchen. You still know roughly what happened earlier in the day. You still understand what a window is and why an open one might matter.

Only part of the situation has become unsettled.

Questions often work like this.

They mark or create some local incompleteness within a background that continues to operate.

There is little reason here to search for an essence common to every grammatical question. Questions do many things. They request information, expose uncertainty, challenge assumptions, redirect attention, test competence, and reopen alternatives.

Some are rhetorical, strategic, hostile, playful, or deceptive.

A question in the sense used here directs attention toward something that is not yet settled.

Sometimes the unsettledness comes first. You are genuinely puzzled. Something does not make sense, and the question gives the puzzlement a form.

Sometimes the question comes first.

A teacher asks:

"What assumption are you making here?"

You may not have been puzzled at all. Only after trying to answer do you notice that your conclusion depends on something you had never examined.

Being puzzled is not obviously something we can simply decide to become.

Conviction Formation Theory extends the fundamental claim to questioning:

We can deliberately formulate a question, but we cannot simply decide that something will become genuinely questionable for us.

But there is an important difference. Unlike convictions, questions call for answers.

A deliberately entertained conviction may later acquire convincing force if what we encounter supports it. A deliberately posed question has an additional possibility: the expected answer may fail to appear. That failure can itself make the question genuinely puzzling.

A conviction can gain force through what supports it. A question can gain force through the failure of what should answer it.

We can deliberately ask what else could explain something, what we may be assuming, what would count against a conviction, or which possibility we have ignored.

At first such questions may be little more than learned techniques. Perhaps nothing follows.

You ask what would count against a conviction and immediately find a satisfactory answer.

But the situation changes when we expected to have an adequate answer and discover that we do not.

The question may not have been genuinely puzzling when we posed it. The failure to answer it can make it so.

By asking, we can place ourselves in conditions under which the absence of an answer may itself give the question force.

What began as a learned technique can then become a genuine problem for us.