What’s in a Question?

Pia Lauritzen
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

141. That’s how many questions my relatively ordinary family asked one ordinary morning. From 6:50 to 7:40, two children and two adults averaged a little over 35 questions each.

Suppose each of us asks about 40 questions per hour for about eight hours a day (reasonably assuming there are intervals at school, work meetings, football practice and the like with a significantly lower question rate). This yields 320 questions per family member per day — excluding all the questions we ask ourselves without verbalising them: “How long can I put off getting up?” “Do I really have to go for a run today?”

Not all the questions we ask ourselves and each other are of the information-seeking kind. Far from it, and one can certainly question how much knowledge and development they reflect.

“Are there any eyes in there?” my husband will ask our children while waking them up for school. “What’s bugging you, girl?” I ask my dog as it gnaws at an itchy spot. “Why can’t I stay asleep when it’s still the middle of the night?” our seven-year-old daughter asks, meaning she finds it too early to get up. “How can a duvet feel so comfy?” our ten-year-old son asks as he stretches in bed, hoping to get two more minutes in his warm nest.

None of these questions live up to Gadamer’s definition of a true question, for they demand no answer. The idea is not that our children should answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether they have eyes beneath their tightly shut lids, and it would be odd indeed if our dog looked up at me and growled, “Yes, these fleas are really annoying.” Nor does our daughter expect an answer to her question. Believe me, if she did she would say so. And our son would certainly protest if I began a disquisition on the various meanings of ‘comfort’.

So why do we ask such questions? What is the purpose of asking questions we neither expect nor want to have answered?

The three big E’s

Questions obviously have multiple features and aims. While the questions I just mentioned serve as modes of expressing one’s self and one’s needs, they also serve as social markers of attention and care. Consider these questions: “Do you have gym class today?” or “Are you buying the gifts?” or “Do you think we have enough leftovers for supper?” or “Will you be eating at home tonight?” Clearly they have fundamentally different goals.

When we ask questions of this type, we hope for a response that will clarify certain practicalities for ourselves and for our respondents. That’s why failure to respond immediately to such questions can make you very unpopular: Your answer is needed to determine how the questioner should act.

That’s not exactly the case with such questions as “What are you doing?” or “Is this a good place to sleep?” or “Why is it so dark here?” These reflect situations where the questioner is considerably less oriented toward, or dependent upon, an answer.

Then there are other questions of the type: “Can you find me a scrunchie?” or “Who’s going to be the first one out the door this morning?” or “How about a hug?” Here, what matters for the questioner isn’t the answer to the question, but the action it prompts.

Of the 141 questions posed on an ordinary morning in my ordinary family, only a single one was aimed directly at increasing the questioner’s knowledge. As it happens, that question was never answered. Gazing at the ball-point pen I was holding in my hand, my son asked: “How can the colour keep coming out of the tip?” That could have been an interesting question to explore together, but we didn’t, and we rarely do.

Nevertheless, many philosophers regard this as just the sort of question that distinguishes human beings from other living creatures: questions seeking an answer that explains how the world works. Straus, a German-American phenomenologist, believed that questions can be divided into three groups, depending on whether the questioner is oriented toward himself, an object or another human being.

This understanding of and approach to questions corresponds to the three main topics in Western philosophy, which can conveniently be nicknamed the “three E’s”: existence, epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and ethics.

Existential philosophy is concerned with what is revealed about the questioner by his orientation toward himself. Epistemology is concerned with what is required before the questioner can be said to have attained true knowledge of the object or matter toward which he is oriented. Ethics is concerned with the responsibility that the questioner assumes when he orients himself toward another person.

Hence, no matter what we are asking about, and no matter when, why, or how we ask our questions, we are always orienting ourselves toward something. The question is what our questions reveal. Do they reveal the ‘something’ we are oriented toward? Or do they reveal the very fact of our orientation?

If the former is true, then philosophy is all about asking the right questions in the right way in order to gain the right understanding of the nature of the world. If the latter is true, then philosophy is all about exploring and challenging the conditions for our asking and orienting ourselves as we do.

The notion that our questions reveal a ‘something’ independent of both questioner and respondent has undoubtedly played the dominant role in the history of the question — a history that has not yet been recorded, although several initial attempts have been made.

The History of the Question

Do you like where this is going? Get the whole story in Questions.

Pia Lauritzen

Written by

On a quest to understand questions. PhD in Philosophy. Author of "Questions" and "Questions: Between Identity and Difference". Co-founder at Qvest.io.

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