THE LITERATURE ON THE LOGIC OF QUESTIONS

Coming to the literature on the logic of questions. It has not been sur­veyed or studied as yet. It has two parts, preliminary and contemporary. Peirce and Collingwood did the preliminary work, which is not technical enough for modern taste, but is highly problem-oriented (in particular, how do we choose questions to study?) and dialectical.

To begin with Peirce and Collingwood, it is not my concern here to ascribe priority, although, it is true, the idea that a true question must have a true answer was repeatedly expressed by Peirce long before those modern writers who make so much song-and-dance about it. Nor do I want to labor the point that the idea that questions hang on presupposi­tions is Collingwood’s. The point I wish to make is that these two writers have written down certain wise maxims which are in a sense well-known, in a sense still ignored.

When Peirce recommends that before examining the truth-value of an answer to a question we examine whether the answer fits the question; when Collingwood asserts that an examiner of a serious question collects first the previous answers to it and studies their shortcomings; when Peirce and Collingwood see a question as both an expression of dissatisfaction and an attempt to prompt an answer; when so engaged, they are in the no-man’s-land of what is obviously the wisdom of the ages and also un­examined mythology. What present-day erotetic logicians (the logicians of questions) do with this mythology is to elevate part of it to the rank of logic by putting it in modern hieroglyphics. (I am using the word ‘hiero­glyphic’ in the original sense of sacred writing (carving) rather than the vulgar sense of indecipherable writing.) I approve of the exercise, but cannot conceive of it as settling any issue whatever.

The example of a presupposition to a question which is used in the literature may well illustrate this. It is Collingwood’s example, and almost everyone else’s: Have you stopped beating your wife? Everybody knows, says Nuel Belnap, {An Analysis of Questions: Preliminary Report₉ 1963, p. 125) that this question is unfair - it rests on two presuppositions which we hope are not both true: (a) you have a wife (b) you beat her regularly. Now this is very baffling. This question, have you stopped beating your wife?, is unfair not because of its presuppositions but because of insinua­tion. The nasty attorney for the other side, let us say, asks an insinuating question in a run-of-the-mill courtroom drama. Only a fool would lose his cool. The best response is to take the question literally: No, I have not ceased beating my wife. The rules of procedure have to protect fair­ness. The attorney for your side has the right to cross-examine you next. Why, my dear fellow, he asks all puzzled and bewildered, why have you not stopped beating your wife? Because, you proceed in an equally cool manner, I have not started as yet.

The error which the erotetic logicians commit when declaring ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ unfair is of a great significance. As Aqvist has shown (A New Approach to the Logical Theory of Interrogatives, 1965, p. 75), we regard the question as unfair only if we think its presuppositions to be false. It is certainly fair when the presuppositions are presumed to be true. When we do not know whether the presuppositions are true, then (as Harrah and Belnap themselves notice) we run a risk; if risk entails un­fairness and if unfairness is to be excluded, many questions will be cen­sured and this will quite frustrate our quest for knowledge! Hence Belnap’s blanket opposition to the ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ type of question is seriously objectionable.

Another example is that of Cooper Harold Langford, of Lewis and Langford fame, and though it appeared in the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1939), it has not been followed up - to the best of my knowledge - even by those who have pursued at some length the topic, which is the existen­tial import of questions. Is your brother older than you? asks an attorney in court. You do not have a brother. What is the true answer in this case? Boolean, says Langford, is unlike ordinary English here: Boolean permits both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as true and proper answers, whereas ordinary English admits no true answer at all. Of course, Boolean also permits as a true answer ‘both yes and no’, but we need not go into this fascinating and often misunderstood type of answer, beyond observing the well known fact that to say both yes and no is to say, I have no brother, and vice versa. Now, on the basis of this, a witness may well confuse one party in court - say by choosing to answer, yes, and thus insinuate that he does have a brother. It will be the task of the attorney for that party to ask the witness, have you got a brother in the first place? It is doubtless easy to report courtroom cases in accord with Langford’s analysis.

Suppose, further, not only Boolean algebra, but also Russell’s theory of descriptions. Take again the question, is your brother older than you? and replace it by, the person who is your brother, is he older than you? This question, entailing, as it does, the false presupposition that you do have a brother, is unanswerable. In the language of erotetic logicians, it is to be criticized rather than answered, or merely pseudo-answered. In court the attorney to the other side must object, the court must sustain the objection, the attorney questioning you must withdraw his question and break it into two: first, do you have a brother? If yes, he proceeds to the second half, is he older than you? If not, rules of relevance prevent him from asking the second half. Again, this is so standard a court proce­dure, that one even sees it regularly in courtroom melodrama. The case which, as erotetic logicians say, involves a question not to be answered but to be criticized, then, is common enough and indeed involves a break down in questioning because a tacit presupposition has been exposed and may have to be given up. This, in my opinion, is true progress in any kind of investigation - legal, scientific, or metaphysical - especially when the presupposition does turn out to be false as suspected. The rules of polite question-and-answer for the same kind of question are much more in­volved, and I shall not discuss them here.

Peirce and Collingwood saw as the central problem of erotetic logic the following one: which problem should we invest efforts in studying? The question has wide ramifications.

Michael Polanyi tells (in his Personal Knowledge) of an experiment per­formed by a leading British physicist which should have opened up hosts of new and exciting questions, yet which was not taken up by anyone. Naturally, Polanyi was puzzled and asked a few physicists, why did they ignore the result? They shrugged their shoulders. It turned out that they were right: the experimental claim was based on an error. So much for Polanyi’s story, the story of an experiment which ought to have drawn the attention of the leading thinkers in the field but did not. Polanyi uses this as an example of personal knowledge, of knowledge which is valid, useful, yet not given to articulation. He thinks it points to the idea that to become a scientist you must breathe science and feel science with your whole being in order to know which scientific question to pursue and which to ignore. If you go by the obvious you may easily go astray. This is why the minor scientist follows the major scientist or the senior scientist. This is why science is the activity of the community of scien­tists.

In brief, Polanyi believes that the agenda of scientific investigation, the priority of questions to be studied, is determined authoritatively by the doyens of science who, eo ipso, are always right. It is perceptive of Polanyi to notice, what has been noted all too seldom, namely that the choice of questions is often an important matter. This is, indeed, how Young Turks become established - by overthrowing an old agenda and putting forward a new agenda. Not necessarily a new view, a new answer, but merely a new question, and with it, to return to Collingwood, a new set of presuppositions.

Polanyi’s case of an unpursued seemingly important experiment, is narrated with much too much mystification. It seems to me that the case is amenable to a much simpler and much more reasonable analysis. The procedure involved is rather simple and was invented and implemented by Robert Boyle: do not call an experimental result false, rather call it unrepeatable, and not even that unless it is decreed by others to be un­repeatable or unless you have yourself failed to reproduce it. Usually an unexpected result is first corroborated by experts in the field. Young up­starts ambitious enough to strike the iron while it is hot may take the risk of assuming the reported experimental result to be true and forge their way. If they were right, they get great rewards for being second only to the trailblazer, and if wrong all they lost was a little time. If they wish, they may, more cautiously on occasion, repeat the experiment and only then proceed with the questions it gives rise to.

It is amazing how much established procedure there is in each estab­lished field; how changes, especially of outlook, effect these procedures, yet how little literature there is on all this. After all, an experiment is a question to nature; and by the time an experiment is designed, the ques­tion to nature is well fixed. (Otherwise we say that the experiment is ill- designed and expect no enlightenment from the process of carrying it out so prematurely.) The process leading to an experiment is a lengthy process of choosing a question cluster (to use Bromberger’s idiom) and slowly nailing down one narrow question. This procedure, so important, is still hardly examined.

V.