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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Questions are everywhere and the ubiquitous activities of asking and answering, as most human activities, are susceptible to failure - at least from time to time. This volume offers several current approaches to the systematic study of questions and the surrounding activities and works toward supporting and improving these activities. The contributors formulate general problems for a formal treatment of questions, investigate specific kinds of questions, compare different frameworks with regard to how they regulate the activities of asking and answering of questions, and situate these activities in a wider framework of cognitive/epistemic discourse. From the perspectives of logic, linguistics, epistemology, and philosophy of language emerges a report on the state of the art of the theory of questions.
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Moritz Cordes (ed.)
Asking and Answering
Rivalling Approaches to Interrogative Methods
Umschlagabbildung: © Kalle Jonsson 2021 (Any reproduction with remunerative intent will be frowned upon.)
Dr. Moritz CordesUniversität Regensburg, Institut für PhilosophieLehrstuhl für theoretische Philosophie, Gebäude PT, Zi. 4.3.693040 Regensburg
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6367-5393
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823394808
© 2021 · Moritz Cordes
Das Werk ist eine Open Access-Publikation. Es wird unter der Creative Commons Namensnennung – Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen | CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) veröffentlicht. Die in diesem Werk enthaltenen Bilder und sonstiges Drittmaterial unterliegen ebenfalls der genannten Creative Commons Lizenz, sofern sich aus der am Material vermerkten Legende nichts anderes ergibt. In diesen Fällen ist für die oben genannten Weiterverwendungen des Materials die Einwilligung des jeweiligen Rechteinhabers einzuholen.
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Contents
Preface and IntroductionCordes, Moritz
In December 2019 two things happened, which can be described in ascending order of historical influence: (i) Enough funding was acquired for an in-person conference to be held in Greifswald in 2020 on the topic of asking and answering with invited speakers from seven different countries. (ii) First cases of Covid-19 were registered in Wuhan. The effects of both events played out in such a way that, indeed, a conference took place in September 2020 but, due to what had become a pandemic, nobody travelled to Greifswald. Instead the contributors met in the digital realm. In order to adjust to the medium the planned presentation time (without discussion) was cut in half, prereads were requested and the time alotted to the discussions was doubled. This contributed to what at least some experienced as a very cooperative and communicative workshop. Fears of ›screen fatigue‹ proved to be unfounded. Instead the participants had many discussions that made the phenomenon of progressive mutual comprehension palpable.
As became clear when the date of the conference drew near, the request of prereads would result in a situation where each participant had carefully prepared a text which they deemed fit for distribution among peers and which, soon, they reflected on under the remarks and attacks from the other participants at the workshop. These texts eventually became the body of this volume. The contributors were given opportunity to revise the prereads. Commentary sections were added by other participants in order to echo some of the communicative aspects of the workshop as well as to enhance the cognitive experience associated with a scientific collective volume.
As to the content, the conference and the volume acknowledged that questions are everywhere and, since the ubiquitous activities of asking and answering, qua human activities, are susceptible to failure, the systematic study of questions and the surrounding activities is desirable. Such study works toward supporting and improving these activities and makes them less vulnerable to failure, whatever constitutes failure. Admittedly, the reflection on questions and their systematic employment are activities which have been pursued long before the dawn of modern erotetic logic, as is evident, for instance, from PlatoPlato’s framing of SocratesSocrates’ style of conversation, from Aristotle’sAristotle eighth book of the Topics, from the style of oral and written philosophy in the scholastic era, from Kant’s three (or four) leading questions of philosophy, and from the logical empiricists’ criticism of traditional problems as pseudoquestions – to name only a few. In fact, from this motley one might get the impression that asking questions is as important in philosophy as argumentation or concept formation. At any rate, it seems that for a long time there has been an implicit or explicit need to provide frameworks for the methodic use of questions in science, philosophy, and everyday life. Such frameworks may take or, in fact, took the shape of categorizations of questions and answers or of the elucidation of their systematic relations or of the reconstructive or stipulative setting of rules which regulate the practice of asking and answering.
In more recent times, scholars, some of whom were present at the workshop, developed various theories of questions by providing (i) ways to formalize ordinary language questions, (ii) semantics for (formalized) questions, and (iii) rules for (formalized) questions. An incomplete list: ÅqvistÅqvist, Lennart (1975), BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. and SteelSteel, Thomas B. (1976), CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano, GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen & RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris (2018), GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen and StokhofStokhof, Martin (1984), HartmannHartmann, Dirk (1990), HintikkaHintikka, Jaakko (1999), KubińskiKubiński, Tadeusz (1980), WiśniewskiWiśniewski, Andrzej (1995). The listed efforts largely agree on the relevance of questions in many areas and on their general amenability to methodic treatment, which is either supported or even enabled by their formalization. Obviously, questions, and their answers, are considered cognitive entities at least in the sense that their utterance is part of human efforts to achieve knowledge, truth and other epistemic goods. As proposals from logicians they are to be distinguished from similiar efforts in informal philosophy of language, informal epistemology, psychology or linguistics, although the lines may blur depending on the approach. Most question logicians are not in the business of making claims about what role questions play in our minds nor do they set out to formally reconstruct all aspects of ordinary language questions. They rather focus on those aspects that are ›cognitively relevant‹ or ›epistemically relevant‹.
Despite these common features, the efforts have not yet lead to a ›mainstream‹ in question logic – erotetics remains “multi-paradigmatic” (PelišPeliš, Michal 2016:14). On the one hand, this pluralism is fruitful, since it provides for so many different ways to investigate questions. On the other hand, the result of (mostly) mutually incompatible approaches is dissatisfying. It also raises the question of who got it right or, more circumspectly: Which proposal is preferable with respect to certain aims which one supposedly wants to achieve by a formal treatment of questions?
Accordingly, the reader will find in the present volume contributions that approach questions and answers from very different angles. In addition, even if the comment sections are discounted, the style of the contributions is diverse. A brief walkthrough may help the interested reader:
Ivano CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano, who gave the opening lecture,1 launches a general defense of a semantics for questions. In doing so he identifies research topics (compositional semantics, logic, propositional attitudes, discourse) where such a semantics plays a major role. His own proposal is known as Inquisitive Semantics, of which he is a/the main proponent. Due to the pivotal character of the paper, two commentators with vastly different backgrounds were admitted. Dorota LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion’s comment constructively combines structural proof theory and Inquisitive Semantics while criticizing CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano’s view on the distinction between answers and resolutions. Manfred KrifkaKrifka, Manfred subscribes to the idea of a question semantics but has significantly diverging ideas about what are the semantic entities associated with questions/interrogatives.
The latter’s approach is spelled out in much more detail in his own chapter. Manfred KrifkaKrifka, Manfred develops the theory of Commitment Spaces and includes interpretations for a large number of different kinds of natural language questions. At the core of it lies the insight, that many polar questions (yes/no-questions) are, in fact, to be understood as monopolar, favoring one of the answering options. The connections between the semantic entities associated with questions and partialist understandings of questions (incl. monopolar readings) are sketched in the comment by the volume’s editor. This closes a unit on question semantics (i.e. chs. 1 and 2).
Andrzej WiśniewskiWiśniewski, Andrzej presents in his chapter an overview of Inferential Erotetic Logic (IEL), the research programme that he created. Due to the introductory character it can be seen as a preliminary to the chapters by David HitchcockHitchcock, David and Dorota LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion. It will also help to understand parts of the contributions from Ivano CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano, Jared MillsonMillson, Jared, and the editor. In the face of these further studies relating to IEL, no comment was included in this chapter.2
David HitchcockHitchcock, David’s chapter can be read as a straightforward application of IEL but it is also kind of a pilot study about how speech agents argue for questions. The results are ambivalent, indicating that not always arguments run along the lines of evocation and erotetic implication, as suggested by IEL. Commentator Victoria Oertel further qualifies this result by observing that what is usually taken as an argument for (posing) a question is, in fact, a means to delimit the spectrum of answers available to the addressee of the question.
In the following chapter, Moritz CordesCordes, Moritz considers how we arrive at a formal framework for questions as well as how we arrive at posing a specific question within a given framework for formal questions. The paper is programmatic; it merely indicates specific answers to either of these two dimensions. In a way, Lani WatsonWatson, Lani, in her comment, gives a more specific answer to the second dimension: She sketches a virtue-epistemological theory of questioning in inquiry-like settings.
Dorota LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion draws a connection between proof theory and IEL relating the heuristic asking of questions and the development of proofs. She takes a first step toward showing how proof theory is able to elucidate a fundamental epistemic procedure. Possibly it connects to traditional philosophical concepts like ReichenbachReichenbach, Hans’s distinction between context of discovery and context of justification. Jared MillsonMillson, Jared, in his comment, continues LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion’s discussion of rules of inference, specifically of structural rules, and assesses their relation to real processes of asking and answering.
In his own chapter, Jared Millson considers what kinds of acts are the acceptance and rejection of questions and how such acts are performed. He sees intra- and extra-conversational reasons for such moves. His ideas are formulated in the context of a bilateralist inferentialism. Joshua Habgood-CooteHabgood-Coote, Joshua’s comment suggests some improvements to MillsonMillson, Jared’s ideas. Most importantly, the former wonders whether the acceptance and/or rejection of questions is amenable to the weak/strong distinction. What does it mean to weakly ask a question?3
The final chapter, authored by Floris RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris, takes a more linguistic turn, echoing the initial chapters of the volume. Roelofsen addresses the connections between indefinite and interrogative pronouns, setting up a dynamic semantics that operates with (indeterminate) discourse referents. His idea suggests that wh-questions do not come with a presupposition that precludes a negative answer – in contrast to what wh-questions are usually taken to presuppose. In other words: To answer ‘Nowhere.’ to the question ‘Where is god?’ does not infringe on any alleged existential presupposition. David HitchcockHitchcock, David’s comment is valuable especially due to his efforts at locating RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris’s ideas in a spectrum of theories of meaning. The commentator does not miss out on the opportunity to demand further elaboration of the approach.
This last directive act can be generalized so as to include the other approaches represented in the chapters. One aspect of filling this desideratum is the further interpollination between the different schools – an effort that has only begun in this volume. In doing so, differences need not be swept under the carpet. In fact, at neuralgic points in this volume, decisions between various ways to develop theoretic superstructures are marked and recognized as non-trivial. This holds, among other things, for the following issues: What shape should a question semantics take? What suggestions should one read into the simplest of questions? What role can formal frameworks play in reading and structuring processes of question asking and answering?
Original Conference Schedule
The conference was held on September 17th to 19th, 2020. The following list provides the speakers and titles of all talks in the order in which they were given.
Ivano CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano: Why We Need a Question Semantics (public opening lecture).
Manfred KrifkaKrifka, Manfred: Questions in Commitment Spaces.
Lani WatsonWatson, Lani: The Social Virtue of Questioning: A Genealogical Approach.
David HitchcockHitchcock, David: Justifying Questions: What Kinds, How, and Why.
Yacin HamamiHamami, Yacin: Interrogative Games.
Andrzej WiśniewskiWiśniewski, Andrzej: The Logic of Questions as a Formal Logic.
Moritz CordesCordes, Moritz: How to Arrive at Questions.
Dorota LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion: The Method of Socratic Proofs: From Questions to Proofs.
Jared MillsonMillson, Jared: Bilateralism for Erotetic Logics.
Joshua Habgood-CooteHabgood-Coote, Joshua: Group Inquiry.
Floris RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris: Questions, Indeterminate Reference, and Dynamic Logic.
The decision of some speakers to not have their talk included in this volume was made individually.
Editor’s Acknowledgements
The conference was funded by the Theoria program of the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as part of the project Logik des Fragens: Zur Reglementierung des interrogativen Vollzugs (UG 15), supervised by Geo SiegwartSiegwart, Geo. This is also the main source of funding for this volume. Additional funding for the volume was provided by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the project Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary (arranged by principal investigator Floris RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris) and by the European Research Council ERC, Advanced Grant 787929 SPAGAD: Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (arranged by Manfred KrifkaKrifka, Manfred). Gratitude is due toward those individuals who were involved with the administration of these projects.
I would like to thank all persons who helped to make the conference an enjoyable event and/or to make the volume a pleasure to prepare, namely Ivano CiardelliCiardelli, Ivano, Joshua Habgood-CooteHabgood-Coote, Joshua, Yacin HamamiHamami, Yacin, David HitchcockHitchcock, David, Catherine HundlebyHundleby, Catherine, Manfred KrifkaKrifka, Manfred, Dorota LeszczyńskaLeszczyńska-Jasion, Dorota-Jasion, Jared MillsonMillson, Jared, Victoria Oertel, Floris RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris, Lani WatsonWatson, Lani, Andrzej WiśniewskiWiśniewski, Andrzej. The project was also tremendously supported by friends and colleagues in Greifswald: Lea Cordes, Gerhard GentzenGentzen, Gerhard, Friedrich ReinmuthReinmuth, Friedrich, Steffi Schadow, Manuela Schlünß, Laura Schmalenbach, Geo SiegwartSiegwart, Geo, and Lucas Treise. It is with great regret that I have to see this volume as my last effort at the University of Greifswald. Hans Rott and Tim Kraft from the University of Regensburg are to be thanked for providing an environment in which the volume could be finalized. Kalle Jonsson, of whose work in music and visual arts I am a great afficionado, kindly provided the cover design for free.4 The personnel at Narr/Francke/Attempto was very helpful, open, cooperative, and, when problems arose, accommodating; Tillmann Bub and Mareike Wagner should receive the main credit for the resultant enjoyable experience. Many of the persons named above put an amount of trust in me that I consider beyond warranted due to some of the non-standard choices that I deliberately made. I hope that the final product does not entirely disappoint – despite the fact that some ideas were not successfully translated to reality.
Moritz Cordes, November 2021.
References
Åqvist, Lennart (1975). A New Approach to the Logical Theory of Interrogatives. Analysis and Formalization. 2nd edition. Tübingen.
Belnap, Nuel D./Steel, Thomas B. (1976). The Logic of Questions and Answers. New Haven/London.
Ciardelli, Ivano/Groenendijk, Jeroen/Roelofsen, Floris (2018). Inquisitive Semantics. Oxford.
Groenendijk, Jeroen/Stokhof, Martin (1984). Studies on the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of Answers. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Amsterdam.
Hartmann, Dirk (1990). Konstruktive Fragelogik: Vom Elementarsatz zur Logik von Frage und Antwort. Mannheim/Wien/Zürich.
Hintikka, Jaakko (1999). Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientific Discovery. Dordrecht/Boston/London.
Kubiński, Tadeusz (1980). An Outline of the Logical Theory of Questions. Berlin.
Peliš, Michal (2016). Inferences with Ignorance: Logics of Questions. Inferential Erotetic Logic & Erotetic Epistemic Logic. Prague.
Wiśniewski, Andrzej (1995). The Posing of Questions: Logic Foundations of Erotetic Inferences. Dordrecht/Boston/London.
1 Why We Need a Question Semantics
Abstract
In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of language, thought, and communication. Based on these considerations, I argue against the FregeFrege, Gottloban view that analyzes questions as distinguished only at the level of force. Questions, I argue, are associated with specific semantic objects, which play a distinctive role in thought and in compositional semantics, stand in logical relations to one another, and can act as contents of multiple speech acts. In the second part of the paper, I present a recent approach to the semantics of questions – inquisitive semantics – and discuss how the notion of question content it provides can be fruitfully put to use in the different roles we identified.
1.1Introduction
The title of this contribution can be read in two ways. The first reading is: For what purposes do we need a question semantics? What roles should question semantics play in an overall theory of language and thought? One of the aims of asking this is to identify certain desiderata for formal theories of questions, which can then be assessed and compared by asking whether the notion of question content that they yield is suitable for these various roles.6
The second reading of our title puts focus on the word ‘semantics’: Why do we need a question semantics, and not just a question pragmatics? The backdrop for this question is the existence of a tradition, going back to FregeFrege, Gottlob’s (1918), which analyzes questions as distinguished only at a pragmatic level: Questions are characterized by their association with a particular kind of speech act – asking – but not with a particular kind of semantic content. The conceptual picture that these accounts advocate looks like this:
The FregeFrege, Gottloban conceptual picture
What we have at the semantic level is just a proposition, which then can be paired at the pragmatic level either with declarative or with interrogative force, resulting in a statement or in a question.
While this view is not popular in linguistics (for reasons that we will discuss) it still has some influence in philosophy. One of my aims in this paper is to argue against it: While questions are indeed conventionally associated with the act of asking – in the sense that, by default, uttering a question counts as asking it – they also play many roles besides being asked. I will argue that the content-force distinction is just as important for questions as it is for statements: It is crucial to distinguish the content of a question from its asking, for exactly the same reasons why it is important to distinguish a proposition from its assertion. The conceptual picture I favor looks like this:7
Statement
Question
Content type
Proposition
Issue
Default force
Assert
Ask
The favored conceptual picture
The arguments in favor of this conceptual picture have been spelled out before: Two key references, which are sources of inspiration for the present paper, are BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. (1990) and GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen & StokhofStokhof, Martin (1997). Here, I will present some arguments from these papers in a novel way, and I will add some new ones.
A further aim of this paper is to briefly illustrate how a recent theory of questions, inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli, GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen & RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris 2018), provides us with a notion of question content that can be put to fruitful use in the various roles that we will discuss.8
Here is the plan for the paper. We start in section 1.2 by looking at some of the theoretical roles which are standardly played by the notion of proposition. In section 1.3, I argue that the notion of issue – the sort of object expressed by a question – has parallel roles to play. In section 1.4, I discuss the FregeFrege, Gottloban view that identifies questions with asking acts, arguing against such an identification. In section 1.5, I describe the approach to question semantics that I favor – inquisitive semantics – and briefly outline how the notion of question content it delivers can be put to use in the various roles we identified in section 1.3. Section 1.6 concludes.
1.2Roles for Propositions
In order to discuss what theoretical roles question contents have to play, it is helpful to start out from more familiar territory: the analysis of statements. By ‘statement’ here I mean a declarative sentence in natural language, as in (1-a), a sentential complement headed by the declarative complementizer ‘that’, as in (1-b), or a formula in a formal language which is meant to formalize a declarative sentence, as in (1-c).
(1)
a.
Smith stole the jewel.
b.
that Smith stole the jewel
c.
stole(s, j)
The semantic content expressed by a statement is normally called a ‘proposition’. A proposition is the sort of thing that represents the world as being a certain way, and which may be true or false depending on whether the world is in fact that way. In theorizing about language and thought, we use the semantic notion of a proposition, and the notion of truth of a proposition, in at least four ways: (i) to account for semantic composition, i.e., for how the semantics of a sentence is computed recursively from the semantics of its constituent parts; (ii) to define logical relations; (iii) to analyze propositional attitudes, and (iv) to give accounts of how language is used in communication. Let us briefly discuss each purpose.
1.2.1Compositional Semantics
One key feature of human languages, both natural and artificial, is that they are recursive: they consist of discrete units which can be assembled into larger units by grammatical rules. The semantic value of a complex expression is not conventionally stipulated, but is built up from the semantic values of its constituents according to recursive rules. In both natural and artificial languages, a statement can occur not only as a complete sentence, but also as a constituent part of other, more complex sentences, as the following examples illustrate.
(2)
a.
Smith stole the jewels.
b.
If Smith stole the jewels, he will be out of the country by now.
c.
Alice knows that Smith stole the jewels.
When a statement occurs embedded, its semantic value feeds into the compositional process and contributes to determining the semantic value of the larger sentence. Thus, e.g., in (2-b) the proposition that Smith stole the jewels combines with if to act as a supposition, and in (2-c) the same proposition is the object argument of the verb ‘know’.
1.2.2Logic
The central concern of logic is the study of the validity of inferences. The notion of validity is, at least traditionally, characterized in semantic terms: An inference is valid if the conclusion is true in all interpretations in which the premises are true. Moreover, logic is supposed to give an analysis of specifically logical items in language, such as connectives, quantifiers, and modalities. Such an analysis is normally given in semantic terms, by specifying how the truth conditions of a compound involving these items are derived from the truth conditions of the constituents.
1.2.3Propositional Attitudes
Our explanations of the behavior of agents involve reference to mental states such as belief, hope, and desire. For instance, we say that Bob is going to a certain café because he wants to meet Alice and he believes he will find her there. Such states are usually analyzed as propositional attitudes. To appreciate the idea, compare (3-a) and (3-b).
(3)
a.
Bob admires Alice.
b.
Bob hopes that Alice called.
Supposing (3-a) is true, what is the object of Bob’s admiration? It is a person, namely Alice. Now supposing (3-b) is true, what is the object of Bob’s hope? It is a proposition – the proposition that Alice called (or at least, this is the standard answer). Similarly, (4-a) and (4-b) describe Bob as having certain attitudes towards this proposition.
(4)
a.
Bob thinks that Alice called.
b.
Bob considers it unlikely that Alice called.
Thus, propositions play a central role in the mental life of agents like ourselves: They are things that we consider, belief, disbelieve, hope, want, and so on.
1.2.4Discourse
Statements are by default associated with the speech act of assertion: If one simply utters (5) in a conversation, they are by default taken to be asserting that Smith stole the jewels.
(5)
Smith stole the jewels.
Speakers use assertions, among other things, in order to exchange information and coordinate their beliefs. How is that achieved? The standard answer, which comes in many variants, is that by uttering a statement, a speaker expresses a corresponding proposition, which represents the world as being a certain way. The speaker is then taken to present herself as accepting the proposition and as recommending that this proposition be accepted by her interlocutors (see, e.g., StalnakerStalnaker, Robert C. 1978, FarkasFarkas, Donka F. & BruceBruce, Kim B. 2010, KrifkaKrifka, Manfred 2015, 2021).
In addition to assertion, statements are also involved in other speech acts. For instance, by uttering (6-a) or (6-b), the speaker is not asserting that Smith stole the jewels, but instead supposing it or suggesting it as possible.
(6)
a.
Let’s say Smith stole the jewels.
b.
Perhaps Smith stole the jewels.
As in the case of assertion, we would like to have an account of how these other speech acts work. Again, such accounts make crucial reference to the proposition that Smith stole the jewels: They typically say that the speaker is proposing to treat this proposition in a certain way – as true by hypothesis, or as an open possibility (see, e.g., KaufmannKaufmann, Stefan 2000, YalcinYalcin, Seth 2007, SchniederSchnieder, Benjamin 2010).
1.2.5Summing Up
We can summarize the situation as in the diagram below. Declarative contents are built up compositionally, and they play a role internally to compositional semantics, as they determine the contribution of statements embedded in larger linguistic contexts. Externally to compositional semantics, they feed into logic, where they are used in defining key notions like entailment, philosophy of mind, where they provide the objects of attitudes like belief, and pragmatics, where they are used in characterizing the workings of assertion and other speech acts.
Disciplines where propositions play a role
1.3Roles for Issues
Having identified some important roles played by propositions, which are contents of statements, let us now turn to questions. I am using the term ‘question’, in analogy to ‘statement’, to refer to an interrogative sentence like (7-a) (also known as a direct question in the literature), the corresponding sentential complement (7-b) (also known as an embedded or indirect question), or to a formula in a formal language which is meant to formalize an interrogative, as in (7-c).
(7)
a.
Who is the culprit?
b.
who the culprit is
c.
?x. culprit(x)
I am using the term ‘issue’ to refer to the semantic content of a question. So, what roles are there for issues to play in a theory of language and thought? My claim is that these roles are very much parallel to the ones we just identified for propositions.
1.3.1Compositional Semantics
First, just like statements, questions occur in natural language not just as stand-alone sentences, but also as parts of other sentences, including statements. Here are three examples:
(8)
a.
If Smith leaves the country, can we get him extradited?
b.
Alice knows who stole the jewel.
c.
Whether I can go out tonight depends on how much work I get done.
In (8-a), a question is part of a conditional construction which is itself a question. In (8-b), a question is the argument of a knowledge ascription. In (8-c), two questions occur as constituents of a statement that asserts a dependency between them. In each of these cases, the semantics of the embedded question plays a role in determining compositionally the semantics of the entire sentence.
Before moving on to the next topic, let us pause briefly to make two points. First, although we used examples from English, the present point is not restricted to natural languages. Of course, for a formal language, one can freely stipulate what compounds occur, and thus, one can in principle disallow embedded questions. However, when it comes to designing a formal language intended to regiment statements and questions, there is no reason why we should not expect such a language to be able to handle compounds involving questions as constituents, analogous to those in (8). If a given question semantics allows for the construction of formal systems capable of handling embedded questions, that counts as a merit of the approach.
Second, it is worth pausing to discuss the relation between a direct question like ‘Who is the culprit?’ and its indirect counterpart ‘who the culprit is’. As BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. pointed out, not just questions, but sentences in general have nominalized, embeddable counterparts, as illustrated in the table below, whose “point or function is to permit us to embed in certain larger contexts […] a form of the stand-alone sentences” (BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. 1983:26).
Stand-alone
Embeddable
Did Mary come?
J asked P whether Mary came.
Mary came.
J told P that Mary came.
Come!
J ordered Mary to come
Stand-alone and embeddable forms of sentences
The claim that the direct question ‘Who is the culprit?’ and its indirect counterpart ‘who the culprit is’ are at some level associated with the same content is known in the literature as the equivalence thesis.9 It has been explicitly defended as a desideratum for a theory of questions by BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. (1983) and GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen and StokhofStokhof, Martin (1984), and it is a standard assumption in the linguistic literature on questions. Let me mention a couple of observations that support the view. First, the content of a direct question can be appropriately reported by using its indirect counterpart, as in the following dialogue.
(9)
A:
Did Smith steal the jewels?
B:
Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. What did you just ask?
A:
I asked whether Smith stole the jewels.
This is hard to explain if the two versions of the question do not share the same content. Second, and most strikingly, in an embedded context, an indirect question makes exactly the same contribution as an anaphoric particle that refers back to the direct question, as the following examples illustrate.
(10)
A:
Who is the culprit?
B:
Nobody knows [that/who the culprit is].
B:
The police will reveal [that/who the culprit is] in tonight’s press conference.
For further discussion, see BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. (1983) and GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen and StokhofStokhof, Martin (1984).10
1.3.2Logic
Like statements, questions are linked by interesting logical relations. Let me give just one example. Assume as a premise that:
Ax, x is a bachelor iff x is an unmarried man.’
Then there is an obvious sense in which the question Q below is logically determined by the questions Qʹ and Qʹʹ:
Q
Qʹ = ‘Who are the men?’
Qʹʹ = ‘Who is married?’
This relation is semantic in nature: It holds because, on the basis of A, the contents of the relevant questions are bound to be related in a certain way.
Let us refer to the sort of logical relation illustrated by the previous example as a dependency. Dependency is a logical notion of great interest. For instance, the predictive power of a (scientific) theory can be taken to consist in the dependencies that it puts in place. One may say that a theory T is predictive of Q given Q1, …, Qn if on the basis of T, Q is logically determined by Q1, …, Qn (see (Ciardelli 2016b) for further discussion). Moreover, dependency is also the pattern that underlies the notion of supervenience, which plays such a central role in modern analytic philosophy. For instance, to ask if the mental state of an agent supervenes on the physical state of her brain is to ask if the question what the agent’s mental state is is determined, over a relevant space of possibilities, by the question what the agent’s neurological state is.
A theory of questions should provide us with the means to characterize the relation of dependency, as well as other logical relations involving questions, and to build formal systems that allow us to study these relations and regiment reasoning about them. Question semantics is bound to play a crucial role in this enterprise, just like truth-conditional semantics plays a crucial role in studying logical relations among statements.
1.3.3Attitudes
Propositional attitudes are mental states with propositional content. But there are also mental states with a different kind of content. Consider:
wonders
(11)
Alice
is curious about
who stole the jewels.
doesn’t care
What is the object of Alice’s curiosity or indifference? Intuitively, Alice’s curiosity is not directed to a proposition, which represents the world as being in a particular way, but rather to an object that represents multiple alternative ways for the world to be. It seems very plausible that the object of the relevant attitudes is nothing but the content of the complement ‘who stole the jewels’. And this is indeed the view that has been taken by philosophers of mind who have considered this sort of attitudes (FriedmanFriedman, Jane 2013, CarruthersCarruthers, Peter 2018). We may say that wondering, curiosity, and indifference are issue-directed attitudes.
Besides issue-directed attitudes, we also find issue-directed activities, such as those reported by the following sentences.
is investigating
(12)
Alice
who stole the jewels.
discussed with Bob
It seems plausible that, in the situation described by such sentences, the object of the activities of investigating and discussing is nothing but the issue expressed by the complement ‘who stole the jewels’.
Issue-directed attitudes and activities are central to our life as agents engaged in inquiry, who have to entertain multiple competing hypotheses and to actively seek information to adjudicate between them: A detective’s search for clues is oriented by specific issues (how did the murderer get in? what was the murder weapon?) and the beliefs she may eventually reach arise by engaging and deliberating on these issues. Like propositions, issues thus play an important cognitive role: They are objects that we entertain, engage with, investigate, discuss, form opinions about, or suspend judgment on.11
1.3.4Discourse
Finally, questions obviously play a major role in linguistic information exchange. By default, questions are associated with the act of asking. If a speaker utters (13), they are normally taken to be asking who stole the jewels.
(13)
Who stole the jewels?
However, like propositions are involved in other speech acts besides assertion, issues are involved in other speech acts besides asking. I will illustrate this with two examples. The first is from Italian:
(14)
Chissà chi ha rubato i gioielli.
Chissà who stole the jewels.
(15)
I wonder who stole the jewels.
By uttering (14), one does not ask the question who stole the jewels, but merely expresses one’s state of wondering about this question, making the question salient in the conversation, but without asking it. Such an utterance is appropriate in a situation in which the speaker presupposes that the question cannot be settled in the current exchange.12 This sentence could be translated in English as (15). The reason why I offer (14) as an example instead of (15) is that in the case of (14) there is no doubt that it is not an assertion about the speaker’s state, as the sentence is not even declarative and cannot be judged true or false. Just like the sentences in (6) can be used to perform a non-canonical speech act with a statement, so (14) can be used to perform a non-canonical speech act with a question. I will refer to this speech act as wondering aloud.13
As a second example, take:
(16)
Let’s set aside who did it for now. [Let’s focus on how they came in.]
By uttering (16), one aims to effect a change to the context which involves the conversational status of the issue expressed by the question ‘who did it’, removing it as the current question under discussion (using the terminology now standard in formal pragmatics, see RobertsRoberts, Craige (2012)).
Many more examples could be given, but hopefully these suffice to illustrate that the situation for questions is analogous to the one for statements: Questions are by default associated with a certain speech act, asking; but the issue expressed by a question may also serve as the content of different speech acts, such as acts of wondering aloud or context management act that aim to change the question under discussion. We want to use question semantics to provide detailed account of how these speech acts work, in terms of their preconditions and the effects they bring about.
1.3.5Summing Up
We saw that issues, i.e., question contents, have the same theoretical roles to play as propositions: We want to use them internally to compositional semantics to account for the contribution of embedded questions to larger compounds; in logic, to characterize the relation of dependency and other logical relations involving questions; in philosophy of mind, as contents of attitudes like curiosity or indifference; and in pragmatics, to give accounts of speech acts like asking and wondering aloud. This is summarized by the following picture, parallel to the one we gave above for propositions.
Disciplines where question contents play a role
As mentioned in the introduction, I do not pretend that the roles we identified exhaust the range of roles to be played by issues. However, these roles do seem to be especially important; a satisfactory theory of questions should, I submit, provide us with a notion of content that can play these roles.
1.4Questions without Question Semantics?
According to the conceptual picture I presented so far, statements and questions are sentences of different syntactic categories, which are associated with different kinds of semantic contents (propositions vs. issues) and different default speech acts (asserting vs. asking).
As mentioned in the introduction, however, there is an alternative view which has enjoyed some popularity in philosophy. This view goes back to FregeFrege, Gottlob (1918), and has been taken up multiple times in the literature, for instance by SteniusStenius, Erik (1967) and SearleSearle, John R. and VandervekenVanderveken, Daniel (1985). According to it, statements and questions are not distinguished at the semantic level – where they both have propositions as contents – but only at the level of force: Whereas a statement presents a propositional content with an assertive force, a question presents a propositional content with an asking force. Thus, the picture that this sort of account presents is the following.
Distinguishing statement and question at the level of force only
This kind of view recognizes just one type of content – propositions – and views questions as distinguished only at the pragmatic level. What is specific to a question is that it indicates a certain force, namely, asking force.14
1.4.1On the Importance of Distinguishing Questions from their Asking
Building on the discussion in the previous section, I now want to argue that the view I just outlined is not quite right: The asking force is not everything there is to a question; questions play distinctive roles in many contexts where no speech act of asking is involved – in fact, where no speech is involved.
Firstly, as we saw, questions play a role in compositional semantics: They occur embedded within other sentences. When they do, it is not plausible to maintain, in general, that their contribution has to do with asking. In the following examples, for instance, the embedded polar questions are not asked in any reasonable sense.
(17)
a.
I don’t care whether you come into the office.
b.
John knows of most employees whether they came into the office.
The role of an embedded question is not to contribute a certain force, but to contribute a semantic content. Moreover, as we will argue below, this content is not a proposition.
Second, we saw above that questions are linked by interesting logical relations. Such relations are not relations between speech acts – they do not concern speech at all. They pertain to the same realm as the usual relation of entailment investigated in logic. In standard logic, whether an entailment holds is a matter of whether the relevant sentences are semantically related in a certain way. The same holds for the above dependency relation. For instance, who is a bachelor is logically determined by (i) who is a man and (ii) who is married. This is not a fact about discourse; it is a semantic fact. Questions are logically related to each other on the basis of their semantics. A logical system to study the relation of dependency, as well as other logical relations involving questions, should come with a language containing question formulas which are not force-imbued.
Third, as we pointed out, questions are part of our mental life: We entertain them, investigate them, set them aside, suspend judgment on them, and so on. When we investigate whether Smith stole the jewels, what we are investigating is not a speech act; it is an abstract content that we can grasp in thought. It is the sort of content that can be asked, but whose reality is independent of asking – indeed, independent of linguistic interaction altogether. This is parallel to the case of statements: When we believe that Smith stole the jewels, what we believe is not an act of assertion, but a certain content – the sort of content that can be asserted. Once more, we find that the identification of questions with asking acts is too narrow: Questions are primarily associated with certain contents, which play a specific role not just in discourse, but also in thought.
Lastly, questions are indeed tied to asking by default, like statements are by default tied to asserting. However, we saw in the previous section that issues, like propositions, are not in fact tied to a single speech act. For instance, consider someone uttering one of the following:
(18)
a.
Did Smith steal the jewels?
b.
I wonder whether Smith stole the jewels.
c.
Let’s set aside whether Smith stole the jewels.
The same issue is at stake in each case, but the speech act is different.15 Again, identifying a question with its asking is too narrow: There can be many speech acts sharing the same question content but differing in force, just like there are many speech acts sharing the same propositional content but differing in force. We need a force-neutral content for the question that can be recognized as being common to sentences with different force. Here is BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. (1990:4–5) making this point:
“I understand that there are many speech acts that share a propositional content but differ in illocutionary force; good. And there are many other speech acts that share an interrogative content but differ in illocutionary force, and others that share an imperative content but differ in illocutionary force. So the program [of speech act theory] is a healthy one; the only – but serious – mistake is to suppose that you can identify the content of all speech acts with propositional content, that is, with the content of declarative speech acts or assertions. […]
[Avoiding] the Declarative Fallacy requires the recognition that interrogatives and imperatives are not just marked differently from declaratives, but possess fundamentally different underlying content structures.”
On the view BelnapBelnap, Nuel D., Jr. and I are advocating, one and the same propositional content p can feed into several force operators, and so can one and the same issue .
Propositions and issues with different forces
We can sum up the discussion as follows. Question contents – issues – bear exactly the same relation to asking that propositions bear to asserting. They are the things we ask – they provide the contents of asking acts. But they have a rich life independent of asking: They play a role in compositional semantics, they bear interesting logical relations to each other, they are the objects of a variety of mental attitudes and intensional activities, and they act as contents of other speech acts besides asking, with their own specific discourse effects. The reasons why it is crucial to distinguish propositions from their assertion are exactly the same reasons why it is crucial to distinguish issues from their asking.
1.4.2Against Propositions as Contents of Polar Questions
Besides linking questions too tightly to asking, thereby failing to appreciate their multiple roles, another problematic aspect of the view presented above is that it assigns to questions the same sort of content that statements have: a proposition.
As FregeFrege, Gottlob himself realized, this strategy is not viable in general. It was intended for polar questions like (19-a), but it is a non-starter for other classes of questions, including alternative questions like (19-b) (on its most salient reading, with falling intonation on the last disjunct) and wh-questions like (19-c). To ask one of these questions is not to inquire into the truth or falsity of a proposition, but rather to inquire into which among several propositions is true.
(19)
a.
Is Max Austrian?
b.
Is Max Austrian, German, or Swiss?
c.
Where is Max from?
This, by itself, does not mean that the view is wrong insofar as polar questions are concerned: Perhaps polar questions do indeed have propositional contents, while non-polar questions have other types of contents. However, once it is granted that the content of an asking act is at least sometimes not a proposition, it becomes much less appealing to hold that it is sometimes a proposition; it seems more natural to assume that the content of a question is always a semantic object of the same kind, just like the content of a statement is generally a proposition, regardless of the specific form of the statement.
Moreover, if polar questions and non-polar questions really have different types of content, we would expect this to be reflected in their ability to embed in various syntactic environments. Polar questions should be acceptable in syntactic environments which expect a proposition, in analogy to declarative clauses and in contrast to alternative and wh-questions. But this is not what we find: Polar questions pattern with other kinds of questions, and differently from declaratives, in their embedding behavior, as the following examples show.
that Max is Austrian.
(20)
Alice
*whether Max is Austrian.
believes/hopes
*whether Max is Austrian or German.
*where Max is from.
that Max is Austrian.
(21)
It is
*whether Max is Austrian.
possible/true
*whether Max is Austrian or German.
*where Max is from.
*that Max is Austrian.
(22)
Alice wonders/
whether Max is Austrian.
is investigating
whether Max is Austrian or German.
where Max is from.
*that he is Austrian.
(23)
Whether Max can
whether he is Austrian.
apply depends on
whether he is Austrian or German.
What his nationality is.
The most natural explanation for these patterns is that linguistic environments have selectional restrictions: Some expect a proposition as their argument, other expect an issue. If this is right, then we should conclude from the above observations that the contents of polar questions are issues, not propositions. Moreover, as was argued explicitly by KarttunenKarttunen, Lauri (1978), the fact that different kinds of questions embed in the same linguistic environments speaks in favor of a uniform semantic type for question contents.16
Finally, one can argue against the view that the content of a polar interrogative is a proposition on the basis of the compositional contribution of such interrogatives. The following argument was, to my knowledge, first given by GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen and StokhofStokhof, Martin (1997). Consider the following sentences:
(24)
a.
Alice knows that Smith stole the jewels.
b.
Alice knows whether Smith stole the jewels.
These sentences express different propositions: For instance, suppose Smith is innocent and Alice knows this; then (24-b) is true while (24-a) is not. Since these sentences only differ in the complement of know, the principle of compositionality requires the two complements ‘that Smith stole the jewels’ and ‘whether Smith stole the jewels’ to differ in semantic value. It is standardly assumed that the content of ‘that Smith stole the jewels’ is the proposition that Smith stole the jewels; and this seems right, since (24-a) ascribes to Alice knowledge of this proposition. It follows, then, that the content of the polar question ‘whether Smith stole the jewels’ is not the proposition that Smith stole the jewels.
In fact, this content must not be a proposition at all, since (24-b) does not describe Alice as knowing a specific proposition, but as knowing either one of two propositions – either that Smith stole the jewels, or that Smith didn’t steal the jewels – whichever of these happens to be true.17
Could one grant that the content of the indirect polar question ‘whether Smith stole the jewels’ is not a proposition, yet insist that the content of the corresponding direct question, ‘Did Smith steal the jewels?’, is a proposition?
This move amounts to denying the equivalence thesis. This seems undesirable since, as we saw in section 1.3, there is much to be said in favor of the equivalence thesis. Even setting this worry aside, we can reproduce the problem without relying on the indirect form of a question, and by using propositional anaphora instead. First, note that the anaphoric particle ‘that’ can be used to refer to salient discourse referents, including the content of a previous utterance. Consider the following dialogue:
(25)
A:
Smith stole the jewels.
B:
I wish Charlie knew that.
What B is saying is that he wishes Charlie knew that Smith stole the jewels. This reading comes about because the word ‘that’ in the second sentence can refer to the proposition expressed by the previous sentence, which is available as a salient discourse antecedent after A’s assertion. Now consider:
(26)
A:
Did Smith steal the jewels?
B:
I wish I knew that.
If A’s question in (26) expresses the same content as A’s statement in (25), we would expect the anaphora ‘that’ to pick out the same content. In that case, B’s sentence would mean that he wishes he knew that Smith stole the jewels. That is not what B is saying. What B is saying is that he wishes he knew whether Smith stole the jewels. In order to explain how this reading comes about, we have to suppose that the word ‘that’ can pick out the same semantic object that would be overtly expressed by ‘whether Smith stole the jewels’. So, this object must be available as a discourse referent after A asked her question. Why is it available? The natural explanation seems to be that this object is precisely the content expressed by A, in accordance with the equivalence thesis.18
1.5Inquisitive Semantics
In this section, I briefly outline my preferred approach to questions, namely, inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli, GroenendijkGroenendijk, Jeroen & RoelofsenRoelofsen, Floris 2018), and discuss how the notion of question content that it yields can be used to play the four roles we identified above.
1.5.2Illustration
To illustrate these ideas, consider a scenario involving a two-digit secret code, where each digit is either 1, 2, or 3. So there are in total 9 possibilities for the code. Each of these possibilities is a way things might be, and thus a possible world in a model that captures this scenario. So, the universe W of our model is represented by the following picture:
Example universe W
