Lani Watson on the Power of Questions

Defining what a question is

0:00This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. Is this a question? Has Lanny Watson written a book about questions? If so, what does she think a question is? And why does she think questions are important? So many questions. Lanny Watson, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hi, Nigel. The topic we're going to focus on is the power of questions. Seems fairly obvious

0:34what a question is. It's something with a question mark at the end. Is that right? This is one of my favourite questions to talk about in philosophy. It's one of the first questions I started thinking about when I got to this topic. I don't think a question is defined by having a question mark at the end. I think we've got lots of questions that don't have question marks at the end. Could you give an example? Yeah. One good example, I think, is the one you just asked, right? We don't have question marks at the end of verbal questions, but we ask verbal questions all

1:06the time, right? So a question is not only something that's an artefact of written language. But surely I signalled it with my intonation. That's another way that people often think a question is signalled by intonation. But in fact, we don't signal questions that well by intonation. And most importantly, all around the world, signalling by intonation changes completely. So even if we were to assign 10 different types of intonation to forms of questions, you find another language, another culture where there's a different type of intonation or signalling or none. If I ask you, how are you? It's got an implied

1:41question mark. It's got a kind of intonation. But actually, I don't really want to know the answer. It's doing something else. How are you is actually a very interesting case. Well, I've got a survey I've been running online for over about 15 years now. What is a question? Listeners can take it if they like on my website. One of the cases in that is essentially a how are you? What I found is that the participants in that survey are almost 50-50 divided on whether or not that actually counts as a question. And it turns on this question of whether or not it's sincere, whether or not you

2:16really do want to know how I am, or whether it's a kind of polite interaction or some kind of rhetorical device. So true questions aren't simply identified by having a question mark. They're not simply identified by intonation. What then is the mark of a true question? For me, and the how are you example does a really good job of illustrating this, a true question stands or falls on not its form, not its intonation, but its function. When you think

2:50about the function of a true question, for me, that's information seeking. So I define a question as an information seeking act. Does it have to be linguistic? No. On the survey on the website, a very high percentage of the participants actually think that looking both ways before crossing the road counts as a question. A similarly high percentage think that looking a word up in the dictionary counts as a question. Obviously both of those are non-verbal acts, but they're both information seeking acts. And I think that's why people judge them to be a

3:23question because they're not looking at form, they're looking at function. That's a relief because I quite often ask questions by raising an eyebrow. Yeah, I mean, exactly. That's a really good example of a completely non-verbal, there's no structure, there's no syntax, there's nothing written down. But we all interpret that as some kind of question or questioning mode. Yeah. And the question is usually, really? Yeah, exactly. And then you're interestingly venturing into this territory of rhetorical questions. And I think of that as grey area territory, because sometimes a rhetorical question may

3:55well be a sort of attempt to elicit information. But the kind of official definition is that it's specifically a question asked, not with the goal of eliciting information. Can I just ask you why you think it's a grey area? Because it seems to me clearly, because it's a rhetorical question, almost by definition, it isn't seeking information. Yeah, that's a fair challenge. I actually don't think it's a grey area whether a rhetorical question is a question or not. I think it is not. But I think it's often a grey area what we count as a rhetorical question. So the how are you example is a good one.

Why philosophers ask questions

4:29In philosophy, the most famous questioner by far is Socrates. Socratic questioning is a particular kind of interrogation of some unfortunate person he bumps into in the marketplace, who thinks they know what they're talking about. But when asked to give a definition, prove almost entirely incapable of doing that. Yeah, Socrates is kind of my main man. I think he's a fantastic role model for questioning and a questioning mindset in the 21st century. It's funny that you have to go two and a half thousand

5:00years back in philosophical history to really find what I think of as a truly excellent exemplar of this kind of questioning. Do you have to be sincere in seeking the information or just have the form of somebody seeking information as it were? Again, I think we're into grey areas there. But for me, certainly, sincerity is not a requirement. It's kind of like using a tool. And we know that if you're using a hammer to do something other than say hammering in a nail, there's a kind of sense in which you're not using it for its original intended

5:33purpose. Maybe you're displaying it as a piece of art, say, but it's still a hammer because it has that function of hammering in nails. Similarly, a question that's asked kind of insincerely used in a way that's entirely not information seeking. It doesn't change the fact that it's a question as long as there's a kind of information seeking function attached to the act. You spoke about Socrates as if he's somebody to approve of. What's so great about asking questions? I ask a lot of questions on this podcast. Does that mean I'm doing something good?

6:03This is a good question. And it kind of comes to the heart of the research that I've been doing. I think of questions as a form of power. And it's a form of power that we've underappreciated in modern life and that we can all learn to harness for positive change. So I think that we can become more empowered in all sorts of arenas of daily life by being able to use questions for the kind of range of purposes that we need them for and that we kind of don't always pay enough attention to. So, yeah, I think you're doing something good. You're not always doing something good because you

6:37can misuse and abuse power. But if we understand what the power is and how we can use it for positive change in our lives, I think that we can really make a difference. It strikes me that different people have different learning styles. I'm the kind of person who I like asking questions and it's that interaction that works for me. But some people seem to prefer just to sit there and let it wash over them and they absorb stuff in a different way. So certainly one thing maybe we should make clear is I don't think of questions as needing to be

7:07spoken or communicative at all. So in my sort of taxonomy, I have private questions and social questions. So someone who's learning in that way is almost certainly right because they're learning, asking a huge number of private questions in their own head and taking on information that way. The other thing I've noticed is that questions, if you get in that mode, it's quite a good way of harnessing unconscious mental power because I don't rehearse questions. I'm just intrigued to know whether you think that a lot of the things that we do in questioning are unconscious or whether

7:41you've got this view that it's a kind of rational process where you kind of formulate it and then ask it. Certainly not that. And I think actually one of the things I think that philosophers get a lot of short shrift for is this idea that in a Q&A, philosophy Q&A, an academic conference, the questioner stands up and says, I've got a question and then talks for quite a long time before they actually pose a question. And it can be very frustrating and it takes up time. And there is a very obvious sense in which that is a use of the power that you have as a questioner to stand up and direct the

8:13conversation. But I do think sometimes the criticism that people take a long time to get to that question is unfair because so much of the question is coming out in that context setting and is coming out in the thinking that's going on out loud in the room. And if you just kind of cut to the whatever interrogative at the end, you wouldn't actually necessarily understand the question. Certainly people misuse that forum to ask questions in all sorts of contexts. But I do think there's quite a lot of requirement for stage setting in order to ask a great question.

8:47You talked about philosophy conferences. Why do philosophers ask so many questions? I mean, some disciplines, they just don't do that. They tend to applaud and say, how interesting, that's a bit like my research. They don't really probe or try to find fault with what's just been presented in the same way that philosophers do. Yeah, I suppose that's one of the reasons why I'm a philosopher and I love philosophy, because it is a space where asking lots of questions like

9:19philosophy conferences have these very long Q&A periods. And that is because there's a true valuing of that process of asking questions and being asked questions. Part of the reason that philosophers are so comfortable doing that is because we've got this long, long thousands of years of history of asking questions that don't come up with answers, right? And we're happy and comfortable and content. And I hope we continue to be asking the same questions, how should we live? How can I know something? What's a good life? And so on, that don't actually come with straightforward,

9:54clear answers for thousands of years. And we still ask them because we're attempting to understand the nature of reality. And so if you're really comfortable sitting in a space where your whole discipline and your job and your profession is about trying to ask and answer questions that haven't been answered in any comprehensive way for thousands of years, then yeah, a 15 minute Q&A is fine. But I think there's also a vision of philosophy which is contested now, that part of what you're doing is testing ideas to destruction, subjecting a view to the harshest kind of criticism to see how

10:30good that idea is, whether it's robust or not. And that can seem extremely rude and aggressive to outsiders and sometimes to insiders. Yeah, it would be strange to suggest that that doesn't go too far sometimes. But a lot of that is about mode, right? And about intent. If you're in a situation where it's highly critical, hostile, aggressive, I don't think that's a welcome way. Because part of the point is, asking a good question, it's not just about what you're asking, or when or who, but it's also about how you ask. And if we're really seeking truth, I mean, this is one of the reasons Socrates

11:04gets into a bit of trouble, right? Because at the end of the day, if he's truly seeking truth, he wouldn't have necessarily tried to rile his conversation partners quite so much. In lots of the dialogues, he certainly is seeking truth. But you can see he sometimes tips over the edge, and potentially is actually trying to do something else, also important and powerful with his questions. And maybe sometimes we're tipping over into that. I think it's important, obviously, to think about all the different power dynamics that are in play when you're really coming at

11:34someone to destroy their idea. Post-Socrates, lots of philosophers tell you how it is. They don't ask lots of questions. They don't have dialogues with people they meet in the street. They write tracts, very complex metaphysical constructions with a huge architectonic in some cases. They're not visibly having an interaction with somebody else. They're just in a monologue, as it were. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that's part of the reason why I do go right back to

12:07Socrates for inspiration when it comes to philosophical practice. Because I've certainly read a lot of philosophical texts where I'm looking for the question marks, literally, in order as a sort of proxy for finding where the questions are. And it's surprisingly hard to find them. And you can go through pages and pages and pages of philosophy without finding question marks. And that's obviously an indication that what that person is doing is trying to produce a long systematic answer.

12:39And these are big, big questions. So long systematic answers aren't necessarily a problem. But I do think there's a risk of philosophy moving towards what I would call an answer-oriented model and failing to remember that actually, we do need to go back to the questions time and time again, in order to make sure that what we're answering is something worth answering in the first place.

Rushing toward answers too quickly

13:04Sceptically, I might say, questions are all right, but I want to know the answers. That's what I'm in this game for. What's wrong with that? So that's a very provocative and interesting way of framing that kind of challenge. I'm not concerned about answers in and of themselves, but I am concerned about pursuing answers without due regard for the questions. And I think we are doing that in all sorts of arenas of life just now, at a social level, also at an individual level. The omnipresence of answers in our technological world, in our very information heavy world, is leading us

13:42towards rushing towards answers without really considering the questions. And that's ending up with, in my view, the development and deployment and use of all sorts of solutions, often technological solutions, that have been developed without due regard for the questions. For example, I mean, one of my favourite questions at the moment is, what is ChatGPT an answer to? If it is a solution, if it is an answer, what was the question? There's a million questions that ChatGPT in fact answers, but in the development of that technology,

14:16what was the actual problem? What was the actual question? I'm not sure. Children are often questioners. That's their mode of discovery. And then we grow out of that and start to respect truth by authority or find out for ourselves we feel more independent as learners. We don't have to keep asking other people. Are you suggesting we should be more childlike? Yeah, actually. I think one of the interesting things about this research, certainly one of the things that's drawn me into it initially, was the discovery that when children enter school,

14:51their questioning typically starts to decline pretty quickly. And it more or less drops off a cliff by the time they're getting into secondary education. And certainly, a lot of people who teach will have experienced the horrific situation of being confronted with a class of students and asking if they have any questions, and there's just none. Questioning falls off a cliff like that in education, I think, for a lot of different reasons. But it's absolutely without question that before we get there, we've spent four or five years developing our questioning, our ability to question and the ways

15:25we question in all these fascinating, extremely powerful ways, driven by our brains, what our brains want us to do. And our brains are still doing that. The neurochemistry that we have when we're three, four, five is still active in our brains right now as adults. It still wants us to explore the world. It still wants us to ask questions. It rewards us when we do with dopamine. So I think absolutely we should be embracing that natural neurochemical impulse to explore and discover and resist the answer

15:57orientation that makes us stop. One last question. What's the best question anyone's ever asked you? That one, of course, Nigel.

16:08Lani Watson, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me, Nigel.

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