Questioning Questions
The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers
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How are you? What is that? Who has it now? When should it be ready? Where could it be? Life is full of questions, but we tend to treat them as things to get past on the way to answers. In education, conversation, and – often – philosophy, our objective is to get to a good answer. Indeed, in societies like ours, there is a sense that a question is a means to the end of an answer. Q, a new book by philosopher Lani Watson, carefully argues against this “answer-centred” culture.
A philosopher interested in curiosity and questions, Watson runs the website ‘Philosophy of Questions’, and in this book makes the case for the unrealised power of questions. Think back to your education – it’s likely that, if you did well, you were praised for knowing the answer rather than for asking good questions. I remember being told, on a few occasions, that I’d asked a good question, but don’t recall a single class that taught that me how to do so systematically. For Watson, this focus on answers seems strange, once the central role of questions – in life, law, medicine, politics, journalism – is taken seriously. Q aims to correct this bias towards answers, and help us become “empowered questioners”, inquirers able to put questions to work.
It’s a virtue of philosophy to help us appreciate the complexity of a familiar aspect of life. Questioning is ubiquitous and unavoidable, after all, but those facts can conceal its complexity. Worse, we risk failing to appreciate the many ways we can skilfully use questions and cultivate better questioning practices. What would it mean to become better at asking questions?
A world of answers
Contemporary culture disproportionately rewards answers. Education rewards correct answers, tests, and assessments. In public life, we find confidence and certainty in someone who ‘has all the answers’, or who acts as if they do. The Internet is an infrastructure for answers and for information acquisition. ChatGPT asks ‘What’s on your mind today?’ A world of readily available answers has its virtues, but having answers isn’t the whole of epistemic life.
Watson takes us through the many things one can do with questions in everyday life. We initiate inquiry – How did it catch fire? We identify what we don’t understand – Who made the decision? We try to direct attention – Why is that light flashing? We expose assumptions and try to discover more about ourselves, others, and the world, something Q often demonstrates with examples from Watson’s own life. Often, our questions are mundane or asked for fun or distraction. In more serious cases, a question – asked clearly and persistently - can save a life. Much of our professional life, too, depends on selecting and asking questions – not just in Prime Minister’s Questions and the courtroom or hospital, but really anywhere we deal with other people.
Watson wants us to become more “question-oriented”, cultivating the sensibilities and skills required for good questioning and becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. To ask is to admit ignorance, need and vulnerability and often requires courage, albeit of an unshowy sort that’s often missed. Is this the right tram for the town centre? Can you call me an ambulance right now? Would you sit with me at the dinner? For answer-centrists, the point is to move from ignorance to certitude, as fast and as confidently as possible. Watson, by contrast, urges us to see questions and questioning as an epistemic achievement, as a mark of a curious and open mind rather than an ignorant or empty one.
Questions are things we do
Philosophers, like young children, love questions. Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha were question-askers, though the latter two also gave us answers. Strangely, then, philosophers have said little about what a question is. Watson, early in the book, describes a typical morning and asks us to count the questions. I counted three, then, after reading her discussion, upped it to about sixteen. Why the disparity? Well, if there is no agreed definition of what a question is, then we can’t reasonably count questions. For instance, questions can’t be defined as spoken or written statements followed by a question mark – not all languages use them, after all (Chinese uses the spoken particle ma, for instance). Other suggested marks, like rising intonation at the end of a sentence, concern the form of questions.
Watson argues that a question is an “information-seeking act”. This emphasises the active, practical nature of questioning and includes the full range of things we do – as babies, children, and adults – to try and get information. Gestures and quizzical looks are questions, as well as utterances – Watson has the nice example of her wife making a ‘T’ with her hands, to ask ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Indeed, developmental psychology emphasises the importance of information-seeking acts, like staring and grasping and pointing and looking. In time, these acts become more sophisticated – we learn to ask questions of somebody, and the right somebody and come to understand timing and context. Here, the social and interpersonal dimensions of questioning become clear, as does the relation of epistemology and ethics.
In chapter two, about the origins of questions, Watson tells a good story about the evolutionary and social history of information-seeking. An early “proto-questioning” spotlights the humble worm, C. elegans, whose survival, like ours, depends on efficient information-gathering – in a nice remark, two researchers are quoted as lamenting that in the natural world, “information is almost always missing”. A second phase of “private questioning” sees individuals acting in information-seeking ways, charmingly illustrated by the ‘Penguin parade’ at Edinburgh Zoo, supplemented, in some species, by “social questioning”. Here, we seek information from others, by asking them to tell us things, which clearly is quicker than observing them in the hopes they’ll reveal what we are keen to know. Social questioning, explains Watson, requires a complex set of cognitive and communicative abilities. Trust, credibility, and the norms and expectations that go with information all come into view, a prelude to the fourth stage of “spoken questions”. (An intriguing book, by musicologist Joseph Jordania, argues that ‘question-answer’ speech has its roots in the call-and-response structure of singing).
The evolutionary and neurological bases of questioning are handled clearly and thoughtfully by Watson, who keeps us focused on everyday uses and abuses of questioning. Questions, as she emphasises, could do a lot of good in the world – more than we realise and less than we will exploit if we remain stubbornly “answer-centric”.
Asking well
Questions are asked by somebody, of somebody, for some reason, at some time, and in some manner. Do you have a loyalty card? Could you explain that again? Can you give me something for the pain? These kinds of questions are parts of our form of life – of a world of apps and puzzling change and medical care. As the world changes, our questions should change, too. Q is at its best on the power of questions – on who gets to ask questions, who is expected to answer, on institutionalised questioning and on questioning as something that could empower or constrain.
Once questioning is understood as something we do, however, another question arises: can we do it badly? Obviously, yes. There are, as Watson emphasises, worse kinds of questions. Closed questions, for instance, artificially limit the range of possible answers. There are also loaded questions, cruel questions, and others that Watson classifies in her other work. Bad questions could be stupid or manipulative, hostile or prurient or obsessive and performative.
Watson offers good advice on how to be a good questioner, in Q as well as her website, whose Questioning Strengths Assessment is useful and fun. Quality not quantity matters, as does sensitivity, tact, careful and thoughtful articulation and due respect for the attention of those at the receiving end of our questions. As a first-year university student, I was firmly told “Don’t request information you can source yourself!”, by a lecturer irked at my lazy informational practice. Moreover, we can also train our informational appetites – what we ask about, and why, is also assessable. Our appetites can be appropriate or inappropriate, in many ways. Gossip and voyeurism, nosiness about the doings of our neighbours and a prowling hunger for the secrets of others are all bad kinds of appetite. Illness narratives are full of intrusive, insensitive, and often cruel questions.
Curiosity is, then, involves kind of caring about information, but that need not amount to care for the person from whom we’re seeking it. The avid gossiper is, in a sense, extremely caring: they care enormously about finding out what happened. The trouble lies in what they care about and why and what they plan to do with the information they get.
A good questioner, then, has trained informational habits and also a set of well-cultivated informational appetites. Curiosity and care are, for Watson, closely related. Our questions can reflect care for “getting it right”, care for others, and care for the state of the world. Questions, caring and virtue form a nice triad. Watson indicates a range of virtues of good questioning – humility and patience, sensitivity and courage – though reminds us that life is too complex for any algorithm for proper questioning. She offers an Aristotelian slogan – good questioning is to ask the right question, of the right person, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons. In the hurly-burly of life, this guide will need to be supplemented by conventions, social understanding, and a sense of what the situation requires. The virtuous questioner may answer or redirect enquiry or choose to accept uncertainty by not asking at all. Knowing how to question includes knowing when to stop questioning.
Watson’s account of cultivated questioning doesn’t boil down to an account of rules to follow. Instead, she offers reminders, experiences, and insights about questions – a far more sensible approach, and more congruent with her emphasis on their “breadth and depth”. Moreover, there are good lessons from the science – our recall of information, for instance, is better if it’s given as the answer to a question we asked. It is useful to distinguish “hypothesis-scanning” and “constraint-seeking” questions – guessing among a range of possible answers, versus trying to reduce the range of possible answers (think of the popular board game Guess Who?).
Watson makes the transition from an “answer-centred” world to a more “question-centred” alternative an attractive prospect. There are, though, formidable obstacles, both to that transition and, perhaps, to our very commitment to the very ideal of information-seeking.
What if we don’t care?
Q plays on a contrast between “answer-oriented” and “question-oriented” cultures. Each is a kind of epistemic orientation – a way that we relate to knowledge, truth, and enquiry. Each of these orientations, obviously, care about those values, even if they disagree about how to relate to them. What, though, about cases where people simply don’t care very much whether they know? Some of us, some of the time, just don’t care – due to fatigue, overexposure, or whatever. But what if we internalise a habitual indifference to knowing and finding out? A habit of shoulder-shrugging “epistemic insouciance”, to borrow the helpful term from Quassim Cassam, to refer to a problematic lack of care or concern about ideas, evidence, and truth.
In the bad old days, philosophers worried about relativism, virulent scepticism and other foes. Those were, in part, arguments about vivid issues concerning the attainability and status of knowledge, certainty, and truth. Epistemic insouciance, though, seems different and worse. It’s not caring about finding out. It’s shoulder-shrugging when asked a momentous question. It’s the dulling habit of automatically replying to any invitation to thought with a monotonous “Whatever”. Sometimes, epistemic insouciance is passive – one unblinkingly shrugs one’s way through a field full of questions. In other cases, though, it can take the form of aggressive disinterest. “Don’t ask questions!” can turn into the command one gives to the inquisitively-inclined, a shushing of others' informational enthusiasm.
Who cares? Does it really matter? Whatever.
Thomas Nagel, thirty years ago, lamented the “extreme intellectual laziness” of contemporary culture. Watson is more charitable, and her discussion makes clear how complicated – and therefore demanding – good questioning can be. We are busy and harried people, our efforts to navigate the online world a constant struggle to cope with “clickbait curiosity” and hyperbole. Good questioning is hard. Life is full of apps, people and organisations offering us easy and comfortable answers. It is therefore important to appreciate the lure of insouciance – a radical pathology that bears more peril than demanding answers too quickly.
If insouciance is the problem, it’s tempting to see the solution as an enthusiastic encouragement of questioning. The problem is that one could ask lots of questions without caring about the truth. Some conspiracy theorists, for instance, encourage bad-faith questioning and are highly skilled at generating questions; they may accumulate huge quantities of information about structural engineering, aircraft design, ballistics, or whatever their favoured theory concerns. What aren’t they telling you? Could everything you’ve been told be wrong? Why doesn’t the media want you to know this?
Questions, more generally, can insinuate and act as a performative scepticism. Watson reminds us that it’s naïve to think someone is “just asking questions”, since questions insinuate, implant ideas, and can be ways of dogwhistling – a kind of communication whose real meaning is only detectable by certain people. Questions, then, are not evidence of epistemic seriousness. Watson’s deeper lesson, then, is that what is needed is not the cultivation of questioning per se, but the cultivation of good epistemic orientation through questioning.
Q helps to make questions philosophically conspicuous, revealing – with skill, humour, and wisdom. Watson compellingly shows us that questioning isn’t just something we do to get answers. Our questions express what we care about, direct our attention, and shape our relations with other people. In some cases, it can save lives, something she illustrates with a moving personal story. Good questioning therefore requires more than techniques for extracting information. As so often in ethics, we need to learn how to care well: about truth and understanding, about other people, and about which things are worth knowing. Asking well, listening patiently, tolerating uncertainty, accepting correction and sometimes leaving things unknown are all parts of a good, shared life.
Our “answer-centred” world is full of clickbait, distraction, AI slop, hyperbole, misinformation, and polarisation. Big tech companies have powerful incentives to determine which pieces of information reach us, designing products and platforms around their own interests rather than simply around what we might want or need. This is one epistemic consequence of the process that tech commentator Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”. In the end, perhaps the deeper problem is not that we care too much about answers and too little about questions, but that we risk ceasing to care enough about either. We need to sustain a world in which enough people still care enough about truth and understanding to regard good questions and good answers as worth the effort.
Otherwise, no matter how well we ask the questions, the only reply might be – Whatever.
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