5. "The reason they can't learn is because they are the dumb class. No other reason. Is adding difficult?

No. It is the dumb class which is difficult. Are the teachers a dumb class? Well, we are supposed to teach kids to 'read, write, cipher, and sing,' according to an old phrase. Can we do it? Mostly not. Is it difficult? Not at all. We can't do it because we are a dumb class, which by definition can't do it, whatever it is." James Herndon, How to Survive in Your Native Land. New York: Bantam, 1972, p. 95. ' 6. A. Penczek, "Introductory Logic: First Day," Teaching Philosophy 19, 1996,
pp. 121-5. 7. Shulman, op. cit., p. 61.

el-5" 7 "How Many Angels can Dance on the Head of a Pin?": The Many Kinds of Questions in Philosophy
DONA WARREN

Don S. Levi, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1295

University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

Educational and Philosophical Conversations about Questions

There are two broad contexts of discourse about questions, each with its own distinctive literature. On the one hand, there is an educational conversation , which trades in issues that bear immediate pedagogical application but which may not spark distinctively Thilosophical interest. There are a number of valuable articles in this vein, 'delifinniftittch concerns as whether or not learning is facilitated if instructors devote a portion of the class period to asking questions of the students, what kinds of classroom questions best serve general or specific educational ends, and what kinds of questions should be posed on student evaluation mechanisms.' On the other hand, there is a philosophical conversation which trades in issues about quest-this that have intrinsrc pluratip filearvalue but which may not Ice immediately applicable to pedagogy. Distinctively philosophical isquestionsare Probably less familiar than they ought to be because the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic, two branches of philosophy which pay particular attention to sentences of various sorts, have been primarily concerned with declarative sentences at the expense of interrogatives. There is, nonetheless, a rich and well-developed literature devoted to topics such as how questions should be analyzed, how the meaning of a question is constituted, the semantic relationships which obtain between a question and its answer and between a question and its presuppositions, thg logic of questions including ways in which a question may imply another question and whether or not all questions may be reduced to a set of "yes or no" questions, the effectiveness of using
0 Teaching Philosophy, 1998, All rights reserved. 0145-5788/98/2103-0257

THE MANY KINDS OF QUESTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY 2J9

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the question and answer pattern as a model of argument and information-seeking, and ways in which questions may be categorized.2 I believe that there is potential for significant overlap between the educational and pliilosoPhiCalaiinVersations about questions, that this overlai, is a field ripe for harvest by philosophers concerned with educational issues, and that by harvesting this field we may begin I third conversation about questions, a conversation which brings ph116-sophical insights and educational practice to bear upon each other ft and which consequently reflects the intersection of interests whiCh . \. is characteristic of philosophically-minded educators. There are three ways in which this conversation may proceed. First, we may import ;kr,' some philosophical thinking about questions into the educational arena te '4':' . e' and tease out its pedagogical significance. 3 Second, we may examine the educational literature on questioning or the educationalil practice of questioning with a philosophical eye.' Third, we may +WS. adopt a perspective on questioning which is of simultaneous philosophical and educational interest s In this paper, I hope to take he ' P third tack in examininthow the introduction of some verkbaila philosophical issues about questions into the philosophy classroom may promote what I call "student philosophical readiness" and foster other , ;L i .. important pedagogical_ ends. :LuW. \ amount of effort specifically directed toward making students ready fOr philosophy can. only_smooth. their entrance into the. subject. ConSequeitilY, an ideal approach toward cultivating student philosophical ,1 readiness would lend itself both to independent discussion and.tard incorporation throughout the course. Becaus .e many_ obstaCles whiciceb..1;( 'students initially face stem from the set of attitudes and assumptionacmeret aliontiquextitinsr that they bring to their first course in philosophy, a , .1_ disCiission of questions may serve such a function. Once we recog-cti-vt: nirdiat Tie-strolls form a philosophical topic in their own-iiiht, numipefirrXeMit class time examining and discussing-attidentitssuiiip-`,kpa fiOns about questions in much ... the same_way that we examine and est discuss student -ailumptionS 'about other philosophical issues the existence of God), thereby increasing studenireadineSS tor phirOsophy even as we &some important philosophy in the classroom.. One common and_siecific assumption about questions which significintliffnliares students' ability to understand and do philosophy' is the assumption_ that certain questions are sinful. "How is the exist! once of an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God compatible with the existence of evil and suffering in the world?" is a familiar example of a question, which meets resistance on account of its presumed immorality, but I have found that this assumption can even impede discussion of such questions as "Does the order exhibited in the universe prove the existence of God?" among those students who believe that all religious concerns should be matters of faith and not reason. Because the unwilling_ness to ask these questions is usually accompitniecrliTrather strong opinions regarding what the ans_w_ers 1d.ironic) asare, Inc this relistance..as..cmlying-the _genera 01_ sumption that certain questions should be answered but notaskedT . interestingly, another assumption about questiOKS whiali interfere" with philosophical readiness is the exact opposite of the first: the assumption that certain questions should be asked but not answer:7a. This "I love a mystery" mentality. enTiThrages. students to ponder:11;4" questions like "Is the mind the same thing as the brain?" and would therebyTherii. to. -nTake these students particularly amenable to philosophical reflection. Indeed, I find that students who entertain this assumption- iibiiiit questions like to think of themselves as "doing philosophy" whereas students who believe in the sinfulness of certain questions often see themselves as standing righteously outside the subject, in a presumably more holy space. Unfortunately, after a few hours, if not minutes, of serious thought, students in the grip of this ieeorid:issninptiOn about questions will opt out of the philosophical game by asserting that the chief value of such questions lies in the mysteries to which, they point; any serious attempt to answer them threatens to strip these questions of their interest and importance.

Philosophical Readiness and Student Assumptions about Questions

Instructors of introductory philosophy classes face unique challenges. Unlike students in introductory courses in such disciplines as history and mathematics, many students in introductory philosophy classes have taken no previous courses in the subject, have had no other formal contact with the discipline, and consequently entertain vague, misguided, or even adversely prejudicial ideas about the subject. As a result, some of these students have difficulty coming to terms with the subject matter and methodology of philosophy. Other students may be actively resistant. In either case, such s tudents-suffer from a lack of philosophical readiness and with the start of each new term 'philosophy instructors must help these students to successfully engage the discipline.? To a certain extent, of course, this engagement can and must come about as a natural by-product of the normal, day-to-day workings of the class. Even without any special attention devoted to making students ready for philosophy, and perhaps even without the recognition Oat 1 students aren't ready the day they walk in, all but the most rcitrant students eventually catch on to how (if not why) the game of p i osophy is played. This much being granted, however, a certain

dt24 Of course students who intentionally exit the project of philosophy by pleading that the questions with which it deals shouldn't be asked, and students who unintentionally exit the project of philosophy by maintaining that the questions with which it deals shouldn't be answered, primarily may be giving vent to emotional distress in the face of threats to their respective senses of faith and awe. As such, these students may be as much in need of comfort as correction. It would be a mistake, however, to trivialize their concerns by offering them comfort alone because students who maintain taatsertain questions can be answered only by faith, and students who maintain that certain questions shouldn't be answered at all, are (or .aLltaaLtuay be) voicing genuinely philosophical positions which warrant genuinely philosophical examination; there's even a chance that-they_are right. By drawing students into a discussion of these issues, instructors may overcome lack of student readiness by an act of pedagogical jujitsu, transforming walls against philosophy into doors through which philosophy might enter. Unfortunately, the philosophical stances available to us regarding whether some questions should remain unasked or unanswered, what there is to be said for and against these stances, and how all this may be incorporated into the philosophy classroom are important topics which must wait for another time. My primary concern here is ,with another cluster of assumptions about questions which is liable .therniciouslyiiiform students' thinking about philosophy: assumprm tions which embody a naive taxonomy of questions.

Enriching Student Taxonomies of Questions

Unlike the assumption that certain questions should not be asked and unlike the assumption that certain questions should not beAns_wered student assumptions about question taxonomy may remain largely implicit and so unarticulated. Like most powerful beliefs, they form the background against which other beliefs are evaluated, and are evidenced not by being directly expressed but by indirectly structuring the way the world is perceived. In particular, an insufficiently fine-grained taxonomy of questions prevents students from seeing crucial distinctions and consequently, in ways discussed below, renders them effectively blind to the true nature and function of philosophical concerns. Student oversimplification of questions is perhaps most evident in their lack of direct concern for questions at all or else in their pronounced impatience with respect to them. Questions, for man students, are things to be answered and gotten Over. t s reasonable to speculite that -thi s. geeraiatlitude is ih-e- reiilt of a tripartite.. s n _ _

their implicit lesson which dominates study al leilit as embodied in many elementary and secondary courses, the -na. Clineadernid iliiciplines Miter a- distinct "answer-orientation" among the students: When asked to factor a polynomial in algebra, for instance, or when asked to determine the pH level of a certain substance I in their chemistry class, the question is usually seen as of exclu- Vii sively instrumental value; getting the right answer is what ultimately . counts. Second, many of these courses encourage faith in various C2i_lt : daThon-procedures which insure the attainment of the all-important 1 r, aithker: Once-orirmiiiteri the requisite "trick," say by learning t60 ippIrthe quadratic formula or by learning to run a litmus test, it's all over but the shouting. Thirc lAte_answers, once gotten, are alwaysrs objectively right or wrong;_either.."x" equals "9" or it doesn't and`:-..-eitherthEinbstance is acidic or it isn't. In shalt, many aspects of 1 I"our educational System encourage what Richard Bernstein calls the :::S" "common opinion of our age," namely, "that for any problem, an -at& answer exists, and for any answer, there exists an expert who cincs n-) '," supply it."' ei _ Quite . naturally then,, by the time most students hit philosophy they have learned to assume that answers are more important than Ist questions, that there is usually, if not always, a finite number of , quasi-algorithmic methods for getting the answers, and that, if correctly followed, the answers which these methods generate will ,brx., objectively right. Students who enter their first philosophy' ..' cOniteitherefore, are well acquainted with the general class of riquestipns which I call "objectively answerable." Those questions which we are in a position to answer, presumably because we know , the relevant algorithm and are in a position to apply it, we might call "actually objectively answerable," Questions like "What is the 'boiling point of water?" and "What happens when a base is added to er n : an acid?" are of this type. Those questions which we are not in a jn position to answer but with respect to which we can imagine possible circumstances allowing us to answer them, we might call . iv, ;`potentially objectively answerable." "Is there intelligent life on other . 14 . planets?" belongs to this class because we would be able to answer 0.1- . this question if aliens landed on the White House lawn. "How many molecules are there in this sheet of paper?" and "What did Cleopatra have for breakfast on her eleventh birthday?" are also potentially objectively answerable, because given the right kind of technology (a molecule-counter and a time-machine, respectively) we could find their objective answers. The class of obkctively answerable questions is not, however, the,,,,, ) Only category of questions with which students are initially familiar; . they are also well acquainted with what I call "subjectively answerable ' n _

.. Ad_liost4Citt". 1 r-( 4 1...14:; 11 r -i 4- (c of other disciplines. Firit, t ., t

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their fourth birthday," would be a very bad answer. "The vampire symbolizes the sexual impulses which were repressed in Victorian society," / would be perhaps not quite so bad. That set of questions which not have objectively right and wrong, answers. but which definitei . .do have better and worse anSWers, I call "normatively_artsWerable. ,/ _ _ Because philosophy is concerned with examining questions that, are not amenable to solution by_experience or experiment, and because the overlap. between empirically answerable and objectively aniwer: able questions isvery great (at the very least), it seems to me that philosophy is not primarily concerned with examining objectively answerable questions.9 But because philosophy is not content with' the mere spouting of personal opinion, neither is philosophy concerned with examining subjectively answerable questions. Thus, to the extent that philosophy poses answerable questions, its turf is corn-" liosed of the normatively answerable,. It is important for students to understand the type of questions which concern philosophy because the standards of evaluation whie-h are applied_tianSwers depend upojthe type of questions asked. If a - , question is objectively answerable, for instance, then an answer to Li that question is considered to be correct if it adheres to some criteria. which are taken to measure the conformity of the answer to facts in the world. It makes sense to say that a scientific question has been 'answered well, for instance, because some scientific theories have more explanatory power than others and because explanatory power y- is taken to indicate conformity to the facts; if a theory has strong explanatory power then, at the very least, the world behaves as if it 6 ' ' were correctly described by the theory. If a question is subjectively c-o,..answerable, on the other hand, an answer is considered to be correct if it is presumed to be a sincere report of the answerer's state of mind. Thus, it makes sense to say that the question "Which do you like better, pecan pie or apple pie?" has been answered correctly if the answer is a truthful report of the subject's opinions. Just as it is inappropriate to assess an answer to a subjectively answerable question on the basis of whether or not it conforms to facts in the world apart from states of the subject's mind, and just as it is inappropriate to assess an answer to an objectively answerable question on the basis of whether or not it is a sincere report of the answerer's beliefs, it is improper to evaluate answers to normatively \ answerable questions along the lines developed to adjudicate success) or failure in the purely objective or subjective domains. Consequently) '4 because philosophy trades in normatively answerable questions, iq doesn't stand or fall upon its ability to provide us with the objec-c tively "right answer," or by its ability to provide us with a venue for never-ending, relativistic expression of personal opinions. Instead at.

questions," questions which we can answer but which don't have the same right answer for everyone. One can distinguish between subjeCtively . answerable questions and objectively answerable questions by making the subjectivity explicit and determining Whether or not the meaning of the question has changed; explicit subjectivity doesn't change the meaning of the question if and only if the question is subjectively answerable. For instance, "Which is better, pecan pie or apple pie?" is equivalent to "Which do you like better, pecan pie or apple pie?", and as such is subjectively answerable, whereas the -OEjectively answerable question "Is there intelligent life on other planets?" is not equivalent to "Do you think that there is intelligent life on other planets?" I believe many students think that objectively and subjectively an/ swerable quifltns basically -partition the- class, assuming thatiall /Ili-esti-6ns are answerable, or at least that all "meaningful" questions tire, and that they are answerable either objectively or subjectively. Students in the grip of this naive taxonomy are likely to approach arTST question with an "either/or" attitude. Either the question has a fixed number of objectively right answers which may be discovered . 1 through qu asiralgorithmic means, or else everyone's opinion is equally valid. Such a dichotomous taxonomy has obvious and immediate.1..; implications for the way in which students are likely to approach, fail to engage, and subsequently dismiss philosophy. Either they will expect philosophy to give them the right answers, or at least a method ftir finding the right answers, for every question it poses (as science I does, or as they might see religion doing), or else they will expect a 1 relativistic, "anything goes," environment. Both options doom students to confusion and disappointment unless they are brought to realize that not all answerable questions are answerable objectively or subjectively, and that not all questions worth asking are anikiable. In the following two sections, I will examine a third species of answerable question and the variety and..Importance of unanswerable questions, noting how_a discussion of these topics in introductory philosophy courses might promote student philosophical readiness and foster other significant pedagogical objectives,

Normatively Answerable Questions

If asked what the vampire symbolizes in Dracula, we would probably realize that this question might not have a finite number of objectively right answers unless it's read as a query about Stoker's intentions. Clearly however, unless we want to side with staunch deconstructionists, we would understand some answers to be better than others. "The vampire symbolizes happy upper-class children on

,C UPI. ,.

philosophical question has been answered well if the answer is well ' r. II.' reasoned, or well argued. A recognition of this fact alone may go a ist. l' long way to help students understand what philosophy is really all : '' . I I about, and why the "yes" or "no" answers to questions such as "Does ' t, God exist?" are less important to the purpose of philosophy than the 1 way_in which those answers are defended. In summarily helping students to understand that there are dif\ ferent kinds of answerable questions, that the primary concern of / philosophy is normatively answerable questions, and that answers to philosophical questions should be evaluated according to the strength , of the arguments supporting them, instructors of introductory phi. losophy courses may make the discipline less befuddling than it would I otherwise be while simultaneously motivating a study of argument r assessment and opening students' eyes to an important and pervasive ' category of questions. This is particularly significant in this scienceseduced age, when it is easy to dichotomize our intellectual world into the scientific realm, where rationality is paramount, and the nonscientific realm, where everything is relative and one opinion is as .good as another. If introductory philosophy classes served no other 'function than the abolition of this dichotomy, their importance would be established. Further classroom discussion of questions, however, may Sable such courses to serve another equally vital purpose.
i

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Unanswerable Questions
I have so far argued that many students' first encounter with philosophy is complicated by their assumption that all questions (or at least all "significant" questions) are either objectively or subjectively answerable and that important philosophical and pedagogical objectives may be achieved by explicitly introducing the notion of normatively answerable questions. This alone, however, would leave an equally important category of questions unaddressed, the category of unanswerable questions. The topic of unanswerable questions can be a torturous one and it requires some serious thought. The category itself shifts depending upon the kind of answer one wants and when one wants it. "Does God exist?" for instance, is unanswerable if one demands an objective and actual answer, but it may be potentially objectively answerable if there is an afterlife or if we are favored with overwhelming miraculous proofs. If we are reading the question subjectively, as "Do you think that God exists?" it is definitely answerable (allowing, of course, "I don't know" as an answer), and if it is read normatively then it's probably answerable too.

,.

a 0-Because it is hard to imagine a question which is subjectively or normatively unanswerable, I will use the term "intrinsically unantreit lit swerable" to refer to queitions which are actually; -objectively to% unanswerable and which we have reason to believe are potentially objectively Unanswerable as well t _Intrip_sically unanswerable questions, in others words, are those questions which we cannot answer al pieseni and with respect to which we cannot even imagine circumstances that would enable us to answer them. There is, of course, the familiar line of apologetics in favor of taking seriously questions which can never be definitively answered. Some of our most fundamental beliefs may be conceived of as answers to such questions, and by critically reflecting upon these questions we may place ourselves in a more profound position of control with respect to how we view the world. If nothing else,,pondering the unanswerable can allow us to stretch our mental legs, to reach beyond our grasp, so to speak, and there may be something distinctively human in this activity. As Bernstein observes, "Mlle distinctive function of philosophy is to keep alive the spirit of restless questioning," 10 and as Pelc notes in a similar vein, a philosophical question "performs more of an expressive role; it betrays the restlessness of the mind; it expects a direct answer to a lesser degree than does a non-philosophical question, it rather counts on a reaction consisting in a maximally adequate understanding of the question itself."" No doubt, such sentiments would be enthusiastically endorsed by those students who object to answering philosophical questions on the grounds that a mundane concern with answers strips the questions of their mystery and depth. With respect to some questions, such as Heidegger's famous "Why is there anything at all?" this may even be the proper attitude to take. Nevertheless, with respect to other questions, suspicions that a question is intrinsically unanswerable may be legitimate cause for complaint and the source of student dismissal of most philosophical questions as "stupid." One need not take the positivist line, identifying the meaning of a question with its answer and thereby considering all unanswerable questions meaningless, in order to sympathize with this position. Semantics, or questions of meaning, aside, unanswerable questions might well appear to be pragmatically_ ungrounded. After all, one might_ wonder, what's the use of asking such questions? What's the point of givingarguments_for or against a given Position, even "good", arguments,..if_one. can_ never_know_for sure that one's conclusion_ itright? 1 believe that an adequate discussion of intlinsically unanswerable questions must grant some respect to the intuitive view that certain unanswerable questions are stupid, because only this will allow students

LUO DUNA WARREN

-a"to appreciate how philosophical progress depends upon the correction of such questions, a correction, to quote Pelc again, which demands a "maximally adequate understanding of the question itself."

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this question to an average introductory class, many students immediately put their fingers on the difficulty: it depends upon what you mean by "sound." If you take "sound" to mean acoustic waves of a certain sort, then the uniformity of nature would dictate that the tree makes a sound even in the absence of anyone to hear it. If, however, you take "sound" to mean the auditory experience of hearing those acoustic waves then the tree wouldn't make a sound, not for the mysterious reason that the acoustic waves have been somehow preempted, but for the entirely prosaic reason that there isn't anyone to experience them. From this we may learn the valuable lessons that some questions are unanswerable because they involve ambiguous terms and that by repairing these questions to an answerable state we may learn to draw distinctions where we hadn't thought of drawing them before, for instance between the "objective" and "subjective" components of sound.I2 Although all ambiguous questions are defective, the inverse relationshirdtlieferliad; we Can't be certain that unambiguous questions are free from defect because there are other ways in which questions can go wrong. In particular, there is the large class of defective questiiiniti/fiichl call "inconsistent!" 13 Again, the first species of inconsistent questions is probably already familiar to most students and so provides a good place to start: the category of externally inconsistent (otherwise known as _"complex") questions. -The most famous question of this type, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" exemplifies the problem which . plagues them all: they presuppose facts not in evidence and so depend on assumptions which may conflict with the actual state of the world; they may, in short, be inconsistent with the external facts. Because all questions have presuppositions ("[Qjuestions," to quote Hintikka, "cannot be asked in a vacuum." 4 ) whereas only a proper subset of questions involve ambiguous terminology, the chances that a given question is externally inconsistent are greater than the chances that it's unanswerable due to ambiguity. Externally inconsistent questions may therefore be expected to be both prevalent and important, important because the presuppositions of question perform the assertive function of expressing the speaker's ontological commitments in a particularly incisive way; because these commitments are not explicitly voiced, they may embody widely taken-for granted and unrecognized assumptions about the world, and when such assumptions are proven false, the consequent conceptual revolutions are often profound. "That which has always distinguished the greatest rr philosophers," writes, Bernatein2lis their ability to question what no one else had drought to question, and thereby to challenge the prejudgments and prejudices of which most of us are unaware even though we hold them."

Defective Questions
Whether or not some intrinsically unanswerable questions are important and meaningful, the fact remains that many intrinsically unanswerable _questions are genuinely defective. Complaints about ifittinid questions notwithstanding, I think the notion that something might be really wrong with a question, as opposed to an answer, is a new one for many students. This failure to recognize thecategory Of I defective questions can interfere with Students' philosophical progress. Some of my students, for instance, have encountered systematic difficulty appreciating the importance of the mind/body problem. , When I have posed this problem as a question, specifically "How can a nonphyg ical mind causally interact with a physical body?" the popular response has been "We don't understand how such interaction can occur, but someday science may develop to the point where we will be able to understand it." These students, in other words, have assumed that my question must be answerable, and failing to find an immediate answer, they assume that it must be potentially so. They have taken my question to be on logical par with questions like "Exactly how many molecules are in this sheet of paper?" and "Is there intelligent life on other planets?", questions which can't be answered now, but which could be answered if only the relevant experts would devote enough time and energy to the answering. By forcing a misdiagnosis of their failure to answer the mind/body question, the assumption that all questions are answerable leads students to underestimate and misconstrue the nature of the problem, and in the face of such a misconstrual radical attempts to dissolve the mind/body problem by abandoning dualism (a metaphysical position to which many of these students are already committed on religious or emotional grounds) seem like unmotivated overreactions. Such misunderstandings can be mitigated, if not entirely avoided, by discussing the ways in which questions can be flawed and hente intrinsically unanswerable. Ambiguity is" one relatively obvious respect in which a question an -go wrong, and I find that it's a good place to start a discussion of defective questions because most students pick up on it pretty quickly, because it naturally leads to a iscussion of other kinds of error, and because it is exemplified by a k uestion which many students have come to think of as quintessentially philosophical: "If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?"! have found that when I pose

In fact, many influential philosophical questions have been or may be ei -tnally inconsistent. "What property of an act accounts for its goodness or badness?", for instance, may be externally inconsistent insofar as it presupposes that there must be some single ethically relevant property, such as maximizing utility or conforming to a set of rules, which underlies our ethical assessments. Kripke's famous "Does Pierre believe that London is pretty or does he not?" may be externally inconsistent insofar as it assumes that belief is a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition." The recognition that a question might be externally inconsistent is a rnajiiiPliilostiphical advance, because by showing us that the question embodies presuppositions which might be at odds with the facts it sheds light on previously unrecognized possibilities. Maybe, for instance, different acts are right and wrong for different reasons, and maybe belief is not the simple dyadic relationship between the subject and an object which the syntax of our propositional attitude ascriptions would lead us to suppose." Internally inconsistent questions, the second species of inconsistent- ituestions,"May be less familiar to students but is at least as philosophically important. The defect which afflicts questions in this category is more subtle than that which afflicts externally inconsistent questions, because while externally inconsistent questions presuppose things which are simply false, and while falsity is not usually a difficult concept for students to grasp, internally inconsistent questions involve concepts which rest upon assumptions which are incompatible with each other, and understanding this is significantly trickier. Of course, some internally inconsistent questions are trickier than others and a discussion of the simpler examples allows students easier entrance to the more complex and important cases. "How much does purple weigh?", for instance, is a particularly egregio urexiinple of applying concepts that are only appropriate to one sort of thing (i.e., things with mass) to entities of a dramatically different sort (i.e., color) and students seldom have difficulty diagnosing the.fallacy embodied in the question. The more interesting cases, however, such as- "What was God doing before he created the universe?" "How can A nonphysical substance causally interact with a physical substance?" and "How many angels can dance on the head of pin?" commit the Same sin in sneakier ways and so are liable to trap novice and professional philosophers alike. "What was God doing before he cleated the universe?", for instance, takes the concept of time and applies it to a period predating the universe, which, in light of the theory that the universe is a space-time continuum, cannot be done. The universe and time were created "simultaneously," and there is,

ti

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strictly speaking, no "period predating the universe." Similarly, "How can a nonphysical substance causally interact with a physical substance?' assumes that the concept of causality can be meaningfully applied to the concept of a nonphysical substance, whereas most of our presuppositions about causality (e.g., that it takes place at a specific location) preclude its application to nonphysical things (e.g., because nonphysical things don't occupy space and so have no location). Indeed, one of the most famous of all internally inconsistent questions, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" was posed not to elicit an answer but rather to highlight the conceptual confusion it embodies; because angels are nonphysical and hence unextended, it's nonsensical to apply to them concepts which imply limitation by space and as such are applicable only to physical and extended things." Just as the recognition that a question is externally inconsistent can spur philosophical insight as the question is corrected and refined, the recognition that a question_is internally inconsistent can lead to- the formulation of ever-better questions, and this formulation is one of the most important ways in which philosophy progresses. In the face of the above inconsistencies, for instance, the question "How can a nonphysical substance causally interact with a physical substance?" cnn be replaced by a more promising question like "Can the mentalistia properties of the brain affect the physical properties of the brain, or are these mentalistic properties merely epiphenomena?" Such now questions reflect and facilitate a reconceptualization of the basic problem which may, ultimately, enable a solution to be found. I would like to complete my discussion of inconsistent questions by noting yet another, and even deeper way, in which questions can be inconsistent: they can be paradoxical. Paradoxical questions, like "Can an omnipotent god create a stone too heavy for him to lift?" are unanswerable because they land you in a contradiction regardless of how they are answered. "No, an omnipotent god can't create a stone too heavy for him to lift," is an unsatisfactory answer because ic implies that there is something that this god can't do (namely create the stone) and this defeats the assumption that the god is omnipotent. On the other hand, "Yes, an omnipotent god can create a stone too heavy for him to lift," won't do either, because again it implies that there's something that this god can't do (namely lift the stone) and we're back in the same trouble. Questions like this, instead of demonstrating external inconsistency with the facts (like "Have you stopped beating your wife?") or internal inconsistency among, the concepts (like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?") show that there is something incoherent about one of the concepts employed. We might say that such questions are "hyper-internally

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inconsistent." In the case under discussion, the notion of unqualified omnipotence is shown to be problematic and the paradox is avoided once we restrict omnipotence to the realm of logically possible actions. (Creating a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift is equivalent to the act of creating a stone too heavy to be lifted by a being who can lift any stone. But this is like creating a square that is not a square, a logical contradiction, and so the failure to do it doesn't undermine omnipotence properly construed.) Conclusion In summary, I believe that introducing students to the many kinds of questions which abound in philosophy and elsewhere,_philosophy instructors may further many significant pedagogical ends. To the instructor's immediate benefit, a discussion of questions may foster general philosophical readiness among the students by enabling them to acquire a faster and firmer handle on the enterprise. More importantly, to the students ultimate benefit, serious and sustained attention to questions can be expected to give them an appreciation for complexity and some of the skills necessary for dealing , with it. They will understand the need for argumentative standards to. adjudiale between competing answers to normatively answerable questions, and such an understanding will undoubtedly motivate and facilitate the development of their general critical thinking skills. Moreover, they will acquire a very specific and often-overlooked ability, the capacity for evaluating questions as well as answers. To quote Michel Meyer, "[One judges a person by the questions he or she raises, in the same way one judges a theory by the questions it solves, or a piece of writing by the questions it evokes or compels one to ask."9 Students should emerge from their philosophy class intelligent consumers and creators of questions, as well as intelligent consumers and creators of propositions, and the recognition that some questions can be defective through external, internal, or hyper-internal inconsistency should give the students some of the tools they need. Finally by understanding that philosophy progress at least as much by repairing defective questions as it does by answering nondefective ones, students may gain a deeper insight into the discipline and might even take away an important life lesson: that we really do learn as much from our mistakes as our successes.

Notes

1. For a defense of the practice of asking questions of students in class, and

for sound general suggestions regarding how these questions can be structured
for maximum educational effect, see Herb Yarvin, "Asking Questions: Some Techniques," Teaching Philosophy, 1,4 (Fall 1976), pp 441-445. For a discussion of the various aspects and complexities of classroom questioning, see Thomas P. Kasulis, "Questioning," Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 9, 4, pp. 29-33 and Michael Whalley, "Teaching by Questioning," Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 9, 2, pp. 46-48. For a defense of multiplechoice questions as a student assessment method in philosophy classes, and for suggestions regarding the construction of these questions, see Peter Collins, "Examining Philosophy: 'Choose the Best Answer'," Teaching Philosophy, 16, 2 (June 1993), pp. 145-154. 2. For readers unfamiliar with this literature, C. L. Hamblin's article "Questions" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good place to start. "Asking Questions in Philosophy" by Jerzy Pelc (Philosophy and Culture, 4 [1988], pp. 746-763) summarizes influential views about the analysis of questions and the relations between a question and its , answers and presuppositions. Andrzej Wisniewski's "Implied Questions," (Manuscrito, 13,2 [1990], pp. 23-38) gives a nice although somewhat technical account of how one question may imply another, otherwise known as "erotetic implication." Jaakko Hintikka has discussed questioning as a model of reasoning and information-seeking in various works including "Questioning as a Phiiosophical Method," Philosophy and Culture, 4 (1988), pp. 763-777 and "The Interrogative Model of Inquiry as a General Theory of Argumentation," Communication & Cognition, 25, 2 & 3 (1992), pp. 221-242. In "Carnap and Quine: Internal and External Questions," (Erkenntnis, 42 [1995], pp. 41-64), Graham Bird defends Carnap's fourfold taxonomy of questions against Quinean criticism. 3. Some particularly 'leasable" issues may be found in Wisniewski's "Implied Questions"; his discussion of how one can search for an answer to an original question by posing and answering well-chosen auxiliary questions may be especially worthwhile. Sylvain Bromberger's "Rational Ignorance," (Synthese, 74, 1 [January 19881, pp. 47-64), which examines the norms governing the choice of which questions to bother answering, is also promising in this context. Collingwood's theory that propositions have meaning only insofar as they are conceptualized as answers to specific questions is also worth importing into an educational discussion (Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939; reprinted 1987, Ch. 5). Unless students understand the questions to . wh[c.h certaillPhilosophical positions are given as answers, those positions run the risk of seeming unmotivated at best and bizarre at worst (e.g., Berkeley's Idealism). 4. Yarvin, for instance, suggests a questioning technique in which the instructor poses several true or false questions which the students can answer successfully only if they understand the concepts involved ("Asking Questions: Some Techniques," p. 443). It's hardly a criticism of this technique to note that it speaks to some interesting philosophical issues about the evidentiary criteria necessary to underwrite ascriptions of concept possession. 5. Michael Goldman's "Why?" (Teaching Philosophy, 11,4 [December 19941,

pp. 285-292) is a nice example of this approach, because Goldman's five

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readings of the question "Why did S (a person) do A (an action)?" not only help students to think clearly about cultural relativism but also warrant philosophical attention in their own right. in particular, Goldman's distinctions give us the framework within which we can raise such important issues as whether or not explanations of behavior which appeal to the cultural function which that behavior serves override explanations of behavior which appeal to the motives of the agent. A careful examination of the Socratic elenchus would also be of simultaneous pedagogical and philosophical interest. 6. This point is also made by Francis P. Crawley in "Putting Philosophy on Trial," Teaching Philosophy 14, 3 (September 1991), pp. 277-282. 7. Richard 3 Bernstein, "Does Philosophy Matter?" Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 9, 4, p. 3. 8. Examination of the class of potentially objectively answerable questions raises a number of interesting concerns surrounding the nature of the possible circumstances in which such questions would be actually answerable Are we to envision all logically possible worlds, or should some stronger notion such as physical or biological possibility be employed? Furthermore, there might be an important class of questions which are potentially answerable only in the affirmative (or negative). Unfortunately, an adequate discussion of these issues would be beyond the scope of this paper so I shall defer it to future examinations. 9. I think that philosophy may in fact be defined in terms of the questions it considers, which naturally makes the connection between philosophy and questions and between teaching philosophy and discussing questions, all the more important. Michael Baur has argued for defining philosophy in terms of questions in "Questions Philosophers Ask," (Eidos, 6 [June 1987], pp. 21-35), although he carries out this project by listing five questions which he maintains any genuinely philosophical study must directly or indirectly address. My own tentative definition of philosophy as the subject concerned with examining questions that aren't amenable to solution by experience or experiment would seem to accommodate most aspects of Ham's discussion. 10. Richard 3 Bernstein, "Does Philosophy Matter?" Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 9, 4, p. 3. II. Jerzy Pelc, "Asking Questions in Philosophy," Philosophy and Culture, 4 (1988), p. 759. 12. In recognizing the category of ambiguous questions, I am of course taking "questions" to mean the sentences which serve interrogatory purposes. Ambiguity is an essentially linguistic phenomenon because only words can be ambiguous. Many discussions of questions require a distinction between interrogative sentences and questions analogous to that between declarative sentences and propositions, but we may ignore this distinction for our present purposes. 13. I have adopted my notion of inconsistency from Hofstadter, who, in Godel, Eschen Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1979) distinguishes between the external and Internal inconsistency of a formal system. See especially page 87 and pages 94-95. Felix Cohen doesn't distinguish between externally and internally inconsistent questions, using the term "invalid" to encompass both. (Felix Cohen, "What is a Question?" originally printed in The Afonist, 39 [1929], pp. 350-356, partially reprinted in Thinking, the Journal of Philosophy for Children, 4, 3 & 4, pp. 57-60.)

14. Jaakko Hintikka, "Questioning as a Philosophical Method," Philosophy and Culture: Proceedings of the XVIlth World Congress of Philosophy, 4(1988), p. 767. 15. Richard J Bernstein, "Does Philosophy Matter?" Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 9, 4, p. 4. 16. Saul Kripke, "A Puzzle About Belief," in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 239-283. 17. The first of these lessons is one of W. D. Ross's points in The Right and the Good, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930). The latter of these lessons is taken from Nathan Salmon's Frege's Puzzle, (Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1986) and is also addressed in Laurence Goldstein's "The Fallacy of the Simple Question," (Analysis, 53, 3 [July 1993], pp. 178-181). It's interesting to note that scientific questions articulated within a radically false theory, such as "How much phlogiston is released when one gram of cedar is burned?" are also externally inconsistent insofar as they presuppose the existence of nonexistent theoretical entities. Thus, scientific advances may also be signaled by the recognition that a certain question is externally inconsistent. 18. Surprisingly, the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" seems not to have been posed by the medieval scholars which it has been misused to lampoon. Aquinas does ask "Can several angels be in the same place at once?" answering that because angels take up no space, any number of them can coexist at the same location. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, [Blackfriars: Cambridge. 1968], q, 52, art. 3, p. 51.) In its practice of intentionally asking questions which have no answer for the purpose of bringing the respondent to some deeper recognition, philosophy would seem to be posing something akin to Zen koans. (For an interesting discussion of interpreting philosophical works and questions which refer to angels and other beings which we now believe not to exist, see George Macdonald Ross's "Angels" in Philosophy, 60, 234 (October 19851, pp. 495-511.) 19. Michel Meyer, "The Revival of Questioning in the Twentieth Century," Synthese, 74, I (January 1988), p. 15. Dana Warren, Department of Philosophy, University of WisconsinStevens Point, Stevens Point, WI 54481-3897