Grice on ? and ¿ -- Notes and Queries (Erotetics)

--- By J. L. S.

Let's start by appending this gem by I. A. Richards. I am glad that Richards is now quoting Grice thanks to me! (There was this query elsewhere as to the Richards/Grice connection. I provide the relevant one, and the editor of Richards, "Meaning of Meaning" has Grice credited all along!)

Richards wrote "Queries"


"May I call what I'm going to offer you, 'theory of querying' and ask first, 'What is a query?'? And then go on to contrast with it, 'What is a theory?'? Will you forgive me, incidentally, for not putting this all into rime? Theory ... query - not to promising a start maybe? Why do I take queries first? Wouldn't it be more natural to start with a *definition* of a theory (or proposition, or rtatement), or at least some sort of indication of what a theory is, and thenfrom that go on to describe or define a query? We'll agree, I take it, that *is* the usual plan? That, as a rule questions are taken to be in some way derivative from or dependent upon statements? That questioning is a special attitude we may or may not take up toward statements? But why should we make queries, thus parasitic upon theories? Doesn't the coverse really make better sense? Don't questions really come before answers, phylogenetically, ontogenetically, psychologically, logically, historically, and even
philosophically? If so, wouldn't it be better to try to give an account of questioning first and then see if we can't describe an *assertion*, *statement* (even the mere *entertainment of a proposition*) in terms of the querying activity? As for example, a sort of precipitate from it: a deposit, a sediment, an opaque
substance, in brief, a MUD, thrown down by the clear translucent lucid fluid medium of thinking? Do some of you, or all of you, alredy detect something BIASS'D? - and, ergo, to be suspected? - in the way I am putting these queries? Have I made any statement yet? They are all queries, aren't they? Might it not be a mistake in strategy from the outset to develop an inquiry into querying through anything but queries? If there is a bias in the attitude to queries I'm displaying isn't that as it should be? In an incomplete provisional inquiry - and all but God's are such I take it? - isn't 'bias' necessary? Isn't calling this 'bias' just a pejorative turn, suggesting that some other direction would be more to our taste? Does a question have to have a direction? Can't we go all ways at once? Doesn't a question have to have a direction? Can it go all ways at once? What will you make of the differences between these two ways of asking? Does the frankness of the metaphor distress you? Is it more distressing than the other uses of the same sort of metaphor which depict propositions as the starting-out points, or terms, or goals, etc. of questioning? And is calling a query a *motion* (or *process*, or *vector*), is that strictly a 'metaphor'? But to come back- does it make any important difference whether we take questioning or asserting to be primordial, and the other derivative? Well, what sorts of difference would we regard as important? If the switch over let us or made us see traditional doctrines and data from a new angle would that be important? If it gave us different ways of formulating - ought I to say *them*, or call them their 'query-analogues'? Would that be important? If it suggested new questions, would that be important? Or have we more than enough questions already? On a humbler level, if the switch were stimulating (ghastly word, isn't it?) what *that* be important? Penultimately, have we any means of inquiry, with any hope of valid results, into the questioning process? Where, in the formulation of any question, comes the whatever-it-is which formulates and propounds and asks it? And what would valid results be? Other queries? Finally what has philosophy to show but queries -- What is being? What is thought? What is a proposition? What is logic? What is philosophy itself? What is man? What is god? -- as the outcomes of its agelong endeavours?

-------------- I A Richards, b. Sandbach, Ches.


EROTETIC PROTOCOLS,


"'Erotetic' is that branch of logic that deals with
questions and answers, right?"
JL Speranza.



It may seem at first sight that you can't answer

Q: What's the capital of Wales?

with

A: I have a train to catch.

But cfr. I A Richards on "Queries" above and reach the right conclusion.

Perhaps one should not limit ourselves onto thinking that it's only STATEMENTS that can answer a question. It's true, too, that ANY statement, provided the right conversational complex context may probably count as as an answer to _any_ question. Granted, such an answer may count as an underinformative, IRRELEVANT, WRONG, EVASIVE, STOOPID, etc. -- i.e. not always the SNAPPY answer you're looking for -- but it should look, on occasion, as an "answer" nonetheless.

"Beware those who know the answer before they understand the question" -- C. M. Manasco