The 9th question
Our question repertoire consists of the following:
1. What?
2. Where?
3. How?
4. Which?
5. When?
6. Who?
7. Why?
8. Whose?
I haven't thought about this too much but I've ordered them in the order in which they must've evolved.
In my opinion ''what?'' is the most basic question. It opens inquiry and petitions for knowledge. I don't know how language evolved but surely the first attempts at communication started off by naming objects. What is this? This is water. What is this? This is fire. And so on...
The other questions, I believe, grew from ''what?'' as experience became sophisticated and language evolved to capture the essence of our experiences. For instance ''where?'' involves as concept of space and ''when?'' requires a concept of time. ''Where?'' and ''When?'' can easily, and without loss of any meaning can be rephrased as ''what is the location?'' and ''what is the time?'' That's what I mean when I said ''what?'' is the first step of inquiry. The same reasoning applies to the other questions.
I don't know why questions mutliplied, given that ''what?'' is sufficent to ask any question at all. Off the top of my head I can think of two reasons:
1. Linguistic convenience: It's easier to ask ''when?'' than the long-winded ''what is the time?''
2. The concept that has its own question has special importance. For instance ''who?'' reflects the concept of personal identity - something unique AND important for humans. ''Why?'' indicates the importance of rationality.
There may be other reasons but I'm not aware of them.
My question is is it time to expand this question repertoire? Do we have certain experiences that, out of being unique AND important or some other thing, deserve their own specific question?
Mathematics is now the language of science. Without numbers people don't take you seriously. Yet English still asks quantitative questions with ''how many?'' Of course it's not that inconvenient to ask ''how many?'' but the concept of quantity not having its own question is very odd given what I said. Some languages like Hindi (India) have a specific question on quantity viz. ''Kitna?'' which translated means ''how many?'' So, shouldn't English develop its own dedicated question for quantity?
The above is just one example. I'm not up-to-date with current trends but do environmental or moral issues deserve their own specific question?
So, kindly frame your 9th question and tell me why you think this question is necessary.
1. What?
2. Where?
3. How?
4. Which?
5. When?
6. Who?
7. Why?
8. Whose?
I haven't thought about this too much but I've ordered them in the order in which they must've evolved.
In my opinion ''what?'' is the most basic question. It opens inquiry and petitions for knowledge. I don't know how language evolved but surely the first attempts at communication started off by naming objects. What is this? This is water. What is this? This is fire. And so on...
The other questions, I believe, grew from ''what?'' as experience became sophisticated and language evolved to capture the essence of our experiences. For instance ''where?'' involves as concept of space and ''when?'' requires a concept of time. ''Where?'' and ''When?'' can easily, and without loss of any meaning can be rephrased as ''what is the location?'' and ''what is the time?'' That's what I mean when I said ''what?'' is the first step of inquiry. The same reasoning applies to the other questions.
I don't know why questions mutliplied, given that ''what?'' is sufficent to ask any question at all. Off the top of my head I can think of two reasons:
1. Linguistic convenience: It's easier to ask ''when?'' than the long-winded ''what is the time?''
2. The concept that has its own question has special importance. For instance ''who?'' reflects the concept of personal identity - something unique AND important for humans. ''Why?'' indicates the importance of rationality.
There may be other reasons but I'm not aware of them.
My question is is it time to expand this question repertoire? Do we have certain experiences that, out of being unique AND important or some other thing, deserve their own specific question?
Mathematics is now the language of science. Without numbers people don't take you seriously. Yet English still asks quantitative questions with ''how many?'' Of course it's not that inconvenient to ask ''how many?'' but the concept of quantity not having its own question is very odd given what I said. Some languages like Hindi (India) have a specific question on quantity viz. ''Kitna?'' which translated means ''how many?'' So, shouldn't English develop its own dedicated question for quantity?
The above is just one example. I'm not up-to-date with current trends but do environmental or moral issues deserve their own specific question?
So, kindly frame your 9th question and tell me why you think this question is necessary.
Comments (53)
Where light? OR Where food? comes before "What" since we pretty much know what food is. When primitive tube animals sought out food, they ingested stuff before they knew what it was. Which is pretty much tied up with what is and is not food.
There really is only one question, so it must be the first. All other questions are subsidiary:
What do I do now?
To me, that's different than "what?"
Will? (or Whither?)
...to which I would add...
Was?
Isn't "how many?" very similar to "how much?", which is what we commonly ask for the cost or price of something. The fact that we say it as two words in English, while other languages say it as one word, seems irrelevant.
Shall I?
And speaking of space and time, 'where'? also unsettles the question of priority more generally, insofar as 'where?' can be understood both spatially and temporally - where in space? where in time? Which in turn implicates a whole slew of others: which direction? How soon will I get there/when will they arrive? There's a real sense in which all yhese questions are co-implicated in each other and cannot be artificially teased apart. In fact, there's an argument to be made (in fact it has been made, and I agree with it!) that the question of 'what?' is the least substantial of all the basic questions, insofar as it is the most removed from the first person and thus the most divorced from the reality of life - an unfortunate state of affiars because 'what?' questions have been taken to define the direction of philosophy since Plato. Deleuze:
"The [Platonic] Idea, the discovery of the Idea, is inseparable from a certain type of question. The Idea is in the first place an “objecticity [objectité] which, as such, corresponds to a way of posing questions. It only responds to the call of certain questions. It is in Platonism that the question of the Idea is determined under the form: What is...? This noble question is supposed to concern the essence, and is opposed to vulgar questions which only refer to the example or the accident. Thus you do not ask who is beautiful, but what is the Beautiful. Not where and when there is justice, but what is the Just. Not how “two” is obtained, but what is the dyad. Not how much, but what... All of Platonism thus seems to oppose a major question, always taken up again and repeated by Socrates as that of the essence or the Idea, to minor questions of opinion which only express confused ways of thinking, whether in old men or awkward children, or in sophists and over-skilful orators." (Deleuze, The Method of Dramatization).
Deleuze's suggestion of course is that we overturn entirely the priority of the 'what?' question, which has more or less debilitated philosophy for 2000 years. I think he's basically right about this.
The 'journalistic' questions, (who, what, when, where, why) seem to be ordered properly. 'Who' is a good first question, since this would answer whether it is relevant to human existence, and gives matters of humanity primacy. 'What' would answer as to the subject matter. 'When, where, why, all seem to answer for 'how' and 'which'.
This would be an over-simplification given the inherent complexity of the potential matter being discussed, but not as a way to begin.
Quoting StreetlightX
But ''where?'' can be reduced to ''what is the location?'' It doesn't work the other way does it?
Quoting T Clark
If that's important to you can you frame a question word like what?, where?, etc. for it. Tell us why it's important too.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What is important to you? Does the answer to that question suggest to you a word question like ''what?'' or ''where?'' - a question word dedicated to the type of knowledge or experience you think matters?
Quoting StreetlightX
I disagree. All questions arise from ''what?'' as I've shown in the OP. Perhaps I don't understand your point but, to me, all questions can be reduced to ''what?''.
Sure, you can change anything into a 'what' question if you play around with words enough, but you lose the specificity of the first-personness or the dexical/perspectival aspect of the initial 'where' question. In other words, you lose something in the translation: the 'reduction' reduces the question to a shell of what it was. You lose specificity for the sake of generality: but this latter is abstract and lifeless.
With respect to naming, Wittgenstein was among those who adequately demonstrated that naming is a tiny subset of all the things that we do with language, and is an awful model to base any philosophy of language upon. Nomination is among the most abstract things we do with language, with the major heavy-lifting borne instead by the indication of relations.
It looks quite complex. There seems to be certain other factors in the fray. Anyway, as you said and I agree, questions like ''where?'', ''who?'' have in them certain assumptions (about identity, consciousness, time, etc.) that make them significantly different from ''what'' rephrasing.
So, which area of human experience or knowledge deserves a separate question?
Thus you invalidate your putative evolution of query!
You might as well ask "which item is food" and put THAT to the top of the list.
This ought to make us realise that language limits the way we express living praxis.
I image the 8th question is a conglomeration of all others.
I presented my views on the matter. I could be wrong of course. As @StreetlightX said we may not be able to untangle the questions into distinct evolutionary categories. I don't know why s/he said that but look at animals and us. Surely animals don't ask ''why?'' or ''who?'' My views are based on such clues as that.
Quoting charleton
It cannot be. As you can see question-types diversified with, roughly speaking, knowledge. The point is how unique and special must an experience or knowledge be before it gets its own question?
An interesting issue my query suggests is how say a 4th/5th/nth dimensional being makes inquiry of the world. What impact would knowledge of a novel question, asked by an alien for example, have on human understanding?
To illustrate my point. Think of environmental impact. People, at least the concerned ones, are very sensitive to environmental issues. So, if we all think the environment is really important we could frame a question asking for the environmental effects of a thing. We do ask ''Is it environmentally friendly?'' or ''is it green technology?'' We could shorten the question for example by asking ''Green?'' or ''Green policy?''
You need to read up on the intelligence of animals.
Quoting TheMadFool
I explained why, I suggest you go back and read.
I did say one reason could be linguistic convenience or ease of communication. However, you can't deny that questions like ''who?'' and ''why?'' require some level of understanding of self, identiy or rationality.
Phrased as vaguely as that, one could deny or affirm a great deal without it having any iota of significance.
It's not the case that ALL animals are self-aware. I've never seen an animal ask ''why?''
Help me phrase it better.
Then you haven't looked hard enough.
Quoting TheMadFool
It's your question.
What question does simple curiosity express? To see something unusual and wonder about it doesn't necessarily imply any particular question. There is no necessity to assume "what?" is being asked, or "why?", or any such question. That is why your attempt to divide basic inquiry into these distinct categories, and place one as prior to the other, is ill-founded. The fundamental curiosity, or inquisitiveness, allows for the possibility of all these different questions.
Give me one example of an animal asking the question ''why?''
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm looking for constructive criticism. Something that'll throw some light into matter. Kindly do so.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How else can we make sense of questions and the things each type of query implies?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. I agree but do you really think my inquiry is a dead end?
Tell me what you understand to be at stake when a 'why?' question is posed. What kind of answer is being sought after, in your opinion?
Quoting TheMadFool
It's not clear what 'matter' you're trying to throw light upon.
A reason in the logical sense.
Quoting StreetlightX
Are the seven questions we know enough to make sense of reality? Can another door to knowledge be opened by adding another type of question to the known seven?
Imagine a two dimensional being living on a flat surface. It doesn't know what ''up'' means and so can never ask a question about ''up''. We, being 3 dimensional can ask questions about ''up''. What type of questions does a 4th dimensional being ask that is different and, probably, beyond our comprehension?
And to reason is to make inferences. It the height of silliness to think animals cannot make inferences or pose inferential questions.
And your 'seven questions' are an arbitrary garb-bag drawn from two seconds of thought. They are in no way comparable to the dimensional issue, which is, by contrast a well posed question.
You've shot yourself in the foot already.
1. Thingness
2. Space, and place.
3. Praxis
4. Category
5. Time.
6. Identity
7 Teleology
According to Kant. 2 & 5 take precedent over all other things being the most fundamental categories upon which our understanding of reality relies.
Without time and space the rest have no basis.
They should have evolutionary precedent.
I don't think the inquiry is a dead end per se, but I think it's rather pointless and misdirected. Ask yourself what kind of question are you asking with this inquiry. Is it an "is there" type of question? Notice all the questions that start with "is". Any statement which claims "it is the case that..." can be turned around to ask "is it the case that...?" That is skepticism.
I think that most serious inquiries involve a number of the factors you mentioned, mixed together. So I don't think your technique of dividing or classifying is quite right. For instance, who, why, and how, might all be asked together, as one class of inquiry, while where and when, might be classed together as another type, etc.. In other words, I don't think that your way of classifying the different types of questions really represents the different types of inquiries that we make. You would really need to take a serious look at all the different types of studies, sciences, social studies, philosophy, and maybe even art, all together, to determine the different types of inquiries that we, as human beings make.
But you will agree there's a difference of degrees between animal and human thinking. Human reasoning is more abstract than animals. Animals make inferences but not the kind humans are capable of.
Quoting StreetlightX
I was impatient. To tell you the truth I've kept it on the backburner for four whole years. Not really thinking on it except on some few occasions.
Quoting StreetlightX
Thank you. I was actually aiming for that. I couldn't come up with a better analogy. I'm thinking of a different level/plane of experience/existence and how beings who're different from us make inquiry of the world. Are they too asking the same 7 seven questions or do they have more or less?
I then realized that a new type of question can be added to the existing 7 by simply looking for a type of experience or knowledge that is of sufficient significance to humans. This, of course, is nowhere as interesting as a 4th/5th dimensional question but it's a good starting point.
Perhaps there is no need to ask a new question as, well, no one till now has bothered to frame one. Even people with genius intellect haven't made such an effort. There must be a good reason why. What is this reason in your opinion?
All the new additions I can think of are simply examples of linguistic convenience e.g. ''is x environmentally sound?'' can be shortened with ''Green x?'' I can't think of a new question that's required because of something novel to humans e.g. experience of the 4th/5th dimension.
Quoting charleton
Thank you for the explanation.
Please read Charleton categories above.
Do you think the concepts that any individual has at any given time just sit there as static place markers? What we already know is engaged as a whole each moment of new experience. And subtly changed as a whole. This means that our understanding of ourselves and our world, whether we notice it or not, is always in process of transformation. The scientists have nothing over the average person, for each of us is a scientist in this important sense.
A finite list of abstract conceptual categories misses the point of the nature of meaning and how it changes.
We do. We use variations of the existing 7 questions to form new questions daily. However, I'm looking for an entirely new type of question - something that has to be invented to open the door of inquiry to an entirely novel kind of knowledge.
If you're interested kindly read the other posts.
We think what we want is a complete break from what went before, but what we really want is a deepening and a continuity between the new and the familiar.
No Kant's work remains a good body of theory. Hegel is regarded as a mystic.
Every without Kant, what I said remains a good idea since the Idea that Kant had to assert time and space as necessarily grounding all other knowledge remains a good one.
I wish I had your conviction. I was and always was in a perpetual state of doubt. Even things like 2+2=4 is to me simply an allegation needing some kind of proof.
Quoting Joshs
Relativity was a novel idea and although it didn't really upset classical physics it did lead to, how shall I describe it, strange ideas like time dilation, time travel. Quantum physics did the same thing. Note, I'm no expert but I'm almost completely convinced that fact is stranger than fiction and just take a look at the variety and complexity of the latter. It may be that there are some truths just waiting to be plucked off the tree of knowledge if only we knew what questions to ask.
Quoting Joshs
If you think continuity is required between two corpuses of knowledge I agree. [I]Usually[/i] knowledge builds up with simple foundations and diversifies into different disciplines. This has been the trend since we even began investigating the world. Thank you for the comment.
As I said in the OP there is a strong component of linguistic ease of expression in the 7 types of questions. It seems that ''why?'' was invented because it's easier to say it than the longer ''what is the reason?'' However, there's a different concept involved in ''why?'' - that of rationality and logic - that, to me, deserves its own question. Thus ''why?''
Are there other human experiences that are significant enough to deserve its own question?
Freud, Daniel Dennett, Foucault. Derrida, Heidegger, Piaget, the Pittsburgh school of analytic philosophy, Habermas, Adorno, Sartre,
"The Idea that Kant had to assert time and space as necessarily grounding all other knowledge remains a good one." Yes, but Hegel rejected Kant's transcendental categories.So while he agreed with Kant that space and time are subjective intuitions, against Kant he argued that they are at the same time properties of relations between objective things in the world also.
Most philosophers today move from Hegel rather than Kant on this point that space and time have inextricably both an objective and subjective aspect.
Perhaps you have never raised a dog or a cat? A perplexed look is pretty much the same thing as the question "why".
Huh... no?
"Quoi?" is an acceptable way of asking "what?" in French, but you have to be careful with your intonation, because it can easily be perceived as rude. It's more often a way to signify that you haven't understood what was just said...
Time and space have structural priority. They are, in a way, the first "dimensions" that must be exploited in developing any functional structure (and, in many sense, even structures without functions).
However, from the point of view of the unit of life, Time and Space can well be superfluous. Living time reflect dynamical recurring values ~ different degrees of lighting, heat, energy (night and day, summer and winter). There is a nearly infinite possible combination of these dynamical values, and the vast majority are not "part of our time". Minute cyclical variations in the degree of ambient radioactivity isn't part of human time, but it might be for unicellular lifeforms which might be destroyed by any un-predicted change in that value... or such things.
You have no evidence here that Hegel or any one of your list of thinkers (presumably pulled out of the Table of Contents of "The Ladybird's Book of Clever Blokes for Girls"), would refute Kant's excellent idea that Space and Time are necessary preconditions to ask any question.
(Y)
Their sharp fangs made me think of other things.
"What" in this context is different than "what" in general. Ie. What is the location of the object? The location is the part of space where the state of having the asked object is true.
Can you speak in a civilized manner without insulting animals?
(Y) sorry. No offence intended. There's a thin line between fact and insult.
Wouldn't you agree, tho, that an entity disposed toward seeking information about a state that is current, is not doing something in an entirely different scale than an entity which is asking "why" in the hope that some other agent will provide him linguistically the same information? The first entity would be said to be disposed to ask "why?", if it had any linguistic performance available.
Yes, I agree. Questions needn't be symbolized. Do you think non-symbolic (non-linguistic) inquiry is better/worse than having language-based questions? Is there something interesting in the questioning tilt of a dog's head than all of the questions in philosophy?
Well, I doubt it would make much sense to deny how linguistic inquiry is capable of so much more than non-symbolic inquiry. With a question, you can bypass every effort needed to find the answer by yourself, which is why it's so goddamn annoying when people constantly prefer to ask questions instead of seeking answers for themselves. They expect all the labour's fruits with none of the labour. I would be hard-pressed to find a line of argument to justify that prelinguistic world interaction is more powerful than the linguistic one. That's not what interest me.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes! Absolutely! I have always been completely convinced that there is more truth and wisdom about the world contained in the interactions of a toddler with its toy, of a dog with its owner, in the way you walk into a house for the first time, then in all the books you'll ever find about the subject. But that's more about my existential approach to knowledge than about the subject, really.
Language infects and transform everything it touches. Once thrown in the world of language, there is no stepping back, not in any meaningful way for philosophy and epistemology, anyways. The tilt of the dog's head, the large, fixated eyes of the cat with it's exclamative vocalization, these are our last anchors back to this prelinguistic reality.
And it's not like language doesn't come with its own cost, too. It warps just as it infects reality. As someone who was suicidal for a while, let me tell you, your own language can kill you just as easily as someone else's gun. It doesn't have to be all that dramatic either. Shame doesn't make much sense to prelinguistic beings. A master might be able to shame his dog, but I've never seen a dog shame another.
I think we still resort to prelinguistic questioning. A perplexed look, for example, is very similar to one that a dog/cat sometimes expresses.
Quoting Akanthinos
Can you expand on that. How does language infect reality?
I'm not sure but it can be said that language is a mode of communication. Thinking, even rational thinking, doesn't need language as such. As other posters here have commented even animals are capable of thought (that's an interesting topic in itself). So, some important nuances of truth may have been sacrificed for ease of communication. Do you mean that?
It never remains prelinguistic for long. The perplexed look is either a lead to an exclamative thought or a sign that leads to an explanation of another's thoughts. Our brains have stewed too long in a symbolic universe not to constantly fall back to that mode of relation.
Quoting TheMadFool
It infects our relation to the world, forcing us to constantly name everything, predicate everything, conjuguate everything. It coopt everyone of our cognitive functions and obscure their reality, relegating them to the nether of subconsciousness. It turns us into infectuous agents, categorizing, ordering and itemizing everything so as to relate easier to it, as if that was any easier than just living in it. And in turn, it obscure the reality of the world, by legitimizing questions regarding the existence of concepts. Dogs and cats aren't idealists.
Of course, this infection is a sort of commensalism, it is for the most often either neutral or positive for the host. It can also be incredibly negative.