For whether-questions indeed, for all elementary questions in the view of some , the question-answer relationship can be defined in purely formal terms. One approach to why-questions is to try to make the question-answer relationship formal in that case, too, or at least as formal as possible.
The main proponent of this approach is Bromberger , whose account is also the first influential account of why-questions. Van Fraassen takes an opposite view, theorizing that the question-answer relationship is almost purely pragmatic.
We consider both theories in some detail below. Bromberger introduces several concepts for use in his account: the presupposition of a why-question, abnormic laws and their antonymic predicates , and general rules , focusing especially on general rules that are completed by abnormic laws. A general rule is a true or false law-like statement of the form:. A special abnormic law is a true, law-like statement of the form:.
Special abnormic laws satisfy five additional conditions of non-triviality and non-redundancy that we need not get into, and Bromberger , 98 introduces the more complicated notion of a general abnormic law, which we may also ignore for present purposes.
Bromberger , 98 illustrates the concept of an abnormic law with the following example:. Now consider the question:. For example, consider a straight, foot high utility pole standing perpendicular to the ground. A taut foot wire is fastened to the top of the pole and to a point on the ground 30 feet from the base of the pole.
Bromberger , argues that 22 does not count as a correct answer to 21 on his theory in part because the following is not an abnormic law:. A second major development in the theory of why-questions is the account of van Fraassen , ch. Rather, an explanation is just a description of reality that serves a contextually determined purpose, namely that of answering a why-question.
He offers this theory in the context of developing his account of Constructive Empiricism. The contrast class parameter allows one to distinguish different why-questions that have the same topic. Thus one can ask why northern hemisphere birds rather than mammals or reptiles go south for the winter, and this is different from asking why northern hemisphere birds go south rather than north or west for the winter. Until one specifies a contrast class, van Fraassen argues, a particular why-question has not been identified or posed.
One can ask why in order to request causal factors, to request a justification, to request a purpose, to request a motive, to request a function, and so on. When the first or second presupposition fails because the contextually determined body of background knowledge in play does not entail both i and ii , the why-question does not arise. When the third presupposition fails, the why-question has no answer even if it arises.
For example, suppose that paresis indeterministically strikes some people who have untreated syphilis. If there are no such causal factors, as in the first version of the paresis case, the question is to be rejected. Firstly, it must be noted that not every how-question requests an explanation.
Thirdly, Cross argues that one can see phenomena of explanatory contrast in how-questions in such examples as the following:. This, Cross argues, reflects the fact that how-questions can exhibit two different kinds of explanatory contrast.
By asking 30a one requests an answer that highlights those special qualities of DNA that enable it to replicate and that benzene and hexane do not possess. By asking 30b , on the other hand, one requests an answer that highlights the differences between the way in which reptiles reproduce and the ways in which mammals and birds reproduce. The latter kind of explanatory contrast also appears to be at play when 30b is re-worded this way:. Finally, Cross , defines a direct answer to a how-question as follows:.
Having found examples in which how-questions have contrast value 1, Cross argues that why-questions, too, can presuppose that the other members of their contrast classes are true. Consider a therapy meeting for alcoholics in which each member of the group is asked the following question:. In this case it appears that the asker is requesting an answer that highlights factors that distinguish the alcoholism of the person to whom the question is addressed from that of the others in the group.
The unification that Cross proposes assumes that why-questions can have contrast value 1, but Risjord , 73—4 argues that instead of accepting that 35 is a why-question with contrast value 1, one can instead analyze it as a why-question with contrast value 0 that makes reference to the topics of other why-questions also having contrast value 0 that have been or could be raised in the given context.
But questions of these forms need not be equivalent, since they may call for different answers. Lipton , calls this The Difference Condition. The central requirement for a sensible contrastive question is that fact and negated foil have a similar causal history against which the differences stand out Lipton , According to Barnes , Lipton is correct that fact and negated foil must have a similar causal history, but Barnes goes further and claims that a why-question presupposes that the fact and foil can be viewed as culminating outcomes of some single type of natural causal process Barnes , In recent years the topic of why-questions has been somewhat neglected by philosophers, at least compared to other topics in the theory of questions.
Another notable development is Skow , which begins with two key ideas: first, that a theory of explanation ought to be a theory of answers to why-questions, and, second, that a theory of answers to why-questions is a theory of reasons-why. Skow goes on to defend the view that reasons-why are causes or grounds, and he argues that reasons-why come in levels. Interrogative expressions can be embedded as wh-complements or indirect questions into attitude contexts to form sentences that are declarative, as when someone is said to know, tell, care, or wonder who, what, whether, how, or why.
Where the attitude in question is knowledge, these sorts of examples are called knowledge-wh. The discussion of knowledge-wh has focused mostly on whether-, what-, which-, and who-complements, as in these examples:.
Groenendijk and Stokhof provide a rich source of examples of intuitively valid and invalid inferences involving wh-complements, such as the following intuitively valid inference :. The imperative-epistemic account is further developed by Hintikka , and has been influential among philosophers of science interested in models of inquiry and discovery, such as Kleiner According to the imperative-epistemic account, to ask a question is to issue an imperative requiring the addressee to bring it about that the speaker knows the answer to the question.
Knowledge-wh comes into it because to know the answer is to be in a state that can be described using a knowledge-wh sentence. For example, according to the imperative-epistemic account, question 41 is to be understood as imperative 42 :. Is a wh-complement occurring in a longer sentence a meaningful unit? If so, what does it denote? Several early approaches to wh-complements can be organized around answers to these questions. Assuming that wh-complements are meaningful units of the sentences in which they occur, one option Groenendijk and Stokhof is to take wh-complements to denote individual propositions.
A second option Karttunen is to take wh-complements to denote sets of propositions. On the view that wh-complements denote individual propositions, wh-complements and that-complements are treated uniformly, and Groenendijk and Stokhof contend that this uniform treatment is a virtue of their theory.
Lewis favors the same sort of account, but Lewis applies it only to whether-complements. Indeed, Hintikka , Chapter 4 argues that knowledge-wh sentences like 37 - 39 are ambiguous between two readings: a universal reading and an existential reading. Examples like 46 are identity questions , which seem intuitively to call for a dimension of context-dependence that standard theories of the question-answer relationship do not accommodate.
The idea is that different ways of identifying Hong Oak Yun are relevant in different contexts; accordingly, different propositions count as answers or as correct answers to 46 in different contexts. Aloni provides a recent example of a theory designed to accommodate this intuition.
Braun rejects the intuition entirely. To know who Hong Oak Yun is , according to Braun, is simply to know the truth of a proposition that answers 46 , which is to say, to know the truth of any proposition that provides information about Hong Oak Yun. The problem, according to Schaffer, is that if knowledge-wh is reduced to knowledge-that and is not question-relative, then cases of knowledge-wh that should be distinguished will not be distinguished.
Schaffer calls this the Problem of Convergent Knowledge. For example, suppose that 47 is true:. On a non-question-relative account of knowledge-wh that reduces knowledge-wh to knowledge-that, all three of the following will be equivalent because all three can be reduced to 47 :. Schaffer argues that sentences like 48a—c are not equivalent. Schaffer argues, in the end, that all knowledge, including knowledge-that, is question-relative. Knowledge-wh is only one of a broader category of attitudes corresponding to what Lahiri calls responsive predicates.
Rogative predicates can accept interrogative complements but cannot accept declarative complements. For example, one can inquire who ate the last doughnut, but one cannot inquire that John ate the last doughnut.
Friedman calls these the interrogative attitudes, and they are precisely the attitudes denoted by rogative predicates. Within the category of responsive predicates Lahiri , distinguishes the veridical from the non-veridical. Whereas a veridical-responsive predicate expresses a relation to the correct answer to its interrogative complement, a non-veridical-responsive predicate expresses a relation to a possible but not necessarily the correct answer.
Other classifications of question-embedding verbs exist and are surveyed by Lahiri , — For a detailed critique of the recent literature on knowledge-wh, see Chapter 2 of Stanley Parent provides a survey of the recent literature about knowledge-wh organized around three issues: the reducibility of knowledge-wh to knowledge-that, the relativity of knowledge-wh to a contrast proposition, and the issue of whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is to be understood as a semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon.
The Uegaki manuscript listed below under Other Internet Resources provides an overview of recent work on the semantics of responsive predicates generally and is organized around four approaches: the reduction of questions to propositions, the reduction of propositions to questions, the uniformity approach on which declarative and interrogative complements of a responsive predicate are of the same semantic type , and the ambiguity approach which postulates distinct proposition-taking and question-taking readings of a given responsive predicate.
The authors are listed alphabetically. Cross wrote sections 1, 3, and 4; Roelofsen wrote section 2. Preliminaries 1. The semantics of elementary questions 2. Why-questions 3. Embedded or indirect questions 4. Preliminaries R. Jimmy Carter d. Gerald Ford e. Someone over three inches tall was the President of the USA in Consider the first example: 3 Was there a quorum at the meeting?
There was a quorum at the meeting. There was not a quorum at the meeting. Thus 4 is a corrective answer to 3 : 4 The meeting did not take place. Jones lives in Italy.
Jones lives in Spain. Jones lives in Germany. On the latter reading, 5 presupposes that Jones lives in Italy, in Spain, or in Germany; thus 6 is a corrective answer to 5 : 6 Jones does not live in Italy, in Spain, or in Germany.
Yet another major category of questions are embedded or indirect questions, which occur as wh-complements in declarative sentences: 7 John knows who spoke to Mary.
The semantics of elementary questions This section provides an overview of some of the most prominent treatments of elementary questions at the intersection of philosophy of language and formal semantics. To illustrate this point, consider the following example: 8 Who is coming for dinner tonight?
Paul is coming. Only Paul and Nina are coming. Some girls from my class are coming. Bibliography Aloni, M. Aloni, M. Beaver, B. Clark, and R.
Aloni, A. Butler, and P. Dekker eds. Asher, N. Trying to understand the viewpoints of others and not writing them off if we disagree is essential, especially as national politics become more heated and personal. In the wake of the violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month, Van der Gaag said she has tried to contemplate how people may have developed such beliefs. This contemplation is exactly the point of philosophy. And the incident in Charlottesville is just one example of a current event that philosophy can offer us a better insight on.
For topics that are this important, we need to gain understanding, so we can work to make our world a better place for everyone. And though it may not seem grandiose, I think a philosophy class just might be the best way to start this mission.
Socrates strongly believed unlike modern society that the cultivation of virtue is the most important pursuit in life. He believed that virtue leads to a good and fulfilling life.
A socratic definition answers a socratic question. Aristotle said what we do for its own sake is the Supreme Good the most important thing in life and that Supreme Good is Happiness. Every single thing we do in life is done because we think and hope it will lead to happiness. What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Socrates came first, and Plato was his student, around BC.
The Athenians voted to kill Socrates in BC. Immanuel Kant is the most important name in modern ethics. He is a follower of both the Intuitionists and Naturalists. Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics.
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