I asked, “Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?” Tom Carroll responded, “I think you meant that rhetorically, but yes — that is the way I understand it.”
Two points.
First, rhetorical questions should be used sparingly if at all in serious, non-polemical writing. If you have something to say, say it and use the indicative mood. So no, I did not mean the question about potencies rhetorically. When I write philosophy I avoid rhetorical questions. It is different when I write polemically. For example, “Whoever said that illegal aliens are illegal persons?” is an example of a rhetorical question. *
Second, how should we define ‘rhetorical question’? A rhetorical question is a sentence, spoken or written, that is grammatically interrogative but logically indicative. It is a sentence in the form of a question used to make a statement or assert a proposition. A sentence is not the same as the proposition it is used, by someone on a given occasion, to express. We use ‘The sky is blue’ to express the same proposition a German speaker expresses when he says Der Himmel ist blau. The two sentences, which express one and the same sense (Frege’s Sinn) are both token-distinct and type-distinct. They are type-distinct because they belong to different languages. These facts point us in a Platonic direction.
Just what is the ontological status of this proposition (Frege’s Gedanke) that is one to the many of its sentential expressions? And what about language-bound linguistic types, in particular sentence types, which are different for different languages? What is their ontic and epistemic status? What is their mode of being and how do we know them? Do you eyeball (literally see) the type? No you don’t. These types too are one to the many of their tokens. These two questions pose quite the challenge to the nominalists among us and give aid and comfort to Platonists and other species of realists.
But I digress.
One more observation anent rhetorical uses of sentences. A father says to his teenaged daughter who borrowed the old man’s car and is seen yapping on a cell phone while driving: ” Do you have to talke on that blasted phone while driving?”
I’d say that that is a rhetorical question too despite the fact that the semantic content of the man’s grammatically interrogative sentence is not indicative but imperative. He is issuing a command, not making a statement, by the use of a grammatically interrogative sensentence.
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*By the way, polemics has no place in philosophy proper, a topic for a separate post, wherein I would have to define ‘philosophy proper.’ This goes hand-in-hand with my deep conviction that to philosophize is to inquire, and not to promote or defend a ready-made worldview. It follows that an apology for philosophy is not a defense of any particular philosophy, but of the practice of philosophy-as-inquiry. Philosophies are many; philosophy is one. It also follows that a particular philosopher’s apologia pro vita sua (apology for his life) such as the one Socrates offers in the eponymous Platonic dialogue, is a defense of the highest and most noble form of the life of inquiry. The Latin phrase alludes to a title of an autobiographical word by John Henry Newman, which I haven’t read, but whose The Idea of the University I have read and recommend that you read. If I were king of the world I would force ever leftist university admin to copy it out by hand.