{"id":9591,"date":"2012-06-30T10:39:57","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T10:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/30\/answering-questions-with-questions\/"},"modified":"2012-06-30T10:39:57","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T10:39:57","slug":"answering-questions-with-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/30\/answering-questions-with-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Answering Questions With Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">It is a commonplace that the grammatical form of a sentence is no sure guide to its logical form or to the ontological structure of the chunk of reality the sentence is about, if anything. For example, &#39;Kato <\/span><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Kaelin is home&#39; and &#39;Nobody is home&#39; are grammatically similar. They both seem to have the structure: singular subject\/copula\/predicate. But logically they are distinct: the first is singular, being about <\/span><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Kato Kaelin, America&#39;s most famous houseguest, while the second is existentially general. The second (standardly interpreted) is not about some dude named &#39;Nobody.&#39; What is says is that it is not the<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">case that there exists a person x such that x is at home. It is not about any particular person.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">So grammatical form and logical form need not coincide.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">It interests me (and may even interest you) that one can make both affirmative and negative assertions using sentences in the interrogative mood. What is grammatically interrogative need not be <\/span><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">logically interrogative.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Suppose someone asks whether God exists. A convinced theist can answer in the affirmative by uttering a grammatically interrogative sentence, for example, &#39;Is the Pope Catholic?&#39; An adamant atheist can answer in the negative by a similar means: &#39;Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?&#39; (Example from Edward &#39;Cactus Ed&#39; Abbey.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Thus in this situation the theist expresses the indicative proposition that God exists by uttering the interrogative form of words, &#39;Is the Pope Catholic?&#39; while the atheist expresses the indicative proposition that God does not exist by uttering the interrogative form of words, &#39;Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?&#39;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">How labile the lapping of language upon the littoral of logic!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is a commonplace that the grammatical form of a sentence is no sure guide to its logical form or to the ontological structure of the chunk of reality the sentence is about, if anything. For example, &#39;Kato Kaelin is home&#39; and &#39;Nobody is home&#39; are grammatically similar. They both seem to have the structure: &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/30\/answering-questions-with-questions\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Answering Questions With Questions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[581,408],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbey-cactus-ed","category-language-philosophy-of"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}