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What is a question?
John E. Llewelyn

University of New England

Published online: 18 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: John E. Llewelyn (1964) What is a question?, Australasian Journal
of Philosophy, 42:1, 69-85, DOI: 10.1080/00048406412341051
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W H A T IS A QUESTION? 1
By JOHN E. LLEWELYN

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1.

EROTET[C LOGtC

'True', 'false', 'affirmative', 'negation', 'entails', 'materially

implies', 'categorical', 'hypothetical', 'disjunctive', 'tautology',
'contradictory' . . .: these words are part of the logician's stockin-trade. 'Appropriateness', 'point', 'contextually implies', 'presupposes', 'misleading', 'self-stultifying' . . .: the use or analysis
of the use of these latter expressions should not, certain philosophers would argue, figure in the logician's agenda, but is rather
the business of the expert in pragmatics, rhetoric or social anthropology. The kind of boundary these philosophers would draw
between the purists aad the anthropologists is hinted at in the
concluding paragraph of an article entitled 'Erotetic Logic' by
A. and M. Prior. They write:
We have found that the things which it seems proper to say
about questions are exactly the things which logicians of a
conservative and antisymbolic bent (like Cook Wilson)---or
of a radical and antisymbolic bent (like Mr. Peter Strawson);
it is the same thing anyway--have said about propositions.
Erotetic logic would seem to be antisymbolic; and we hazard
the suggestion that, conversely, antisymbolic logic is erotetic.
That is, it is consciously or unconsciously preoccupied with
types of questions rather than with types of statements, and
what there is of value in its belongs properly to the 'erotetic'
field."
The authors of this article draw their line between a logic of
statements and erotetic logic, a logic of question and answer,
which is 'antisymbolic'. It would be worth considering whether
the line should not rather be drawn between a logic of neutral
units, e.g. the 'thoughts', a 'propositional concepts', ~ 'propositionradicals', ~ 'descriptors' or 'phrastics ' of recent literature and, on
For critical comments on an earlier version of this paper 1 am especially
indebted to :I. F. Bennett, N. L. Cooper and R. Routley.
2 Philosophical Review LXlV (I955), p. 59.
~Gottlob Frege, 'Negation', Geach and Black (eds.), Philosophffa/ fVriting.s
o~ Gottlob Frege (Oxford, 1952). Cf. P. F. Strawson, lndividlmls (London,
1959), pp. 244-246.
4Bertrand Russell, Principles ol Mathematics, 2rid ed. (London, t9371,
pp. 503 ft.
6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical lnrestigaiions (Oxford. 1953), p. 14.
S R. M. Hare, 'Imperative Sentences', Milld LVIII (1949), and his The
Language o/ Morals (Oxford, 19521. Cf. the distinction between 'factors" and
'themes' made by A. Ross, 'Imperatives and Logic', Philosophy o/ Sciem'e 11
(19441, p. 38.

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JOHN E. LLEWELYN

the other hand, the logics of the resultants of joining a neutral

unit with an operator of one logical mood or another. This would
put the logic of statements on the same footing as erotetic logic
and the logic of imperatives, and it would be no less 'antisymbolic'
than they. The central position assumed by the propositional
calculus would thus be ceded to the logic of the residual neutral
units after the "operative' propositional features had been extruded. It is not part of the programme of the present article to
test these speculations nor to examine the reasons that the Priors
give for concluding the way they do. I shall be contented if I
succeed here in upsetting one of the arguments that would nip
these speculations in the bud. This argument has the form: 'There
can't be a logic of questions, whether an antisymbolic one or not,
for there are really no such things as questions at all in the last
analysis'. That is, I want to show that questions cannot be analysed
away--at any rate, not by any of the three kinds of analysis that
look in the least promising. I want to show that there ate some
jobs done in English by means of sentences end-stopped by
question-marks which cannot be done without such sentences,
gestural equivalents or other symbolic devices explicitly introduced
as substitutes for such sentences: that the grammatical interrogative mood is not redundant but flags a logical or, if you like,
pragmatic interrogative mood. The discussion will be confined to
atomic questions.
2. CAN ALL QUESTIONS BE FRAMED AS INDICATIVES?

This question has been answered in the affirmative by H.

Jeffreys in his Theory ol Probability, 7 and one might be disposed
to agree without hesitation that at least rhetorical questions are
amenable to this treatment since they resemble indicatives in that
they appear togive rather than invite information. This resemblance is especially strong if the title 'rhetorical' is reserved, as it
is throughout this article, for questions to which no answer is
expected because what the answer would be goes without saying,
because there is a convention or regulation that the addressee
shall remain silent, or because the addressee is known to be mute
or out of earshot, as with a poet's apostrophe to the dead. And
it is only slightly less strong in the case of what may conveniently
be described as semi-rhetorical questions, i.e. those questions to
which an answer would not be out of place though the intonation
pattern and occasion of utterance make it clear what the poser of
it expects the answer to be. Yet it is clear that if a platoon
commander addresses his men in the words 'We shall not turn
Oxford, 1948, p. 378. Compare Wittgenstein, op. cir., 24.

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WHAT IS

A QUESTION?

71

back after advancing so far' he forfeits the impression of give and

take between his hearers and himself that he could have conveyed
if he had instead put the rhetorical question 'Shall we turn back
after advancing so far?" The interrogative carries the implication
that the men have a say in the matter. If it were claimed that in
pointing to this kind of difference we had already rebutted the
contention that all questions can be expressed in the indicative
mood, the rejoinder might be that in the case put forward we had
failed to show that the indicative version would not do for all
significant purposes; i.e. the difference might be decried as merely
stylistic or rhetorical and therefore peripheral. Now although it
would seem that in a discussion that is e x hypothesi about a
rhetorical device stylistic and rhetorical differences are by no
means peripheral, let us consider briefly the position of a genuine
enquiry like 'When did you last see your father?' This question
presupposes but does not state that the person addressed had a
father whom he has seen at least once, and creates the presumption
that the speaker believes this. The only indicative sentences that
could be used to state the information invited are those that would
answer the question (this is a tautology); and to make an answer
equivalent to a question in this way is to take away the distinction
between questions and answers and therewith the interest of asking
whether the former are expressible in indicatives, s The reductionists will admit t h e rashness of this move but hold that they
need go to no such extreme. According to them the work of the
above interrogative sentence can be done no less well by 'I wonder
when you last saw your father' or, if not b y this, then by 'I want
to know the date on which you last saw your father' or 'I should
like you to tell me the date on which you last saw your father" or
'I believe you know when you last saw your father' or 'I do not
know when you last saw your father' or by a combination of some
of these.
We often do use such forms to elicit information, but we
often do not. 'I should like you to tell me the date on which y o u
last saw your father' might elicit the response 'April l st', or the
retort 'Would you?'. 'Would you?' has as an alternative the
indicative 'I see, you would like me to tell you the date on which
I last saw my father', but how, without resorting to the interrogative mood, can it be made clear that what is wanted is news, not
sympathetic understanding? Not simply by going on to explain
that the words were intended as a request for information, since the
interrogator would be satisfied only by information of a certain
s For criticism of recent attempts to show that a question is equivalent to its
correct answer or a disjunction of its answers see C. L. Hamblin, "Questions
Aren't Statements', Philosophy o/ Science 30 (1963), pp. 62-63,

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Joltr~ E. LLEWELYN

kind. He might therefore try this: 'My statement that I should

like you to tell me the date on which you last saw your father
was intended not as an observation but as a request for information which would make it possible for me to make a complete
statement out of "This person last saw his father on . . ." and
to be uttering a true statement when I uttered it'. But he has still
not forestalled the riposte 'Oh, you would' or another merely
corroborative indicative or a confession from the person being
questioned that he did not understand what was meant by 'request'
and would someone please explain. That is, the indicative reduction of questions cannot be performed without appeal either to
interrogatives, and thus the question would be begged, or to
requests, which in turn would by an analogous argument be seen
to be inexplicable without reference to interrogatives or imperatives.
But before determining whether a reduction of questions to
imperatives can fare better than a reduction of questions to
indicatives let us weigh the chances of another candidate.
3. CAN ALL QUESTIONS BE FRAMED AS PROPOSITIONAL
FUNCTtONS?
An atfirmative answer to this question is given by F. S.
Cohen, Carnap, Lewis and Langford, Reichenbach, Ryle, C. L.
Hamblin and others. 9 All these writers suggest that it throws light
on the logic of questions to consider how far the analogy between
the use of interrogatives and propositional functions goes. Only
Cohen, however, explicitly supplements the suggestion that questions may be regarded as propositional functions with the thesis
that there are no propositional functions which are not questions.
He gets to this latter conclusion via the alleged discovery of a
solecism in Russell's account of propositional functions in the
Principles o] M a t h e m a t i c s and the first edition of Principia
Mathematica. A detailed discussion of Cohen's remarks on Russell
is not necessary since there is a quick way of dealing with the
former's contention that propositional functions are in ]act questions. For could this fiat claim be anything other than a platitude?
If we take Cohen to be counting the words 'where?', 'who?',
'when?', 'what?', 'why?', 'how?' 'whither?', etc., as variables and
*F. S. Cohen, 'What is a Question?', Monist XXXIX (1929); Rudolf
Carnap, The Logical Syntax o! Language (London, 1937), p. 296; C. I. Lewis
and C. H. Langford, Symbolic Logic (New York, 1932), pp. 332 ft.; Hans
Reichenbach, Elements ol Symbolic Logic (New York, 194"/), pp. 339 ft.; Gilbert
Ryle, 'Categories', Proceedings ot the Aristolelian Society N.S. XXXVII!
(1937-8); C. L. Hamblin, 'Questions', Australasian Journal o/ Philosophy XXXVI
(1958), and C. F. Presley in the succeeding volume of the same journal.

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WHAT Is A QUESTION?

73

therefore such sentences as 'Where did you get that h a r t as

propositional functions, then of such functions it is true but trivial
to say that they are questions. If on the other hand the propositional functions Cohen is talking about are such expressions as
'x is the place at which you got that hat', then the claim is
puzzling; it is difficult to see what it could amount to; and it is
still more puzzling to be told that in fact ',x' is a question. That
Cohen holds that not only 'Is Socrates mortal?', 'x is mortal', and
'x --- 3 q- 5' are questions, but that '4~x' is also one is evidcnt
from the following passage:
In the second edition of the Principia Matllematica, Russell
and Whitehead show that what was previously asserted in the
form of ~bx, (where ~ is a constant), may be asserted in the
form of the universal proposition, (x).epx, and state somewhat cryptically that the "assertion of a propositional function" is no longer needed. We may infer, I think, that thc
reason it is no longer needed is that it does not exist. One
cannot "assert" a question. TM
Cohen's bald statement is baffling for the following reason.
Asking questions is something one begins to do at a very early age,
and our familiarity with them would make us confident that we
could answer at least some questions about questions. But there
is no analogous early experience we could draw on to guide us in
answering questions anyone might put to us about propositional
functions. Even consultation of grammar-books would be of no
avail. And from books on logic all we would learn would be that
such and such a logician introduced what he called 'propositional
functions' as a gadget to perform such and such a role. We might
even become sufficiently familiar with the text to be able to
proclaim that in spite of what he said on p. 92, in view of what he
said on pp. 13, 38, 87 and 421, the author was using the expression 'propositional function' to perform not the role for which
he said he had cast it, but another role. Since, however, there arc
no conventions for the application of the term 'propositional
function' outside those prescribed by Russell or another logician
who introduces the term, it would be vain for anyone to make
the quite general observation that propositional functions arc
questions. And it is just this, rather than commenting solely on
Russell or legislating on his own behalf, that Cohen seems to bc
doing. It may be objected that therc are non-technical propositional functions since there are non-technical variables other
than the words 'who?', 'where?', etc.. viz. pronouns. ~ But to infer
'" Op. oil., p. 358.
~' W. v. O. Q u i n e , Melhvd,~ v / Logic ( l o n d o n ,

19.~2), pp, 127 fl,

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JOHN E. LLEWELYN

that whenever we use pronouns we are putting questions would

be to demonstrate conclusively that 'question' was here being used
in a technical and esoteric way so that it would now be doubtful
whether the analysis had any bearing on questions of the common
or garden variety. It would need to be shown that a discussion of
questions in this novel sense was not irrelevant to questions as
these are customarily conceived.
Not knowing what to make of the declaration that propositional functions are questions, let us consider the less paradoxical
thesis that Cohen advances in common with Carnap, viz. that
questions can be construed as propositional functions. This is also
implied by Ryle's statement in 'Categories' that '"Socrates is 4,"
exhibits no more or less than "Where is Socrates?" or "What-like
(qualis) is Socrates?" or "How big is Socrates?" according to the
genre selected for ~k'. It should be noted that at this stage in his
article Ryle's primary concern is to cast light on the notions of
propositional function and the range of a variable rather than to
make a point about the logic of questions, and that, as contrasted
with Cohen, Ryle says only that '"Socrates is 'k" exhibits no
more or less than "Where is Socrates?" or . . .'. He also says
that we have to select a genre for 4,. The genus of the question is
the range of true and false answers which a question pre-empts.
It furnishes the most useful criterion for a classification of
enquiries. 1-
In order that the genus may be exhibited in the propositional
function and in order to preclude a deadlock like that which was
seen to arise from the attempt to make indicative sentences do the
work of interrogative sentences, the propositional function must be
" T h i s method of classification' could be extended to include rhetorical and
other kinds of questions. An alternative classificatory technique would be to
arrange questions according to how many answers they pre-empt rather than the
kind of answers they pre-empt. If we list rhetorical and related questions along
with enquiries and disregard compound and molecular questions like 'Who's who':"
and 'Where do we go and when7' a scale may be drawn up limited at one end by
questions that are satisfied by an infinite number of answers and at the other end
by questions that are satisfied only by a non-answer. E.g.:
'How many did you say?"
'Who is Socrates?'
"Which of the twelve Apostles wrote the Epistle to the EphesiansT
'Was Plato Socrates' pupil?'
The semi-rhetorical 'Shall we turn back after advancing so far':"
The quasi-rhetorical 'Are we downhearted?' (where a ritualistic 'No" is
invited and where it would not be playing the game to answer with
silence or with 'Yes').
The rhetorical 'Shall we turn back after advancing so far?"
There are demisemi, hemidemisemi, etc., possibilities not shown here, but
note that since the scale is constructed according to the number of answers
pre-empted no complication is caused by the fact that the response to a question
is sometimes the gloss that it doesn't arise ('How many did you say?'--'! didn't
say anything.') or the request that it be reframed ('Who is Socrates?'--'You
mean "What is Socrates? . . . . Socrates" is the name I give to my vintage car').

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75

expanded in the way indicated by Carnap: 'To symbolize the

question ("When was Charles in Berlin?"), the variable whose
argument is requested must be bound by means of a questionoperator, e.g., "(?t) (Charles was t in Berlin)"'.la To cover
enquiries of minimum range a question operator and a 'validational
variable' (Sheffer) with perhaps three but at least two values,
'true' and 'false', would be needed. Enquiries of this last-mentioned
type are the 'yes/no' or 'whether-or-not' variety. The Priors call
these 'whether' questions, but this name does not pick out only
enquiries of minimum range since, as they themselves remark,
some 'whether' enquiries present a range of possible answers
which is limited but need not be limited to so few as two or three.
For example, 1 may ask whether this tree is an elm, a sycamore, a
maple, a plane or a lime, and the information sought may be more
specific than would be given by the answer 'Yes' or 'No'. Contrast
this question with 'Which of . . . ?' and 'What?' questions where
there is a determinate number of possible answers, as in 'Which of
the Apostles wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians?' If all 'variable'
questions were of this kind it would be possible to regard them as
a disjunction of yes/no questions, but in practice when one poses
a variable question one would be hard put to it to cover it with
a set of yes/no questions, for the range of a question is often
indefinitely extendible or indefinitely divisible or not divisible at
all into discrete units, at least not by the questioner. If our aim
is to simplify our interrogative logic this is better done by treating
yes/no questions as variable questions of the form 'What is the
truth-value of S?'
Thus although we can construct propositional functions which
exhibit many of the features of questions, propositional functions
can do what Cohen claims they can, viz. stand in Jor interrogatives, only if they contain a question operator. It might be proposed, however, that instead of introducing a question operator the
same end could be accomplished by means of a request operator
the function of which would be to signal the requirement t h a t all
but one of two or more given alternatives be struck out. Ryle, it
should be noted, says that questions are propositional functions
only in so far as the former are considered 'in abstraction from
their practical role as petitions or commands'. 1~ But Cohen's
claim is not qualified in this way. For him to admit a question
operator wouId be openly to admit defeat; and to admit a request
operator would be to change the subject. Let us therefore change
the subject, for examination of the credentials of the indicative
~'~Op. cit., p. 296.
l"Op. cir., p. 195. My italics.

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candidate showed that it, too, might be dependent on an imperative analysis.

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4.

CAN ALL QUESTIONS BE FRAMED AS IMPERATIVES?

An atlirmative answer to this question has been proposed by

Bosanquet t~ and R. M. Hare. Hare writes:
It would seem, in fact, that questions can be translated
without loss of meaning into commands; thus 'Who is at the
door?' can be translated 'Name the person who is at the
door' (where 'who' is of course a relative and not an indirect
interrogative), and 'Are you married?' can be translated 'I
a m / a m not* married, *Strike out whichever is inapplicable'.
Here again, 'whichever' is of course a relative. In general, a
question can be translated into a command either to put
values to the variables in a sentential function, or to assert
one of the component sentences of a disjunction. TM
In a comment on Hate's suggestion G. C. Field concedes
that the schoolmaster's question to his pupils does approximate to
a command and that the imperative analysis might fit such questions ~s theseJ T But, says Field,
it makes a funny story when we hear of anyone ordering
himself to do this or that. On the other hand we quite
normally and naturally put questions to ourselves. If 1 am all
alone and hear a sudden unfamiliar noise, my immediate
state of mind would be most naturally and properly expressed
by the words "What's this?" whether or not 1 actually pronounce them. And at more complicated levels of thought, wc
often use phrases to the effect that we have to discover what
are the right questions to ask before we can expect to get an
answerJ a
In view of this criticism let us rephrase Hare's thesis more
liberally as the claim that imperative sentences can always be used
to do the work of interrogative sentences. A justification for this
restatement is the explanation that Hare elsewhere gives that he is
using "command' to 'cover all these sorts of things that sentences
in the imperative mood express'. TM
Are self-addressed imperatives as rare and odd as Field
supposes? On the face of it there is something superfluous in
~:'Logic (Oxford, 1888), Vol. !, pp. 36 and 380 n. 2, and Knowledge and
Rctdil), (London, 1885), p. ll4.
in,imperative Sentences', p. 24.
~:Cf. C. Sigwart, Logic (London, 1895). Vol. l, p. 177.
~'Note on Imperatives', Mind LIX (1950), p...232.
" The Language oJ Morals, p. 4.

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commanding or requesting oneself to do something when one is

already in a position such that one cannot fail to know what it is
that one wants done. But likewise with self-interrogation (and,
come to that, with indicative statements made to oneself) one is in
a position to know whether or not one knows the answer to the
question; so, whether one does know or not, self-interrogation
seems in both cases to be otiose. But imperatives no less than
interrogatives are not infrequently addressed to oneself without its
making a funny story. Consider the following snatch of dialogue
of the soul with itself: 'Let me see now. What time did I say I'd
be t h e r e ? - - I seem to remember saying 10.15.--What do I make
it n o w ? - - W h a t have you done with your watch, Smith?--Bother!
I must have left it on the mantlepiece.--Or was it on the t a b l e ? Oh, stop dithering.'
In this interior dialogue both first and second personal interrogatives and imperatives occur. -~ If Smith had addressed third
personal interrogatives and imperatives to himself his communings
might indeed make a subject for a funny story, or else for a
psychiatrist, and we might well find self-addressed first or second
person imperatives comic if we thought of them, as Field does,
as orders like 'Quick march!' which Field takes as the paradigm
use of imperative sentences. He might have been less reluctant to
follow Hare if he had recalled that the French for 'to ask' is
demander and for 'to wonder' se demander; and that written
injunctions are often addressed to oneself, e.g. 'Return library
book' scribbled on the memo pad.
There is nonetheless something in Field's assumption that a
preliminary classification of sentence uses can be made on the
basis of a comparison of uses which raise a laugh with those which
leave us straight-faced. Here, to pass from Field to the FieldMarshal, is an excerpt from The Times Parliamentary Reports:
MR. W I G G asked whether Field-Marshal Montgomery
would be charged under Sections 40 and 41 of the Army
Act, in that he, by retaining possession of military documents which he had not been authorized to retain, had
contravened the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, 191 I.
SIR W. C H U R C H I L L - - N o . (Laughter)
This reported laughter was occasioned, I hazard, not only by the
contrast between the succinctness of Sir W. Churchill's reply and
the orotundity of Mr. Wigg's question, hut also by the fact that
to almost everyone in the House other than Mr. Wigg the question
'" Although 'Let . . .' is second personal il is handy to be able to distinguish
"let m e . , " from "Let h i m . , ." as lit'st and third persoaal impcz~tive,-,
respectively.

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was too preposterous to call for an answer. That Field-Marshal

Montgomery should be charged was to them out of the question.
The answer was so plainly 'No' that they could not conceive of
their putting the question themselves except as a rhetorical question. With this as an example of a rhetorical question (though
Mr. Wigg evidently intended it as either a serious or a jocular
enquiry), we may now ask whether Hate's method of analysis can
deal with it.
Any acceptable imperative translation of this yes/no kind of
rhetorical question would have to allow for the fact, often signalled
in such rhetorical and semi-rhetorical questions by the presence of
the negative particle or the word 'surely', that the question is not a
request for information and that what the answer would be goes
without saying. Consider this version: 'Field-Marshal Montgomery
is/is not* to be charged, *Strike out and do not strike out whichever is inapplicable'.
If this is rejected as self-contradictory or self-stultifying, Hare
might observe that whether a particular interrogative sentence is
being used rhetorically or not may be made clear not by any
linguistic factor but only by the non-linguistic background of the
utterance. In a parallel fashion, he might point out, the nonlinguistic background would make it clear that the imperative was
to be cancelled in 'Field-Marshal Montgomery is/is not* to be
charged, *Strike out whichever is inapplicable' and that the speaker
had already decided which alternative applied. Variable rhetoricals
present no problems special to themselves.
Hate's method of translation appears adequate, then, to
enquiries and rhetorical questions. There is, however, a large class
of questions remaining to be examined. They overlap rhetorical
questions in so far as they do not invite information, but they
have the further object of getting someone to do something. These
'practical' questions, as we shall call them, are of two varieties,
request questions and deliberative questions.
Requests would seem to give Hare no trouble at all; these
can be translated into imperatives without adopting the special
style introduced for coping with requests for information. Thus,
"Would you turn off the radio?' becomes 'Please turn off the radio'.
Of course, the sentence 'Would you turn off the radio?' could
be used to request information: 'Suppose you had your radio on
and the chap in the next room asked you to turn it off so that he
could practise his trombone. Would you turn off the radio?'
Where, however, the sentence is not being thus used to invite an
illocutionary response, i.e. where the information sought is not

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79

what would be given in uttering the reply,21 the question would not
be satisfied by a locutionary response unless (a) this (e.g. 'Certainly') were accompanied by a performance or attempted performance of the action requested or (b) the locutionary response
offered an excuse for the non-performance of the non-iUocutionary
action, e.g. 'But my hands are all over in flour'. A requested nonillocutionary response, it should be noted, may be locutionary, e.g.
Henry Higgins' 'Say after me "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the
plain" '.
We note finally of questions requesting non-illocutionary
responses that they are satisfied by performance or attempted
performance of the requested action even when this is unaccompanied by an illocutionary act (like the acquiescive 'Certainly'),
except for one or two cases such as 'Would you mind turning off
the radio?' which, unlike 'Would you turn off the radio?', might be
used because the speaker wants the non-iilocutionary act performed onIy if he can rest assured that the person addressed has
no objection to performing it. The indicator of whether this were
so or not would be the tone of voice in which it was uttered and
the relationship of the questioner to the person addressed. Is he a
prefect? Did he snap the words out? Was it during 'prep'? Here
we are asking not what response satisfies the question, but what
response satisfies the questioner. We have left logic, even
pragmatics, a good way behind, and are getting involved in
matters of social anthropology. Let us beat a retreat.
5.

DELIBERATIVE QUESTIONS

'Deliberative' is the name adopted by J. M. O. Wheatley-+

for a class of questions which are 'satisfied' by expressions having
not a truth-value, as is the case with answers to enquiries, but what
may be called a 'support-value'. Thus, according to Wheatley
(whose terminology we shall later find reason to modify) the
question "Shall i vote Conservative?' is satisfied by 'I will vote
Conservative' even though 1 may have decided to vote Liberal, in
which case the resolution, i.e., the expression '1 will vote Conservative', is said to be unsupported. Likewise, 'I will not vote
Conservative' satisfies the same question and is supported provided
that at the time of speaking I have decided to vote for some other
party or to abstain, or have not yet been able to make up my
~1Austin distinguished ilIocmioaary acts, where we do something in saying
something, from perlocutionary acts, where we do something by saying something,= ~ .J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words (Oxford, 1962), pp. 99 ft.
-'t~lioerative ~ e s t i o n s ' , Analysis 15 (1955). He refers to Renford
Bambrough's remarks on deliberative questions in "Gods and Giants', The
Listener. July 19, 1951.

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mind whether to vote for one of the parties other than the Conservative party or to abstain. ~'~
Note in passing that when the words 'I will vote Conservative'
or other words that would be used to express a first person
singular resolution are spoken on the stage or in the classroom
by a teacher showing how to translate 'Je vais voter conservateur'
the supported/unsupported dichotomy does not apply. On the
other hand, to the utterance 'We will vote Conservative', spoken
by me on behalf of my wife and myself, the dichotomy fails to
apply not only in play-acting, pedagogical, etc., uses, but also when
voting one way or the other is a l i v e issue for me but not for my
wife.
Wheafley gives an example of a first person plural deliberative question but omits to say that not all deliberative questions (in
his sense of 'deliberative') are first personal. However, as was
noted earlier, when I discover that I have left my watch at home I
might ask myself in a mildly schizophrenic way 'Are you going to
dash back and get your watch?'
Wheatley remarks that deliberative questions are not necessarily addressed to the questioner. But when they are addressed
to others it is not primarily to elicit information, but to elicit an
opinion or advice. Any information that may be sought is sought
not for its own sake but for the sake of making an 'informed
decision', as Wheatley puts it. And the question here, he adds, is
a decision to do something, as in answers to all deliberative
questions, not a decision that something is the case.
It needs to be emphasized, nevertheless, that although Mary's
'Shall 1 vote Conservative?' can be addressed to another in order
that she may make an informed decision, the chemist's 'Does this
flask contain acid?' can also be made to look like a question asked
for the sake of making an informed decision, e.g. (1) whether to
pour water on the contents of the flask or the contents of the flask
on the water; or (2) whether to call the contents of the flask 'acid'.
This second alternative suggests that every decision that statement
can be construed as a decision to statement--in Carnap's terminology, that there is an external (or practical) question for every
internal (or theoretical) question. -04 An attempt to save the distinction might take the form of pointing out that, although
decisions to and decisions that are not so cleanly separable as
Wheatley lets it be thought, decision to and decision that statements are not interchangeable, f o r a decision to statement cannot
~ Although Wheatley omits it, the 'whether' clause is required.
~Rudolf Carnap, 'Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology', Revue internationale de Philosophic 11(1950).

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81

be converted into a simple decision that statement, but only into a

decision that statement plus another decision to statement. Thus
the support of Mary's resolution 'I will vote Conservative' is
expressed not by 'I have decided that "I shall vote Conservative"
is true', nor by 'I have decided that "I will vote Conservative" is
true' (which would be unacceptable in any case if what it mentions
were a resolution, i.e. had no truth-value); but by 'I have decided
that the statement "I shall vote Conservative" is true on the
grounds that the statement "I have decided to vote Conservative"
is true'.
Yet again, is not what is said by 'I have decided to vote
Conservative' said as well by 'I have decided that I shall vote
Conservative" or 'I have decided that I will vote Conservative"
(the microsyntactical difference between these two need not concern us here)? In that case how do we hold on to Wheafley's
distinction?
The difference between decisions to and decisions that is
thrown into relief by a comparison of the chemist's 'I have decided
that this flask contains acid' with Mary's 'I have decided that I
shall vote Conservative'. When the chemist asks 'Is this acid?' his
question is asked within a convention which itself is not called
into question: since the litmus test is the "acid test' of whether a
liquid is an acid, no decision about calling the liquid an acid has
to be made. It has already been made. True, it is possible to
envisage circumstances in which the question of nomenclature
could be raised. But that question is not raised by the words 'Is
this an acid?' Even if every intrasystematic decision went tandem
with an extrasystematic decision to abide by a terminological rule,
these decisions would be two in number and two in kind. T o
change the metaphor, Mary's sentence 'I have decided to vote
Conservative' is an instrument that plays the same tune as the
words 'I have decided that l shall vote Conservative'. Similarly
with the chemist's 'I have decided to call this liquid acid'. In all
these cases we have to do with decisions to, for the 'decided
that' form of words is being used to say the same as is said by the
'decided to' form of words. On the other hand, the chemist's 'l
have decided to call this liquid acid' and his 'I have decided that
I shall call this liquid acid' play a different tune from 'I have
decided that this liquid is acid', though perhaps they supply this
latter with an obbligato.
6.

IMPERATIVES, QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Bernard Mayo summarizes his criticism of Wheatley's article

on deliberative questions as follows:

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A deliberative question calls for a resolution or decision, but

its answer is neither of these. Its answer is an imperative.
To decide is to commit oneself to a certain answer, and this
means to accept, to consent to, a particular imperative which
is an answer to the question, and which may be selfaddressed .25
It appears to me that to call a question that an imperative
answers deliberative is to conceal a kind of question which has
better right than any other to be called deliberative. In allowing
that the imperative answers to such questions may be selfaddressed Mayo is still obscuring a kind of question that has
more to do with deliberation than has the question he calls
deliberative. Wbeatley subscribes to this error in writing:
A child sits down with its drawing paper and crayons and
says "What shall I draw?" Such a question is not inquisitive
but deliberative. The child does not wish information; "Don't
know" or "Can't guess" would be an improper answer. The
child wants not predictions but suggestions, or advice. 26
That is, both Wheatley and Mayo use the word 'deliberative'
to refer to questions that could be addressed to others as well as
to oneself. Wheatley is satisfied that when the child asks his
mother 'What shall I do?' he wants 'suggestions, or advice'. But
the mother's 'I should draw a ship (if I were y o u ) ' is no resolution. Another person cannot resolve for me except in the
irrelevant sense in which it can be said that another resolves that
I shall do a thing even though I do not decide to do it. e
Algie may follow his mother's advice without demur because
it is his mother's advice. Or he may, if he is counter-suggestible,
not follow it for the same reason. In these cases it is not misleading to regard her answer as an imperative. However, Algie
may accept his mother's advice without demur because he has
made up his mind to accept her advice whenever it is offered, to
hand her a blank cheque. In this case he has answered 'I will' to
the self-addressed question 'Shall I do whatever Mum tells me to
do?'. Of course, Algie may have been too busy playing or too
lazy to have formulated this question to himself. Indeed it might
even be that although he did delegate the responsibility of deciding,
he would not have done so if only he had precociously posed to
himself the question whether he should delegate this responsibility
for future decisions. Yet here, too, the blank cheque question
would have point. It would be pointless only if one and only one
n'Deliberative Questions: A Criticism', Analysis 16 (1956), p. 63.
Op. cir., p. 52.
Cf. Mayo, op. cir., p. 59.

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of the pair 'I will' and 'I will not' were a logically possible answer;
and this situation can never obtain.
It has already been conceded that perhaps it takes a precocious or elderly lad to ask himself a blank cheque question and
to deliberate and make the policy decision which answering it
involves. But it would not be at all unusual for Algie to follow up
his mother's 'Draw a ship' or T d draw a ship (if I were you)'
with such musings as 'No, I can never make my ships look as
though they are in the water and not on it; and it's so boring
drawing the sea'. Skill in weighing the pros and cons is one of the
criteria by which a person's maturity is measured, but this could
not be so if all non-inquisitive questions of the pattern 'What shall
I do?' are answered by imperatives. Even if the putative imperative answer is not issued as a command but tendered to me as
advice there is still room for me to ask myself whether I should
accept or follow this advice. Again, that there is always room for
this question is presupposed in the notion of conscientiousness. If
predictions and imperatives were the only kinds of answers to
questions put in the words 'What shall I do?' the conscientious
man could never get geared into action. I conclude that the
interrogative 'What shall I do?' can be used to ask a question that
cannot be other than self-addressed. The questions that Mayo and,
most of the time, Wheatley concentrate on, questions that can be
addressed to others as well as to oneself, are not deliberative
questions but request questions, requests for encouragement, 'suggestions, or advice'. Even if it were to be conceded to Mayo and
Wheatley that the primary application of the term 'deliberation' is
to a public activity of committees and councils, we must, I have
argued, isolate a special class of questions that can be addressed
only to the poser and cannot be answered by imperatives. I propose to call these deliberative questions and to examine finally
whether the work done by such questions could be done by
imperatives, as Hare implies it could.
Hare's imperative version of the deliberative question 'Shah I
vote Conservative?' would be 'I shall/shall not* vote Conservative,
*Strike out whichever is inapplicable'. But this begs the question:
for what I am having to make up my mind about is precisely
which is inapplicable. Similarly with 'Vote/don't vote* Conservative, *Strike out one of the alternatives'; here the question remains
open as to which of the alternatives I should strike out.
Hare emphasizes that in his own example of an imperative
translation of a question there is no interrogative conjunction,
pronoun or adjective: ' " A r e you married?" can be translated "!
a m / a m not* married, *Strike out whichever is inapplicable". Here

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again, "whichever" is of course relative.' This may be a satisfactory imperative translation of an enquiry. But in the two
imperative versions of deliberative questions that we have given
resort to an oblique stroke merely postpones the posing of a
'which?' or 'whether-or-not?' question. Perhaps we could abandon
the oblique stroke and try instead 'Vote and don't vote* Conservative, *Resolve the practical contradiction' or 'Vote and don't vote*
Conservative, *Cancel one of the imperatives'. In these versions
it remains to be decided how to resolve the contradiction and
which of the imperatives to cancel.
'Make up your mind what party to vote for' (or 'Let me make
up my mind which party to vote for') is inadequate since, as has
been noted in discussing whether deliberative questions are
answered by imperatives, deliberation aims not simply at a decision
but at the best decision. The purpose of deliberation has been
balked if it ends in plumping for one alternative---except where
the point at issue is the higher order one as to whether or not I
should merely plump for one of the alternatives. Thus either
'Make up your mind what party to vote for' must be interpreted
'Make up your mind whether to vote Conservative or not', or, on
the other hand, the 'what' of the first version must be acknowledged to be an interrogative adjective.
So proposed imperative translations of deliberative questions
contain signs ('whether', 'which', 'what' or an oblique stroke)
which point toward, questions which cannot be analysed as imperatives. They request the person addressed to decide between
alternatives, to make a choice, and the verbalisation of this
decision, the resolution ('I will do x ', 'I will say y ' ) , cannot itself
be cast into imperative form without this imperative's raising a
further question for decision, viz. whether to obey it or (in the
case where the imperative expresses a request) to meet it or (in
the case where the imperative is used to make a suggestion) to
accept it. Unless a resolution comes in somewhere an infinite
regress is promised. It may appear that this promise is not
fulfilled if expressions of the form 'Let me . . .' and 'Let us . . .'
be counted as imperatives. 2~ Note, however, the role played by
the 'Let' imperative in the interior dialogue of section 4. 'Let me
see now. What time did 1 say r d be there?' Compare 'Let's stay
here, (eh?)'. In the first of these the 'Let . . .' sentence is a
preamble to a question; in the second it puts a proposal or makes
a suggestion and in so doing raises the question 'Shall we stay
here?' Certainly, B's agreement to A's proposal might be expressed
'Let's do that', and in saying that B would not be making a further
'~1 owe this point to R. Routley. Note that invalidity in my argument
concerning an infinite regress generated by imperative answers would not affect
my conclusion, more important for the purposes of this paper, concerning an
infirdt regress generated by imperative formulations of questions.

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proposal. He would be agreeing. But that that agreement presupposed a resolution is brought out by the fact that one of the
most natural ways for B to express his agreement would be by
saying "Yes (all right), let's do that' and this would in turn presuppose that he had said or would be willing to say 'Yes, I will' to
the self-addressed deliberative question 'Shall I agree with A?'
Analogous remarks would hold of self-addressed imperatives of
the 'Let me . . .' form supposing there are any of these other
than inaugural ones like 'Let me see (think)' for which we have
a use.
Of course, one can fail to decide, fail, that is, to respond with
a resolution to a deliberative question ('What shall I do?', 'Shall I
say y?'), but to fail to resolve is not to disobey or fail to obey
(meet, accept) an imperative. 29 Likewise with the self-addressed
deliberative question: as I argued in section 4, there is no doubt
that imperatives are addressed to oneself, but whenever an attempt
is made to analyse a deliberative question imperatively we find
ourselves in an infinite regress unless we admit that at some stage
we reach an imperative which leads not to yet another selfaddressed imperative which one has to decide whether to obey
(meet, accept) or not, but to a deliberative--and that is to say
self-addressed---question to which the answer is a resolution.
Perhaps this conclusion illustrates part of what some writers have
in mind when they distinguish between treating a man as an
object or an 'it' and treating him as a person or a 'thou', and part
of what it is for a man to treat himsel] as, in the Kantian sense of
the phrase, an end in himself; for it is, of course, mistaken to
suppose that Kant's categorical imperatives have to be framed in
the grammatical imperative mood.
It is also worth remarking that since some deliberative questions are of the form 'What shall I say?" an imperative translation
of an enquiry sometimes elicits a question that cannot be cast in
the imperative mood. This is when the addressee has to wonder
how to reply.
I conclude that an imperative reduction of all questions is no
more feasible than reductions in terms of indicatives or propositional functions. It also follows from what I have said that when
these three methods of analysis are made available jointly there are
common and important kinds of question that remain recalcitrant.
If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view
you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like 'What is a
question? T M
University of New England.
:*Strictly speaking, we don't obey, meet, accept or consent Io imperative.~,
but for the sake of brevity I follow Mayo's idiom.
3Wittgenstein, op. cit., 24.