Philosophy Readings For GEQ1000,

Semester 1, 2021-22, National University of Singapore

QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
&
THE PHILOSOPHY OF QUESTIONS
by
A/P John Holbo
Version 1.0 (30 July, 2021)
Text and images (except for quoted text) © John Holbo 2021

What is this PDF? These are required readings. That’s different from lecture notes,
although in this case the readings overlap the lectures heavily. Questions? Ask!
1. Why Q?
Q Pillar, that is?
Why have it?
Here’s a statement from Video 1.1 that might be an an-
swer:
Scientific inquiry is based on the scientific meth-
od, which is based on rigorous questioning.
Does that sound acceptable?
If so, then the following equation is probably ok:
science = scientific inquiry = good questions
By the power of = we reduce to:
science = questions.
Science education is important! Q education must be it!
QED!
Something similar holds outside the Faculty of Science. We have a segment on design in this
module. Design isn’t scientific inquiry, but there may be such a thing as ‘design thinking’. (Our
designer thinks so!) Good design is based on rigorous testing/criticism of design features. Rigorous
testing/criticism is a kind of questioning, right? Putting to the test is putting to the question (to
use a phrase that keeps coming up in the videos, starting in 1.4, courtesy of the early modern
thinker Francis Bacon.)
We don’t have an English professor on our teaching team. I wish we did! If you take a module
in the English department on—oh, say—the plays of Shakespeare, you probably won’t be told
to ‘practice the scientific method’ on the text of Hamlet. More likely your professor will want you
to develop skills as an interpreter and ‘critical reader’. That means being a good questioner of
texts. You are on the way to being a good student of literature when you know how to ask the
right kinds of questions about literary texts.
Then again, some approaches to the text of Hamlet may require—oh, say—statistical analysis.
Maybe you want to prove Francis Bacon was secretly the author of Shakespeare’s plays. A few
people think this is true. Almost all scholars think this is crazy. The point is: if you want to prove
something true, but all the experts say you’re crazy, you need to back your bold answer with smart
Q methodology. You need to question them; and yourself.
Time and again, in the history of science—in the history of think-
ing—we see contrarians saying something everyone knows can’t
be true. Mostly they are crazy. Once in a while, however, the con-
tarians are right. And when they are right, it can be immensely
valuable. How do we think about this sort of trade-off?
A lot of what goes on around the university must be a mix,
Q methods-wise. Engineers, for example, mix pure physics with
more rough-and-ready methods. This is obviously going to make
it complicated, saying what good Q methods might be.
But this much seems clear: everyone’s got questions.
Because everyone’s got problems.
I hope this much seems plausible: it makes sense
that there’s GEQ1000 because questions are crucial
all around the university.

2
2. Why -Q?
NUS’ GE programme consists of five ‘pillars’.
But it sounds funny to talk about a Question
Pillar. (This point gets made in video 1.1.)
Pillars hold up the roof—of the university,
presumably. Of knowledge, generally. But
questioning is a force for bringing down
the roof. Question—inquiry—criticism—
these are terms of challenge. This is how
we undermine, not how we reinforce,
buttress and support.
So: can you have a Q ‘pillar’?
But maybe this is not such a tough
riddle. Here’s an answer to it.
NUS isn’t a finished thing. Quite the opposite, it’s an ongoing construction project. Pardon
our dust! And the same goes for science generally. And for what goes
on in every different department on campus. Everyone is always tearing
down, the better to build up. So the power of Q may be like a wrecking
ball: you always need around to knock old stuff to make room for better,
newer stuff.
That doesn’t sound wrong, but it sounds …incomplete. We don’t say the
construction industry is ‘based on’ demolition. Architecture isn’t ‘based on’
knocking down old buildings. When we say that the university, or science, or
the English department, is ‘based on questioning’, I think we have a sense of Q
as a positive, constructive, not just a negative, destructive force.
Leaving behind architectural metaphors, getting more philosophical: one of the
world’s most famous philosophers, the ancient Greek thinker Socrates,
was notorious for going around town bothering people with ‘what is
X?’ questions, then not really coming up with solid answers. (I talk
about this a bit in video 1.2, in particular.) Socrates is famous today
because we have decided, in retrospect, that this was, on balance, a good
use of his and his fellow citizens’ spare time. Even so, it got annoying at the
time. Pity his neighbors!
What’s the use of being made to feel dumb because
you don’t know X unless that pain leads to you feeling
better when, eventually, you do know X? (Socrates
was forced to drink hemlock for being so annoying
all the time.)
Today the university isn’t full of people acting exactly like
Socrates did, 2500 years ago—even though the university is,
arguably, an institution descended from the academy founded
by Socrates’ follower, the philosopher Plato. Socrates was a pret-
ty negative guy. The university is not such a negative place. More
constructive! (Look at all these handsome new pillars!)
So how do we honour Socrates’ legacy of questioning, at the uni-
versity, while getting past the doubt and confusion of his all-questions-
all-the-time lifestyle choice? How can Q be a pillar, not just a wrecking-ball?

3
 There’s more to the university than questioning and/or there’s more to questioning than just
knocking down. (Maybe Socrates knew that already?)
It would be nice to understand all this!
But it’s tough. So let me make you do some of the work. Suppose MY job is YOUR job! You’ve
been tasked with designing Q—a module called “Asking Questions”. Your job is to design a GE
module to impart critical ‘Q’ skills (whatever that means!)
These skills have to be:
1) Teachable (Can’t teach the unteachable!)
2) General (This is General Education!)
3) About Q (this is Q!)
Maybe you can visualise the challenge as a simple Venn diagram. There are general skills,
teachable skills, and Q skills (whatever that means!) What’s that area of overlap in the middle?
What goes there? We want that!

What might go in that middle area?

Are you drawing a blank? Not sure where to start? Maybe this will help. Let’s try to think about
reasons why that middle area might be: nothing. A null set.
There are going to be lots of things in each circle, yet maybe nothing in all three circles. Why
might that be? Let’s try to think up some reasons why that might be.

3. Why Might Q Be Unteachable, In a General Way?

Hey (you say!) What kind of module is this anyway? First they force me to take their weird module,
then my first task is to say why the module is impossible to teach?
OK, OK, I’ll help you out. Let’s employ the power of negative thinking!
Rather than saying how to do this Q thing, let’s try to put our finger on how and why we might
not be able to. Then, when the obstacles are clearer, we can start trying to overcome them sys-
tematically. That is, the way to figure out a good way to teach Q is to rule out unworkable ways.
We can kind of go circle by circle, around the whole Venn diagram. It seems to me there are at
least three reasons Q might not be teachable.

4
 1) There are skills that are useful in the Q department, but they aren’t teachable
What sorts of skills might be in that category?
Here’s a hint. Some things you can’t teach because everyone knows them. Some you can’t teach
because you ‘have it’ or you don’t. It’s some talent or ‘gift’. (Do you think there are things like
that?) Some things you can’t teach because it’s the sort of thing you can only teach yourself. Or it’s
not suited to a university classroom, or LumiNUS, or an on-demand video. Think about it. What
Q skills are not going to get taught in a Q module, in practice, in your opinion? And why not?
2) There are Q skills that are useful and teachable but maybe not general
Whatever your academic discipline, you will be confronted with cases,
problems, puzzles, challenges of some sort. Tackling these is a matter
of knowing what to look for, concerning the thing you are dealing with.
What should you always ASK, before tackling such-and-such a type of
problem? That’s a crucial filter, focus-point, first step. Think about it in your
own case. What’s one thing YOU know about, so when there’s a problem you
pretty much know to ask smart questions, not dumb ones?
Maybe you now about fixing bicycles; or trouble-shooting misbehaved
computers; or properly intonating a guitar; or writing a pop song after you’ve
got that guitar sounding real good. Or maybe the thing you know is how to
prepare for a long desert hike; or make soup; or make cool cosplay armor
that looks like the real thing. Everyone’s got a hobby. Or, if you are too busy
with school to have a hobby, you must know some academic thing instead:
how to construct a statistical model; or interpret a poem by Wordsworth;
or write up a lab report.
What’s YOUR thing?
Surely you can do better than poor Wordsworth!
(He sounds hopeless. Poor guy!)
Have you now thought of at least ONE thing that will answer to your mind if you question it?
Good!
What’s the question in-the-know people know to ask first, when there’s a problem concerning
your thing? What’s one thing the old hands are always telling newbies that goes something like
this: ‘when the guitar sounds awful and you can’t see what the problem is, first ask ...?’
No, I’m not going to make you write it out at this time. But do answer in your own head.
Whatever you come up with, about your thing, it’s specific. Can you generalise it?
Knowing how to ask the right soup question makes for great soup. Does it help you to live a
great life in general? (Some chicken soup of the soul thing?)
And so forth. Does knowing how to set up a guitar make you more in tune with how to live?
I’m not telling you. I’m honestly asking. Is the Q know-how your hobby requires the key to
unlocking life’s mysteries, because the questions to ask about your hobby are the same questions
to ask about life, the universe, everything? Or is that not it? A lot of the time, our little bits of
local Q know-how are surely not universal questioning wisdom. Maybe that’s how it always goes?
Maybe ‘question locally’ is the only universal Q wisdom. Don’t try to find some magic, general
formula that always applies, no matter what the type of problem is. Maybe there is no such
formula. That seems possible and, when you think about a lot of cases, plausible.
But that doesn’t mean it’s true. Maybe there are general Q-formulas, you just have to think
about how to generalize all that local know-how.
Moving right along:

5
 3) There are skills that make you a good questioner, but indirectly
Like what?
Two other GE Pillars are: ‘Quantitative Reasoning’ and ‘Thinking and Expression’. I certainly hope
both of those modules boost your Q skills. Getting better at maths should help you formulate
questions in maths terms, when that is what life’s troubles call for. Getting better at expressing your-
self helps you express yourself in question form—which is definitely a major form of expression.
But GEQ isn’t supposed to just reduplicate what other GE modules teach, even if overlap is ok.
How can we teach Q directly, in a general way?
Again: what would YOU teach, if YOU were in put charge of designing our module? And how?
Or—since we are being all negative for now—would you elect instead to cancel the module
on the grounds that it is one big attempt to teach the unteachable?
It’s pretty bold to claim to teach Q. After all, if Q can be taught, it’s really valuable, since it’s a
skill that travels. Whatever you are doing, being able to ask the right questions about that thing
is going to give you an edge. Then again: it’s pretty bold to claim Q can’t be taught. If we don’t
understand how questioning works in general then there are going to be an awful lot of other
things we don’t understand, that we probably like to think we do. (Like the nature of science.)
This is the flip-side of saying questioning matters everywhere. Which bold claim is for you?

4. Let’s Break It Down

This module consists of six segments, each representing a different discipline. We’ve tried to get a
decent spread across the university’s faculties and departments: philosophy, physics, economics,
design, engineering, computational thinking. (We apologise to everyone who got left out. We
don’t mean to send the message that history, business, English, biology, geography, so forth, aren’t
equally worthy of exemplifying Q!)
There is an hypothesis implicit in this approach: namely, each discipline has its mode of ques-
tioning; a mode that is, perhaps, defining of that discipline. To know how economists ask is to
know what economics is; what the subject’s all about. And so on and so forth for philosophy,
physics, history, English, all the rest. When it comes to the life of the mind, we are what we ask.
Stating it flatly like that, I think it’s obvious the hypothesis really is just an hypothesis—that is,
a guess, not some self-evident truth or secure axiom. It could turn out to be quite wrong that
each discipline has its own question mode, which defines it. (Think about it! What might be a
counter-hypothesis? Why do we have different departments? What makes them different if
not different question modes?) But ‘every department has its way of questioning’ seems like a
reasonable starting point, insofar as it is, although not self-evident, only a modest hypothesis.
Modest how so?
On the one hand, it’s hard to come up with one mode of questioning that fits every case—a
one-size-fits-all formula for formulating only the best questions, no matter what kind of thing you
are asking about. On the other hand, it seems like we can look for relatively common denomi-
nators.
We don’t need a Q for soup and a Q for bicycles and a Q for regression analysis and so forth.
We don’t need a separate mode of questioning for every single thing under the sun (cabbages,
kings, sealing wax, all the rest.) We can generalise to some degree. Maybe we’ll generalize from
soup to cooking. But why not then: all the way to chemistry? This isn’t really an argument that you
should always generalize exactly up to border of some university department. But you have to
start somewhere. We’re at a university. Thus, the structure of our module.
There’s nothing wrong with assuming a doubtful hypothesis and running with it … so long as
you know this is what you are doing. So long as you are prepared to backtrack, if it doesn’t turn

6
out to be the way. So here’s a healthy question to keep in mind as
the module goes forward. To what degree does it seem like each
discipline has its own Q mode? Make your own judgment! And
remember: you can learn from negative results as much as from
positive results. If in the end you decide it doesn’t seem right
that each department has its own ‘Q mode’ … well, what
does that tell you about the nature of the university, and the
nature of good-questioning?
But here at the start—in the philosophy seg-
ment, with those other segments still waiting to
happen—I want to break things down a bit differ-
ently.
We philosophers like definitions. I could ask you to
define ‘question’. Not a bad idea! (You could cheat and
ask Google what the definition of ‘question’ is. Then
you could look at what Google coughs up and ask:
can you teach THAT? If so: how? And would it be a good idea?) But, instead,
in the first few videos, I take a different approach: I ask you when you think
the first question was asked, and by who … or what? (You don’t know what
I’m talking about? You should watch videos 1.2-1.3.)
You might think I took this approach just so I could have an excuse to draw
dinosaurs. Nonsense! There’s a real issue! To understand questioning,
should we study predator behavior … or Shakespeare? Apes … or Isaac
Newton? Should we think of questioning as a high-end skill—something
distinctively human, even something that distinguishes the smartest sort
of homo sapiens from the rest of the human herd? Or should we think of
questioning as something elementary, primitive? Is questioning a sophisticated,
late, advanced development? Crowning cognitive achievement? Or is it something that has to
be there right from the start for any thinking to get done? Maybe the first animal eye that opens
asks the first question? A question is a command that the hearer cause the speaker to know the
answer. (That’s a definition I propose in video 1.4.) Cause me to know! So the first eye
commanded the world! (Or maybe that’s an unhelpful, if poetic metaphor for what
the first eye did.)
I already asked you to imagine that you were given the job of designing a Q
module. Let me give you a variant dream job. (Or nightmare job! YMMV.) You are
given a generous fund for original Q research. You are supposed to study …
questioning: in the lab, in the field, in library archives, on the internet, in your
own head, wherever you think it is to be found. Wherever you decide is Q’s
true, native habitat! What would you study: geniuses? Babies? Failure? Success?
Animals? Humans? Biology? Culture? Psychology? Sociology? The philosophy of
science? The history of art? What?
To repeat: you’ve been told to research ‘questioning’ That’s it! all the instruc-
tions you get! That’s pretty vague—and ambiguous. But don’t despair! Think
about it. Off the top of your head: what type or line of research would you think
is most promising? (Least unpromising, if you are a pessimist about the project.)
What kind of researcher would you seek out, to hand money to? Who is qualified to
query concerning Q?

7
 Here’s a related point I didn’t make in any of the videos, but
probably I should have. One thing that is going to affect your
decision about how to study Q is probably going to be your an-
swer to a further question. What good is studying Q going to
do? What’s the payout from research, if it pans out? Here again,
it seems to me that we may be suspended between a high-end
and a low-end answer. Let me explain.
One possibility is that studying Q may unlock improved
cognitive capacities.
Like mutant super-powers?
Well, maybe not quite like that. (Don’t expect the Q
equivalent of a Hogwarts letter or personal invitation to
Prof. X’s school for gifted youngsters! Sorry!)
Think of it this way. A lot of history books—books about modern history, economic history,
social and political history, anthropology—have these graphs that really start to take off in an
upward direction at a certain point. For 100,000 years or so our species lived in hunter-gatherer
bands. Then things changed. Really fast, relatively. Once upon a time we had stone tools. Now
we have the internet. And nuclear weapons. And there are 7 billion of us. It really is kind of like
we did get a sudden invitation to ride a train on a track no one could see before, into a new
world—as a species.
What changed? Not one thing, surely. But a likely, leading candidate for special
consideration is: the scientific revolution (in the 17th century) leading to the
industrial revolution (in the 19th Century.) So: what was the scientific revolu-
tion? Did humans discover a new thing? Proper scientific method? That is, a
proper questioning method?
Did Q—in some sense—get us to this new place we now live in? The mod-
ern world?
When you look at those graphs, shooting up like rockets—population,
economic growth, life-expectancy (and don’t forget global temperatures!)—
after the industrial revolution, what do you think is the rocket fuel? Is it Q?
A volatile mix of Q and other factors?
If some new way of asking questions was necessary (if not sufficient) to
rocket us from the stone age to the information age in relatively short order,
maybe Q really is like a mutant super-power!
On the other hand, maybe studying Q isn’t going to raise the cognitive roof, vastly, for our
species. Maybe a more reasonable aspiration is that it might raise the floor, marginally, for each
of us, as individuals. Maybe each of us can become a bit less dumb. We can fight cognitive bias.
Stop making so many stupid mistakes around the place on a daily basis.
Thus, the study of Q might be a blueprint for civilization; or it might be more like a personal
life coach—personal trainer for your brain.
We will presumably research and teach Q differently, depending which practical form of payout
we anticipate.

5. Three Senses of Question

I said we were going to break it down. Let’s break it in three.
In video 1.4 I suggest that there are three major, distinct senses of question that are likely to
attract us:

8
 1) Putting Nature To The Question: Problem-Solving/Experimentation
2) Putting Others To The Question: Interrogative Communication
3) Putting Ourselves To The Question: Self-Awareness/Knowing What We Don’t
Know
I’m not going to write out everything I had to say about this in video 1.4. But I’ll summarise
and try to clarify.
These three kinds of questioning seem to go together. All the same, 1-3 seem like different
skills/cognitive capacities. In Video 1.4 I suggest these three capacities might come apart not just
in theory but in practice. Some creature (maybe a human) could lack one (or more?) while still
retaining the others. So, for example, maybe you could have 1 without 2; or 2 without 1; or 1 and
2 without 3? What do you think?
It’s obviously dangerous to try to do biology as some armchair philosophy. Why should what
seems possible to you, biologically, be any sort of guide? I can imagine a griffin and a firebreathing
dragon. That doesn’t make them biologically possible. Once upon a time, no one had ever imag-
ined that natural selection was a mechanism that explained biological evolution. That’s a terrible
argument against Darwin! What you can imagine is a bad guide to what’s possible. What you do
imagine is even a worse guide, probably. But in this case the point of the exercise is to help us
get clearer about 1-3, conceptually.
Imagine some social insects that are dumb, i.e. they have no capacity to solve novel problems.
Simple, rather predictable robots, these guys. But they have communication protocols. They can
‘ping’ each other for information. That seems like 2 without 1. Lots of dumb little guys, but coor-
dinated, can do a lot. Or imagine, instead, a smart but solitary predator. It can’t communicate but
it solves problems. If you put some food in a box and there’s a trick to opening it, this beast will
keep working and puzzling until it figures out the trick! But it never thinks to ask someone else. It
never passes along the result.That sounds like 1 without 2. The last one, 3, is maybe the trickiest,
because what does it really mean? It’s tempting to say you can’t have either 1 or 2 without 3.
Because what would ever get you started asking nature, or others, if it wasn’t asking yourself, and
getting no answer? On the other hand, 3 can seem like the last step, the sophisticated final result
of getting better and better at 1 and 2. Think about it! Is 3 the beginning or the end?
Let me now add three quotes that might be relevant—maybe inspirational. (Let me add: one of
the most inspirational of thoughts is ‘this guy is wrong!’ Maybe you will be inspired by how wrong
some of this stuff seems.) The first quote is from R.G. Collingwood, a British philosopher:
Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question ...
I do not mean only statements made out loud to somebody else; I include
statements made by somebody to himself in the course of solitary thinking ...
In our least scientific moments we hardly know that the thoughts we fish up
out of our minds are answers to questions at all, let alone what questions
these are.
The second quote is from Werner Heisenberg—famous physicist—make of it
what you will:
What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our meth-
od of questioning.
Does Heisenberg mean the only thing we can study directly is ques-
tioning? Thus, Q is the only true pillar? (Does that make any sense what-
soever?)

9
 The third, final and longest quote is from a less well-known writer, Sylvain Bromberger. He was
a professor of philosophy at MIT. The book this passage is taken from, On Knowing What We
Don’t Know, was published in 1992. The quote comes from the Introduction (pp. 1-2):
We find ourselves, as individuals and as communities willy-nilly cast in a world not of
our making, in which we want to survive, if possible to thrive, and whose features we
want to understand. We start out with little prior information about that world, but
we are endowed with the ability to come to know that there are things about it that
we don’t know, that is, with the ability to formulate and to entertain questions whose
answers we know we do not know. It is an enormously complex ability derived from
many auxiliary abilities. And it induces the wish to know the answer to some of these
questions. Scientific research represents our most reasonable and responsible way
of trying to satisfy that wish. That is its most tenable defining goal, and not, as others
have held …[Here Bromberger lists some views of the nature of science he doesn’t
agree with] … However, in seeking its goal science repeatedly runs into difficulties.
Many of these difficulties are physical in nature and call for the design of new and
more powerful instruments. Others are psychological and call for the invention of
devices that supplement our memory and our computational powers. Still others, and
those are the ones that are relevant here, are intellectual and pertain to our ability
to conceive, formulate, consider, connect, and assess questions, and to our ability to
conceive, formulate, consider, connect and assess answers. These sorts of difficulties
often call for inspiration and creative intelligence. Careful observation and description
are not enough.
Can you teach … inspiration?
If not—and if questioning is a matter of inspiration, and if scientific method rests on question-
ing—can you teach science?
We’d better be able to teach science! We’ve spent plenty of money building buildings, hiring
people to teach in the science faculty. But there isn’t a Department of Inspiration and Creativity,
not because people don’t value that. But maybe it doesn’t seem like a thing that can be taught,
or not taught directly, purely, on its own.
A bit of a puzzle, then, how it all fits together.
In the final video, 2.8, I sketch a Brombergerish framework to go with these sorts of thoughts.
Instead of trying to survey all the ways-of-knowing there might be (maybe each department has
its own, based on its mode of questioning?) I try to divide up all the different ways-of-NOT-
knowing. Science isn’t just a structure of knowledge, after all. Science is a dynamic front—balance
point—between the mass of things we know and the larger mass of things we don’t. The nature
of science is a complex function of the nature of what we know and the nature of what we don’t
know. The same goes for non-scientific forms of knowledge as well. How you know is crucially
shaped by the shape of what you don’t know (which, of course, you may not know.)

6. A Case To Consider
I want to conclude these readings by presenting you with a pair of passages to think about.
The first is from a book, Who Asked The First Question: The Origins of Human Choral Singing,
Intelligence, Language and Speech, by Joseph Jordania (Logos 2006). Jordania is neither an an-
thopologist nor a linguist nor a psychologist. He’s an ethnomusicologist. That is, he studies musical
traditions cross-culturally. I don’t usually find myself in the musicology section of the library—let
alone staring at the ethnomusicology shelf—but maybe, if you have watched video 1.2, you can
imagine how I ended up there, attracted by the title of this book.

10
 Jordania’s speculative theory, as you might guess from his title, is that human language, even
intelligence, arose out of a more primitive question-and-answer instinct. He thinks our hominid
ancestors must have made music—call-and-response noise, at any rate—and this evolved into
questioning, hence into language. One of Jordania’s pieces of evidence is that, allegedly, non-hu-
man primates (apes and monkeys) do not ask questions. I’m dropping you into the middle of
the conversation here, but I think you’ll pick up the thread. (Nim and Wishoe are the names of
language-trained chimps. The rest you can guess. I am not going to copy Jordania’s bibliography.
The inline citations should suffice if you get curious and want to chase down references.) The
following is from pp. 335-7 of his book.

Regarding questions, it has been documented for a few decades already that the
vocabulary of enculturated apes contains question words as well, like “who” “what”
“where” in Nim and Wishoe’s vocabulary (Bronowski & Bellugi 1980:110; Terrace,
1980:11, 167). So it seems almost obvious that apes must be able to ask questions.
Nevertheless, according to the accounts of the experiment authors, apes do not ask
questions. Wonderful examples of conversations with their human teachers have been
recorded and published (Terrace, 1980; Gardner & Gardner, 1975, 1984; Premack,
1976; Rumbaugh, 1977; Rumbaugh & Gill, 1977); Patterson & Linden, 1981). Analysis
of their conversations shows that in human-primate conversations questions are asked
by the humans only. The same can be said about the question words: apes understand
them and give appropriate responses, but amazingly they themselves do not use
question words in conversation with their human teachers. [emphasis in original]
The apes’ ability to comprehend questions is quite amazing. Describing Nim’s ability
to be engaged in conversations on many topics, Terrace notes: “...His teachers would
ask him questions such as What color?, What name of?, Who?, ... Nim showed his
comprehension by making an appropriate response... As his ability to sign improved,
Nim began to reply to his teachers [sic] questions with more than one sign” (Terrace,
1980: 166-167). But the ability to ask questions proved to be much more difficult.
Ann and David Premacks designed a potentially promising methodology to teach
apes to ask questions in the 1970s: “In principal interrogations can be taught either
by removing an element from a familiar situation in the animal’s world or by removing
the element from a language that maps the animal’s world. It is probable that one can
induce questions by purposefully removing key elements from a familiar situation.
Suppose a chimpanzee received its daily ration of food at a specific time and place,
and then one day the food was not there. A chimpanzee trained in the interrogatives
might inquire ‘Where is my food?’ or, is Sarah’s case ‘My food is ?’ Sarah was never put
in a situation that might induce such interrogation because for our purposes it was
easier to teach Sarah to answer questions” (Premack & Premack, 1991 [1972]:20-21).
More than a decade later after writing these words of how to teach apes to ask
questions, Premacks wrote: “Though she [Sarah] understood the question, she did not
herself ask any questions—unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as
What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny’s house?
Where puppy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by
asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else” Premack
& Premack 1983:29). Amazingly, Sarah would sometimes “steal” the words from the
trainers, and then she would happily repeat the questions asked by trainers to her
and then repeat her own answer [emphasis in original]. And still, she never asked
trainers any questions.

11
 Earlier Washoe also failed to formulate and ask questions, though that was one of the
aims of the Gardners’ project (Gardner & Gardner, 1969, 1975; Bronowski & Bellugi,
1984:110; McNeill, 1980:152-153). Despite all their achievements, Kanzi and Panbani-
sha do not seem to possess the ability to ask questions as well. At least, Sue Savage-Rum-
baugh and her to-authors never seem to have claimed this so far (Savage-Rumbaugh,
1986; Savage-Rumbaugh and Levin, 1994; Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1993, 1998, 2001).
The only case when it was claimed that an ape asked a question that I am aware of
was connected to the chimpanzee Lana. (Lana was a chimpanzee that participated
in Duane Rumbaugh’s experiments in the 1970’s.) “When the machine [food-giving
machine] was broken and food could not be loaded, Lana was able to ask: ‘?You move
food into room?’” (Savage-Rumbaugh & Levin, 1994:143-144) Even if this is the case
of an ape asking a question, it would be strange to consider the possibility that apes
would ask a question of a machine (who can not [sic] give them an answer) and would
never ask questions of their human trainers, who can interact and give them answers.
Given the natural curiosity of the apes, it would be natural to expect that if apes know
how to ask questions, they would be asking plenty of questions.
So, according to our current knowledge, despite all their cognitive achievements,
apes do not ask questions. They are apparently very good in replying to human ques-
tions, and they do understand quite complex requests and questions, but fail to
ask questions [emphasis in original]. In cases when they begin a conversation, their
utterances are either statements (“Bird there”), or orders/requests (“Play me”, “Tickle
me”, “Me more eat”, etc). There seems to be something very important in this fascinating
fact, something connected with the evolutionary distinction between the cognitive
capacities of apes and humans.
Accordingly I would suggest that it is not the recognition of ourselves as individuals
that makes us humans (we know that apes, at least chimpanzees and orangutans, are
as good as humans at recognizing themselves in the mirror). It is, rather, recognition
of other members of the society as individuals with equal cognitive abilities and
the employment of their cognitive abilities as a source of information (asking
questions), that makes us human, and our language—human language.[emphasis
in original]
There is a subtle connection between the ability to ask questions and the “theory
of mind”. Reference to the cognition of another individual as a source of information
should be considered one of the highest forms of the “theory of mind” (or TOM.
Premack & Dasser, 1991; Cheney & Seyfarth, 1991; Povinelli, 1993; see also Mead,
1934). According to the available information, apes lack this ability: “The chimpanzee
has passed tests suggesting that it attributes states of minds to the other one. These
states, however, are either motivational ..., or perceptual ... Decisive evidence for the
attribution of informational states is still lacking” (Premack & Dasser, 1991:265).
The fascinating fact about the TOM and questioning behavior is that children learn
the mystery of asking questions long before they show the development of TOM. This
is fascinating, as apes are able to acquire at least some elements of TOM, which appears
around the age of four in children’s development (Astington & Gopnik, 1991:12), but
at the same time apes seem unable to learn questioning, which appears in children’s
development in the form of correctly pronounced question intonation much earlier—
before a child turns even one (Crystal, 1987: 241, 143).

End quote. Thought-provoking stuff! But I have my doubts.

12
 On the one hand, Jordania is not clearly an authority on his subject.
He is, as I said, an ethnomusicologist. Furthermore, speculators are
always coming up with bold new theories of the origins of language and
human thought. (My personal advice: don’t even think about believ-
ing any theory about the origin of human language until you can tick
off ten different ones on your fingers!) These mysteries are notorious
for the way they tempt otherwise sober scholars into confirmation
bias (see video 2.1). You collect a few, tantalizing bits of evidence
that fit with some pet rule you’ve formulated and—Eureka!—you
are suddenly so sure you’ve solved ancient riddles of human nature
we’ve been puzzling over since Plato and before!

On the other hand, nothing Jordania says in this passage explicitly assumes any
speculative theory about the origins of human thought and language—even if
that’s where he’s headed.
He seems to have done what humans do best. He didn’t have personal
experiences of the phenomenon he wished to understand but he knew enough
to ask other people questions— by checking out their books and articles from
the university library!
In this way he gathered empirical evidence in support of a general thesis
of the form: All X’s are Y’s. All non-human primates are non-questioners. It’s
like ‘all swans are white’ or ‘all ravens are black’. (A lot of stuff about black swans
and ravens in the videos, if you haven’t watched them yet. That would be videos
1.7 and 2.4-2.5.)
From a Popperian perspective this is perfect fodder for science. That is, Jordania is
playing the science game by the rules, win or lose. What we should do now is run out
and disconfirm his hypothesis, if we can. We want a counter-example. (Popper?
Who’s that? Disconfirmation? Same videos! 1.7 and 2.4-2.5.)
But exactly what would count as a counter-example to Jordania’s hypoth-
esis? Think back to my three senses of ‘question’. Which sense(s) does
Jordania seem to be operating with?
The next passage is from a popular book I quoted in video 1.6, by
the famous primatologist Frans De Waal. The book is: Are We Smart
Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton 2016).
Remember my video? De Waal is the author who discusses the dif-
ference between ape and capuchin monkey problem-solving styles.
(The capuchins are the button-mashers. Apes, on the other hand, may
sit and think before tackling a problem, hands-on. Is that relevant to
what you are about to read? Maybe!) The following section (pp. 129-
131) bears the nicely Socratic subtitle ‘Knowing What Others Know’.

13
 Imagine that aliens from a distant galaxy landed on earth wondering if there was one
species unlike the rest. I am not convinced they would settle on us, but let’s assume they
did. Do you think they’d do so based on the fact that we know what others know? Of
all the skills that we possess and all the technology that we have invented, would they
zoom in on the way we perceive one another? What an odd and capricious choice this
would be! But it is precisely the trait that the scientific community has considered most
worthy of attention for the last two decades. Known as theory of mind, abbreviated
ToM, it is the capacity to grasp the mental states of others. And the profound irony is
that our fascination with ToM did not even start with our species. Emil Menzel was the
first to ponder what one individual knows about what others know, but he did so for
juvenile chimpanzees.
In the late 1960s Menzel would take a young ape by the hand out into a large, grassy
enclosure in Louisiana to show her hidden food or a scary object, such as a toy snake.
After this, he would bring her back to the waiting group and release them all together.
Would the others pick up on the knowledge of one among them, and if so, how would
they react? Could they tell the difference between the other having seen food or a
snake? They most certainly could, being eager to follow a chimp who knew a food
location or being reluctant to stay with one who’d just seen a hidden snake. Copying
the other’s enthusiasm or alarm, they had an inkling of his knowledge.
Scenes around food were especially telling. If the “knower” ranked below the “guess-
ers,” the former had every reason to conceal his or her information to keep the food
out of the wrong hands. We recently repeated these experiments with our own chimps
and found the same subterfuge as reported by Menzel. Katie Hall would remove two
of our chimps from their outdoor enclosure and keep them temporarily in a building.
Low-ranking Reinette would have a small window from which to look out into the enclo-
sure, whereas high-ranking Georgia would have no such view. Katie would walk around
hiding two food items: one entire banana and one entire cucumber. Guess which one
chimps prefer! She’d stuff food underneath a rubber tire, in a hole in the ground, in
the deep grass, behind a climbing pole, or some other place, while Reinette followed
her every move from inside. Then we’d release both chimps at the same time. By then,
Georgia had learned that we’d hide food, but she’d have no clue about the location.
She had learned to carefully watch Reinette, who would walk around as nonchalantly as
possible while gradually bringing Georgia closer and closer to the concealed cucumber.
With Reinette sitting nearby, Georgia would eagerly dig up the veggie. While she was
busy, Reinette would hurry toward the banana.
The more experiments we conducted, though, the more Georgia caught on to these
deceptive tactics. It is an unwritten rule among chimps that once something is in your
hands or mouth, it is yours, even if you are of low status. Before this moment, however,
when two individuals approach food, the dominant will enjoy priority. For Georgia,
therefore, the trick was to arrive at the banana before Reinette could put her hands
on it. After many tests with different combinations of individuals, Katie concluded that
high-status chimps exploit the other’s knowledge by carefully monitoring their gaze
direction, looking where they are looking. Their partners, on the other hand, do their
utmost to conceal their knowledge by not looking where they don’t want the other to
go. Both chimps seem exquisitely aware that one possesses knowledge that the other
lacks.

14
 De Waal does not address Jordania’s hypothesis directly. But maybe the existence of these
chimps, all this sophisticated behavior De Waal reports, refutes Jordania?
Or not. What do YOU think?

7. Applying The Three Senses of ‘Question’ To This Case

I think we see here an illustration of what makes Popper-style disconfirmation an attractive, simple
model of ideal science, but also a tricky thing to apply in practice. What is reasonable to believe
about chimps—about humans and non-human primates—based on what we learn from reading
these two passages? (I’m assuming we can basically trust the data both researchers report, i.e.
neither of them is just making it all up.) But before we can decide that, first we need to render
the two passages intellectually inter-operable, as it were.
It is common to want to relate Hypothesis X to Data Set Y, even though Y wasn’t gathered to
address X. De Waal didn’t write this passage to address Jordania’s hypothesis about non-human
primate questions. But what he reports seems relevant. But how? What we should do is go back to
section 5, take my three senses of question, and use them. Jordania is saying non-human primates
don’t ‘question’. In what sense(s)? I think it is fairly clear—but not completely clear.
He is NOT denying non-human primates ask questions in the Sense 1 sense. Many non-human
primates are obviously highly curious and intelligent. They can ‘put nature to the question’, in a
problem-solving sense.
Jordania IS denying that non-human primates ask questions in the
Sense 2 sense. He thinks they do not ‘put others to the question.’
They do not employ the linguistic interrogative mode. That is,
they say things, but nothing they say ends with a question
mark. This is a narrow point, but that is what makes it
interesting and, one hopes, testable.
What about Sense 3, ‘putting oneself to the ques-
tion’? Not so clear. The things Jordania says about
ToM [Theory of Mind] suggest there may be a sense
in which non-human primates lack the ability to think
about minds, abstractly, as things that contain infor-
mation, or misinformation. That might make it hard for
them to think about their own minds in the way Sense
3 demands.
If you can’t look at your neighbor and think ‘she thinks
the bananas are in the box, but really they are not’ can
you think a parallel thought about yourself? ‘I think the
bananas are in the box, but do I really know they are?’
What about De Waal? Can we just say: if what De
Waal reports is right, Jordania is all wrong? He reports
chimps not only seeking information from each other
but even deliberately misinforming each other. Isn’t that
questioning in sense 2? No. Strictly, no. De Waal doesn’t report
any chimp using linguistic interrogatives; that is, asking questions in
the narrow Sense 2 sense. So there is no evidence yet that Jordania is
wrong concerning that hard core of his hypothesis.
But De Waal does seem to be suggesting there is sophisticated chimp
ToM. Doesn’t that challenge Jordania by denying what he sees as an implication
of his hypothesis?

15
 Jordania says that what makes humans distinctive might be this (I quote again from the passage):
recognition of other members of the society as individuals with equal cognitive abili-
ties and the employment of their cognitive abilities as a source of information (asking
questions)
It seems De Waal has a case of chimps doing just that. But does he? Maybe all the sophisticated
gaze-tracking is instinctive to the point where even chimps who are misdirecting their fellow
chimps by deliberately looking in the wrong direction aren’t aware of what they are doing or
how or why it works. Since chimps have no ToM, only an instinct, they never move on to the next,
basic step: just ask questions, verbally.
Think of it this way. Non-human primates are often quick to pick up tool use. If you show
a monkey a better way to get ants out of an anthill, she may immediately use it (assuming she
thinks ants are tasty treats.) That’s presumably because she sort of gets what is going on here and
why it works. She thinks of anthills as kind of like a container for ants. She has a mental category:
tools for getting the good stuff out of containers like that. (Think of all the times in life you use
a machine and sort of get the physics of how and why it works, but not really. But enough that
you might be able to adapt the machine; at least recognize another machine for doing the same
work.) You see the analogy with minds? A mind is like a container for a different sort of good
thing: thoughts. You would expect the chimps, who are apparently always using gaze-tracking
tricks to break into those containers, and to guard their own containers, would recognize a good
new tool for container-cracking. Namely: just asking questions. Verbal questions are a great tool!
But they don’t pick it up. What does that tell us, if anything? I don’t want to try to settle the
question. My point is: here is a really interesting issue! To resolve it, we need to be careful what
we mean by ‘question’. So: studying questioning is worthwhile. Philosophizing about the senses
of ‘question’ might help you do science. And solid science might help with the philosophy of it.
As a final note about this case, I would like to point out the real-world limitations of Pop-
per-style analysis, in a case like this. Jordania has an hypothesis of the form All X’s are Y’s. All
non-human primates are non-questioners. Once we settle what ‘question’ means, this seems like
a basis for doing science. Now we just go and check! Are there, or are there not, non-human
primates that ask questions? If we can find one, we abandon Jordania’s hypothesis. If we can’t,
we believe him. In fact, we will probably be slower to believe him, even if we haven’t got any
counter-examples, and—if we do get to the point of believing him—slower to abandon him in
the face of counter-evidence. And that’s probably rational. At least reasonable. (Hey, you want
to know a fun fact? Once upon a time, one grey parrot—a famous one, named Alex: look him up
on the internet!—seems to have done this thing Jordania says no non-human primate has done:
namely, ask questions. Strictly, that’s consistent with his thesis. But it’s kind of surprising!)

8. Conclusion
And we’re done! Please feel free to move on to the next segment of the module.
‘But wait! Professor Holbo, you didn’t tell us what the ‘Q method’ of philosophy is! You said
Socrates asks questions. But what do YOU think? Is what you did, in these readings, in all your
videos, YOUR idea of philosophy?’ My position here is a bit delicate, insofar as I’m trying to
introduce not just philosophy but our module, and various other disciplines. I don’t want to foist
my views on my colleagues—who (be warned!) are likely to have their own philosophies of what
they are up to. (Don’t blame me if they say other stuff! That’s normal and to be expected.)
But there is also the basic problem that philosophers disagree about what philosophy is. So,
naturally, that spills over into dueling accounts of its Q-methods, so anything I claim will be
controversial.

16
 Let me illustrate with final thoughts from a philosopher I admire, Bertrand Russell. A passage
from a book of his entitled The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (Routledge, 2010). It says I’ve been
doing it wrong—what with all these dinosaurs and monkeys I’ve recruited to populate the place.

The process of sound philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in

passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel
quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection
and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start
from … There is a great tendency among a very large school to
suppose that when you are trying to philosophize about what
you know, you ought to carry back your premisses further
and further into the region of the inexact and vague, beyond
the point where you yourself are, right back to the child or monkey
… That, I say, is a theory which is very widely held and which is used
against that kind of analytic outlook which I wish to urge. It seems to me
that when your object is, not simply to study the history or development
of mind, but to ascertain the nature of the world, you do not want to go any
further back than you are already yourself. You do not want to go back to the
vagueness of the child or monkey, because you will find that quite sufficient
difficulty is raised by your own vagueness. But there one is confronted
by one of those difficulties that occur constantly in philosophy, where
you have two ultimate prejudices conflicting and where argument ceas-
es. There is the type of mind which considers that what is called primitive
experience must be a better guide to wisdom than the experience of reflective
persons, and there is the type of mind which takes exactly the opposite view. On that
point I cannot see any argument whatsoever. It is quite clear that a highly educated
person sees, hears, feels, does everything in a very different way from a young child or
animal, and that this whole manner of experiencing the world and of thinking about
the world is very much more analytic than that of a more primitive experience. (5-6)

So now you know! Famous philosophers think Holbo has wasted your time! You don’t learn
about physics by studying ape-men. You should read Isaac Newton! Same goes for Q, presum-
ably. But to my mind Russell’s final thought is wrong. How could it be ‘quite clear’ we are so
different from children and animals? (Russell seems to think I could only doubt
him if I were claiming monkey-wisdom must be wiser than Russel-
lian philosophy. But that is not my view.) But maybe you take
Russell’s side. Fair enough. Then you will want to think about
what you would substitute for my approach. How would
YOU approach Q? Would you think hard on the concept
question? Debate it, Socrates-style? Focus only on the best
questions, i.e. those asked by a few, true geniuses? (Forget
button-mashing monkeys and babbling babes!) I agree with
Russell’s goal: analysis, precision. I just have different notions
how to get there. Another quote from Russell’s book that
I quite like: “The point of philosophy is to start with some-
thing so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end
with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

17