Erotetics or erotetic logic is a part of

logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

, devoted to logical analysis of

question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...

s. It is sometimes called the logic of questions and answers.

Overview

The idea was originally developed by

Richard Whately Richard Whately (1 February 1787 – 8 October 1863) was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman ...

. For example, he noted the ambiguity of the interrogation "Why?". (1) It could be a reason, such as why the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles, or (2) a cause, such as why days are shorter in winter than summer, or (3) a design requirement as in a timepiece.Mary Prior and

Arthur Prior Arthur Norman Prior (4 December 1914 – 6 October 1969), usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contribution ...

"Erotetic Logic", ''

The Philosophical Review ''The Philosophical Review'' is a quarterly journal of philosophy edited by the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and published by Duke University Press (since September 2006). Overview The journal publishes original ...

'' 64(1) (1955): pp. 43–59 . In 1936 Whately's work was revived by

Eugeniu Sperantia Eugeniu Sperantia ( – January 11/12, 1972) was a Romanian poet, aesthetician, essayist, sociologist and philosopher. He was born in Bucharest to folklorist Theodor Speranția and his wife Elena (''née'' Cruceanu), a relative of poet Mihail ...

. In 1955 Mary and

recalled Whately's suggestion for a variable copula to write questions symbolically. Recognizing the consequent symbolic calculus, they note that it is insufficient for the logic of interrogatives, which is antisymbolic. In 1940 R. G. Collingwood published ''An Essay on Metaphysics'' in which he examined

presupposition In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include ...

s in statements and questions. In fact he claimed "Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in the answer to a question." By way of explanation, he wrote "In proportion as a man is thinking scientifically when he makes a statement, he knows the statement is the answer to a question and he knows what the question is." In this sense, when thinking is scientifically ordered, a question is logically prior to its own answer. Collingwood also asserts that "Each question involves a presupposition". In 1966 Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. wrote on "Questions, Answers, and Presuppositions". In 1963

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

published ''Communication: a Logical Model'' by David Harrah that focused on questions as pivotal in communication. The same year Belnap published ''An analysis of questions: preliminary report''.

C. L. Hamblin Charles Leonard Hamblin (20 November 1922 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales) ...

reviewed the works of Harrah and Belnap together: he considered them a launching of erotetics into serious consideration. Later, Nuel Belnap and T.B. Steel Jr. wrote ''The Logic of Questions and Answers'' (1976), which came at a watershed moment: while purportedly continuing the philosophical investigation of Harrah, they anticipated

query language Query languages, data query languages or database query languages (DQL) are computer languages used to make queries in databases and information systems. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL). Types Broadly, query language ...

s and

data base management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

s. The bibliography included 25 references on

question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural l ...

and natural language understanding. For most of the time, researchers concentrated on the relation between questions and answers. Recently, more attention is given to the way questions come from sentences or other questions, similar to

entailment Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one ...

. Some contributions in this direction are

Jaakko Hintikka Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Life and career Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa). In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Helsin ...

's interrogative model and

Andrzej Wiśniewski Andrzej Wiśniewski (13 January 1956 – 3 April 2022) was a Polish professional football manager. Career In 2001, Wiśniewski briefly managed Wisła Płock, which fell to the second division. In 2002, he coached the Palestine national team. La ...

's inferential erotetic logic (IEL). In the interrogative model, questioning is seen as game played between two parties. One of these parties may be

reality Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, r ...

. In 2011

Anna Brożek Anna Magdalena Brożek (born 11 May 1980 in Kraków) is a Polish philosopher and musician. Life Brożek studied piano at the Academy of Music in Kraków in 1999-2004, and at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in 2006-2008. At the same time, ...

published ''The Theory of Questions'' which started with philosophical context (

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

), then use in human intercourse, with a consideration of

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

and answers. Embedded questions and situational analysis are noted, as well as specific considerations with regard to science, psychology, and surveys. Concluding chapters consider legal proceedings, philosophical questions, and the history of erotetic study in Poland in the 20th-century. Erotetics has been used for insight into

teaching Teaching is the practice implemented by a ''teacher'' aimed at transmitting skills (knowledge, know-how, and interpersonal skills) to a learner, a student, or any other audience in the context of an educational institution. Teaching is closely re ...

: "To teach someone something is to answer that person’s questions about some subject matter."C.J.B. MacMillan & James W. Garrison (1988) ''A Logical Theory of Teaching: Erotetics and Intensionality'', Kluwer

References

Sources

* Whately, Richard (1875) ''Elements of Logic'', Longman, Green & Co. (9th Edition, London) *

(1999) ''Inquiry as Inquiry: A Logic of Scientic Discovery'',

Springer books Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in ...

Nicholas Rescher Nicholas Rescher (; ; born 15 July 1928) is a German-American philosopher, polymath, and author, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961. He is chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and was for ...

(2000) ''Inquiry Dynamics'',

Transaction Publishers Transaction Publishers was a New Jersey-based publishing house that specialized in social science books and journals. It was located on the Livingston Campus of Rutgers University. Transaction was sold to Taylor & Francis in 2016 and merged with ...

{{ISBN, 0-7658-0007-1 * Andrzej Wiśniewski (1995) ''The Posing of Logical Questions'', Springer Netherlands.

External links

Erotetics
at

PhilPapers PhilPapers is an interactive academic database of journal articles in philosophy. It is maintained by the Centre for Digital Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, and as of 2022, it has "394,867 registered users, including the majorit ...

Logic

Overview

See also

References

Sources

External links