Your Teacher Was Wrong, There Are Bad Questions

Understanding the Purpose of Questions and How to Make Them Better

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

If your teacher was anything like mine, you have heard the phrase “there are no bad questions.” As a teacher myself, I have to admit that I have used the phrase as well in my classes. The reason for saying there are no bad questions is to encourage people to speak if they do not understand something in class, or if they are too shy.

On the face of things, the phrase is true. There are no bad questions when you are trying to learn something. Any and every question a student has will help the teacher know what the student understands and what needs to be explained further.

However, when we look a bit deeper the idea that there are no bad questions easily falls apart and, more in line with how we so often feel in class, the opposite seems to be true. In fact, there are questions that are bad and should not be asked.

In this article, we will look at two main ways that questions can be bad. We will first look at how we can improperly use questions which leads to a question failing to achieve the goal of a question, getting an answer. Then we will look at how questions can go philosophically wrong with the help of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Bad Questions Get You Bad Answers

The main purpose of a question is to get an answer. For example, when we ask what time dinner is, it is because we are hungry and want to know when we can eat. Thus, the most obvious way that questions can be bad is if they don’t get you good answers or even an answer at all. This happens in two primary ways: being asked in the wrong context and being manipulative. Let's look at these in turn.

First, the context in which a question is asked plays a big role in determining if a question is a good one or not. This type of bad question is bad not due to the nature of the question itself, but due to them being asked at the wrong time. One way this can happen is that a question can simply not fit the context of the discussion, preventing it from being properly addressed. For example, if we are having a discussion about architecture and you ask a question about chocolate. In asking such a question, you derail the conversation and are unlikely to get any answer at all let alone a proper answer.

A question can also be out of context by leading the discussion in the wrong way. In this case, in a discussion about architecture, the question is about architecture but does not contribute to the particular goal of the discussion, for example, on Parisian architecture in the 1800s. This derails the conversation and makes a proper answer unlikely. What’s more, asking off topic questions can be problematic in that the people who would answer your question are not prepared to answer the question.

The second way questions can be bad is when they are manipulative. This type of question includes loaded, leading, and bad faith questions. Manipulative questions are not asked with the intent to get an answer but rather to force a response out of someone. Loaded questions, for example, have hidden assumptions built into them that do not let a person answer in a way that they want.

For example, “have you started caring about the environment yet?” is a loaded question because it assumes that the person does not (or did not) care about the environment. It immediately puts the person we are talking to on the defensive and undermines the basic level of trust built into every conversation. These types of questions don’t only lead to bad answers (or no answer at all), but can have wider implications of communication. They can damage relationships, polarize discussions, and erode the possibility of good-faith dialogue.

The above shows how our use of questions can prevent us from achieving our goal of getting a proper, honest answer either by not contributing to the conversation or by destroying it. While out of context and manipulative questions are certainly bad, they are often a result of a failure on behalf of the person asking the question rather than the question itself. However, questions themselves can also be bad.

Bad Questions are Linguistically Confused.

An inherently bad question, rather than a question improperly used, is a questions where the words in the question are unknowingly used to mean something other than their ordinary meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein described this as language on holiday when he said,

“For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 38)

For Wittgenstein, words like ‘meaning’, ‘truth’, and ‘mind’ are frequently used despite the fact that their meaning is far from clear. For example, the question ‘what is truth?’ uses the word truth in a very different way than a sentence like ‘2+2=4 is true’. The problem is that we fail to recognize that these two uses are different and thus confuse ourselves into thinking that ‘what is truth?’ is (1) a question we understand and (2) is an answerable question.

At the heart of this confusion is what philosophers of language call a category mistake. A category mistake is when a word or phrase is used as if it belongs to one category of meaning, when it actually belongs to another. Consider the following two sentences:

1. My daughter is in a good mood today.

2. My job is in a good mood today.

Both of these sentences are grammatically correct. In English, we need a noun as the subject of a sentence. ‘My daughter’ and ‘my job’ both fulfill this requirement. However, ‘my job’ is not the kind of thing that can be in a good mood. In other words, it is not part of the category of things which can be in a good mood (e.g. people, animals, or a god). Thus, sentence #2 has no meaning despite all the words in the sentence having a meaning.

Wittgenstein argued that these kinds of category mistakes lead to bad philosophical questions that lead to more confusion rather than to clarity. For example, the question ‘What is an apple’ is a straightforward question to answer. But replacing the word ‘apple’ in the question to make a new question like ‘what is truth’ makes us think that we can answer the new question in the same way as the first.

Thus, these philosophically or linguistically confused sentences are bad because they ask the impossible. They ask us to give an answer to a question we do not, and often cannot, understand. While out of context or manipulative questions often fail to get an answer, philosophically confused questions make both parties believe that they have answered the question when they have in fact not. This makes them even more dangerous.

Conclusion

While the intention behind the phrase “there are no bad questions” is to encourage learning, we’ve seen that some questions genuinely are bad. They can be out of place, manipulative, or even philosophically confused. These types of questions prevent understanding and can undermine productive discourse.

However, this does not mean that we should be afraid to ask questions. Rather, we should approach questions with the same care that we do our answers. Good questions are tools for clarity and understanding and it is with that in mind that we should consider the questions we ask and answer.

In conclusion, As Wittgenstein reminds us, sometimes our task is not to treat every question as worthy of asking or answering, but to show that it deserves to be asked in the first place.