Topics Philosophy

Question Is it possible to answer a question with another question? is that what we called a Socratic questioning?

Accepted:
October 27, 2017

Comments

It seems that there is an

It seems that the word "answer" is being used in two senses in the question that you ask. Plainly, it can happen that someone asks, 'Is the tomato a fruit?' and someone else answers thus: 'What do you think?' That might well happen. But it is not the end of the story. One could count that as an answer, or as a failure to answer, or as both, but then in two different senses. It is a verbal response or reply, and "response" is one sense of "answer". There is a narrower sense of "answer", in which it means something like, "State the correct (or what the respondent takes to be correct) solution to the problem posed by the question", or something like that. This is closer to the legal sense of "answer", in which one "replies" or "makes answer" to a charge or accusation, by offering a defence. Asking a question as an answer would not work in these contexts. So if I am asked, 'What is the solution to 7x9?', what is meant is "the correct answer", and it is the answer to the question what the product of 7 and 9 is. 'What is the product of 7 and 9?' has an answer (63), and it is in this second sense no answer at all or not an answer to ask, 'What do you think?' The answer to the question, 'Is it raining' in this second sense is 'Yes' or 'No' or 'Sort of' or 'It's drizzling,' and 'I don't know' is an answer only in the first sense, a response.

Question Is it possible to answer a question with another question? is that what we called a Socratic questioning? Accepted:October 27, 2017

Question Is it possible to answer a question with another question? is that what we called a Socratic questioning?

Accepted:
October 27, 2017