On asking

Abstract

Based on a survey testing people’s intuitions about questions, Lani Watson has recently claimed that the act of seeking information captures the nature of genuine questions and what distinguishes them from rhetorical ones. In this paper, I will argue that Watson’s account fails to provide an accurate theory of questions. By revisiting the survey cases and results, and using Searle’s conception of the illocutionary point of directives, I will first argue that the cases support and confirm a simple and straightforward aim-constitutivist theory of the speech act of asking: One asks a real question by uttering an interrogative sentence only if one’s utterance is an attempt that aims to get the addressee to answer the question it expresses. Otherwise, one is asking a fake or rhetorical question. Moreover, based on Friedman’s perspective on inquiring attitudes as states in which one has a question open in one’s thought, I will argue that the survey cases can be taken to expand and deepen the sincerity conditions for questions that Searle had initially proposed: One sincerely asks a question if one wants the addressee to answer the uttered question to settle an inquiring state of mind, or to make a target audience enter into it. Finally, in the cases in which the survey participants recognise the presence of a question despite the absence of any apparent speech act of asking, I will argue that they recognise an inquiring state of mind rather than simply an information-seeking act: They recognise that one is in a mental state in which one is asking oneself a particular question.