Questions
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| Publication date | 09-2014 |
| Journal | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
| Volume | Issue number | 2014 | Fall |
| Organisations |
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| Abstract |
The philosophy of language since Frege has emphasized propositions and declarative sentences, but it is clear that questions and interrogative sentences are just as important. Scientific investigation and explanation proceed in part through the posing and answering of questions, and human-computer interaction is often structured in terms of queries and answers.
After going over some preliminaries we will focus on three lines of work on questions: one located at the intersection of philosophy of language and formal semantics, focusing on the semantics of what Belnap and Steel (1976) call elementary questions; a second located at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of science, focusing on why-questions and the notion of explanation; and a third located at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology, focusing on embedded or indirect questions. |
| Document type | Article |
| Note | Originally published Spring 2014, with minor corrections Summer 2014 and Fall 2014. Later minor correction Summer 2015, and substantive content changes Spring 2016 and Spring 2018. |
| Language | English |
| Published at | https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/questions/ |
| Other links | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/questions/ |
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