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In reply to the discussion: Do we actually know who killed those cops [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)When you ask a question, you have presuppositions. You don't ask questions that you think are insane.
"So, how many tons of chocolate coated shrimp do you think the first lady ate for breakfast today?" To ask it is to be a nutjob.
It's a commonplace to intuit that questions have no "truth value"--they don't have a claim on the truth. They don't assert a claim. "It's just a question."
"So, Mr. President, do you still beat your wife?"
The idea that questions are just harmless questions without some kind of embedded claim is straitjacketed early 20th century logic in which humans were automatons. It shows a fake (or stunning ignorant) understanding of how human brains work. We assume that many kinds of questions suppose relevance, some underlying claim taken to be true. Depending on the question, this claim can be easily denied with a yes/no response or it might need a long-winded one. The two goofball questions I wrote above require longer responses. They're inflammatory because they seem to suppose relevance and there's some claim that listeners assume the asker thinks is true. It takes a sentence or two to peel back to the underlying presupposition, the underlying claim. The very fact that they provoke a certain level of outrage is sufficient to show that it's not "just someone asking a question."
The problem is that in understanding a question with an embedded presupposition the listener must assume the presupposition is true. In studies it's been shown that later the rejection of the presupposition might be remembered. It's also possible for the assumption that the presupposition is true to be remembered. The more you challenge the question, think through to the underlying presupposition and consciously deny it, the less likely that is. Most people don't do that. So in asking the question, you wind up getting a certain percentage of people, a month later, to think that you actually made a claim that, for whatever reason, they believed was true.
It's a great rhetorical technique. It's really good for propaganda and advertising, esp. if you don't let the listener have a chance to think through and deny the presupposition. Politicians love asking that kind of question and then quickly moving on to answer it themselves or changing the subject, denying listeners "think time". It's psychological manipulation at its rawest. It's demagoguery at its vilest.
Neutrally phrased questions with no special intonation like "Is Barack Obama President of the United States?" are closer to being truth-neutral. It's hard to not put non-neutral emphasis on obvious questions.
Welcome to a rudimentary psycholinguistic, research-based, data-driven view of questions.