A lot of emphasis in education is placed on showing what you know. But for at least a decade now, as I’ve thought about the twin challenges of engaging students and defending the place of philosophy in a college education, I’ve stopped emphasizing the mastery of content for its own sake. Instead, I’ve emphasized using content as a starting point for critical thinking. In doing so, I realized that critical thinking is at least as much about asking questions as answering them: questions are part of a critical stance.
I teach at a pair of small, Catholic Benedictine liberal arts colleges—one for men, one for women—that share a single academic program. Most of the students in my classes are there for one general education requirement or another, even in upper-division courses. So I think broadly about what it means to have a liberal arts education and the skills students can take with them beyond college. Among these, one of the most valuable is also one of our departmental learning goals: resisting the urge for quick and easy answers. Asking questions is one way of learning to do this.
So for the past few years, I’ve been trying to teach my students to articulate where questions come from: their context and motivation, the mystery that drives them, and the hook that engages us in inquiry. I have three motivations for this specific approach.
First, and most practically, I want them to write better introductions to papers. A lot of my students know that an introduction needs to contain a thesis, and they know there’s supposed to be some kind of hook to engage their audience. But they frequently need help crafting a narrow and interesting thesis, and they rarely know how to craft a relevant and engaging hook. I realized that we can solve both of these issues if they can articulate a question the thesis is answering. “People have been talking about X since the dawn of time”—maybe—but why? If we know what’s bugging our proverbial/mythical ancestors, then we can see what kind of answer is interesting. And we also have our hook, because questions are engaging. They alert us to something interesting: a gap in knowledge, something unusual that needs explanation, a puzzle, a mystery.
Second, we are told that philosophy begins in wonder. That means (among other things) asking questions. If I want my students to really do philosophy and not just learn about it (and I do), they need questions.
Third, and relatedly, there are lots of kinds of wondering, so wonder alone doesn’t define philosophy. What makes philosophical wondering different from scientific or historical or economic wondering? I find it handy to define the field of philosophy in terms of its questions. But just listing the big philosophical questions, as we often do, is defining by example and doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It doesn’t really explain what makes philosophy different from, say, science, and how to know a philosophical question when you meet one. It’s a good start to say that philosophical questions are not settled empirically (though facts might be needed to answer them); they’re open-ended and difficult to settle in any definitive way; and they’re about “fundamental” issues like concepts, knowledge, and values (though this is defining by example again). Still, this is pretty vague and high-level for students. I want to see if we can define philosophical questions more accessibly, so that students have a way in.
These three motivations led me to try teaching students to think about where questions come from. We talk about what makes us ask questions. Sometimes we want information or clarification. Sometimes we’re surprised or confused or puzzled or curious. (Sometimes we’re just trying to show off or be a pain in the butt, too, but I’ll assume this isn’t serious questioning and set it aside.) We ask questions when we get stopped, stuck on something that’s in the way of our understanding whatever it is we’re trying to understand—when we’ve run into a mystery. (By this standard, test questions aren’t really questions, they’re instructions: show me what you know about X; demonstrate your Y skills.)
This mystery quality is what the questions in my three motivations have in common. Thus, I started asking students to introduce questions by identifying what stops someone’s understanding of something and articulating the mystery that leads to the question. A well-stated question will provide some background and then end with “So, ?” I provide templates to help them get started.
One template is the “clashing intuitions” approach. A lot of (philosophical) questions arise when we notice that we have two intuitions about something that isn’t compatible, at least on the face of it. The template for this kind of question is: On the one hand, it looks like X. On the other hand, it looks like not-X. So how should we make sense of this?
Free will provides a nice example of this one. On the one hand, it certainly feels like you’re deciding what to eat for lunch, and that nothing is compelling you in any particular direction. On the other hand, any physical event has a physical cause—and your reaching out to grab the sandwich is a physical event. Those two things can’t be true at the same time, because if my reaching for the sandwich is the result of other physical events, my apparent choice had nothing to do with it. Still, the feeling of choice is strong. So do we have free will?
A second template is the “wait, I don’t actually know what that is” approach. In a discussion, it often happens that we’re using some term pretty freely, and at some point, we realize that not everybody understands it the same way, so we need to spend some time defining what we mean. The template I give students for this one is: We all think we understand X; after all, we use the concept in regular life and people seem to (more or less) understand each other. But do we? There are cases (Y, Z) that make us realize that we don’t really understand X. So, what is X?
Just about any big concept provides an example for this one. Take beauty. We can all name some definitely beautiful things, and some definitely not-beautiful things. But when you meet an edge case—say when you disagree with someone and try to argue about whether that person, painting, landscape, building, etc. is beautiful—you realize you only have fuzzy working knowledge of beauty, not well-defined knowledge. So, what is beauty?
A third template is the “What’s the meaning of this?” approach. It’s based on the fact that we sometimes worry about the consequences of different ideas, and that motivates us to wonder why, or what’s at stake. The template goes like this: X is (or might be) the case. But if that’s true, then it has consequences that don’t fit with our usual understanding of things, or that we haven’t thought (enough) about yet, such as Y. So what does X mean for us?
For example: We know that humans are animals. But we have a long history of thinking we’re special or separate or superior to other animals. So what should we make of this—the fact that we’re animals, and/or the fact that we think we’re special? In other words: What does it mean for us that we’re animals?
On a very general level, then, and for pedagogical purposes, a useful formula for getting students to introduce a question usually involves an initial statement, followed by a “but” that introduces some contrast or problem with the statement, and ends with “so,” the question. Obviously, this won’t cover every case, but it gives students a path into territory they’ve never entered before, or have been in but often haphazardly, without orientation.
This formula works well for setting up a thesis as an answer to the question. And it provides grounds for more detailed and richer theses, because the setup already shows where there will be difficulties in taking one side of the issue. This way, they’re more likely to argue for something focused and narrow: “I will argue that A, because B and C outweigh D.” It’s not foolproof, and they still need practice crafting theses, but I find it helps get beyond a simple report about what they’ll argue for.
I start by having students practice introducing questions I’ve given them, and from there we can move to them writing their own questions, noticing where they get stopped when thinking about a topic. Asking students to introduce questions also has the advantage of tending to make paper assignments more authentic because students are investigating questions that they can at least see the logic of, if not actually own for themselves. They especially come to see the value of this in the “Philosophy in the Wild” assignment I have them do, in which they go “undercover” and hold a philosophical conversation with someone who doesn’t know they’re doing an assignment. They can’t just spring a question on their partner out of the blue; they need to set it up so that it seems natural.
Practice with introducing questions also helps students get more of a feel for the difference between philosophical questions and other kinds. “Are we alone in the universe?” comes up when I have them read the short story “They’re Made out of Meat” by Terry Bisson. The question can be introduced using the “clashing intuitions” template: On the one hand, we don’t have solid evidence that there are aliens; on the other hand, given the vastness of the universe, the probability that life has also evolved elsewhere is pretty good. So, are we alone in the universe? Now we see what arrested our attention. But it’s also clearer that this isn’t a philosophical question, because it’s asking for information. In theory, it could be answered by science.
Maybe we can get from this to a philosophical question, though. In a case like this, the “What’s the meaning of this?” template comes in handy. I ask students to think about the interests that might have motivated us to ask whether there are aliens, because maybe we can find philosophical questions in the neighborhood. It seems to matter to us whether there is life elsewhere. But why? Because that will mean we need to adjust our understanding of our place in the universe. Or because we’ll need to figure out how to treat them. “What will it mean for us if there are aliens?” or “If we ever meet aliens, how should we treat them?”—those are invitations to philosophy.
So I’ve found a lot of pedagogical value in teaching students to think through the motivations for questions. But wait, there’s more! I think it comes in handy not only in motivating students, but also when philosophers are asked to justify our ongoing existence as a department (and, more broadly, a field). When asked by a student, administrator, politician, or average person, Why should we care about this?, it’s hard (though not impossible!) to say things that will convince a skeptic when philosophy is framed as a matter of knowledge. What is the use of knowing Plato’s theory of the Forms?
But when philosophy is framed as a matter of thinking—including asking questions—it’s much easier to make a case. What’s the use of getting surprised or confused or puzzled or curious—wondering about—Plato’s theory of the Forms? A number of answers open up. For one thing, the questions are interesting and important. Plato’s theory arises from, and leads to, important questions about knowledge, reality, and even ethics—questions that still matter today, even if we don’t accept Plato’s view.
Furthermore, I don’t have systematic evidence for this, but I’ll bet that practice with articulating questions’ background makes it more likely that we’ll notice questions in the first place. When we start to frame questions as mysteries, we might start to see more things as surprising, puzzling, confusing, or curious. Or, at least, we might realize that more things are mysterious than we would otherwise notice. This is itself an important critical thinking skill: the readiness to suspend belief in the status quo.
But also, the ability to articulate where questions come from is part of the very valuable skill of getting to the heart of an issue. When we understand the motivations for our questions, we’re better able to understand what will count as answers and why those answers matter. (Once or twice a year, a major publication comes out with an article that tells us that employers really want this skill, and like philosophy/humanities/liberal arts majors because they have it.)
In short: questioning is thinking, and to the extent that we want to teach thinking, we should be teaching students to frame questions as well as answer them.
The Question-Focused Pedagogy series of the APA Blog is focused on how we can, ought to, fail to, and might teach question-skills and pass on the values and importance of questions and questioning to students. If you would like to publish in the Question-Focused Pedagogy series, please reach out to its editor, Stephen Bloch-Schulman at sschulman@elon.edu.
Erica Stonestreet
Erica Lucast Stonestreet is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy department at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in central Minnesota. She is most interested in the ethical dimensions of love and caring, and the relationships, projects and things that make us who we are. She is currently working on a popular-audience book tentatively called Who We Are and How to Live, which aims to show how conceptions of human nature influence theories of ethics, and argue for a more relational conception of human beings. She is the 2023 recipient of her institutions’ Sister Mary Grell / Robert Spaeth Teacher of Distinction award.
