I. The Hermeneutic Priority of Questioning
How does a sentence heard, seen, or felt transform into a meaning understood? We—linguistically shaped human beings—hear and see sentences all the time, all around us. And yet only some of those sentences make sense to us. It is not just that some sentences are expressed in languages that we have not yet acquired. I doubt that I am the only English speaker who hears and reads many English sentences I do not understand. Many people tolerate this experience of not understanding, accepting that we just do not have enough context and familiarity with specialized terminology, or that what is being said is not for us anyway—whether we are coincidentally overhearing someone else’s conversation or we are being deliberately excluded from a specific conversation (perhaps even esoteric ones). Yet we can often figure out the question to which a sentence answers to make that sentence understandable. It seems we never really understand a sentence unless we know what the sentence is an answer to, which means much miscommunication happens because we prioritize different questions (at least implicitly).
I am captivated by and curious about the characteristic features of transitioning from perceiving a sentence to understanding a thought or sense. I want to explain this transition from sentence seen to thought understood by way of isolating and explaining what we can call “the hermeneutic priority of questioning.” What transforms a sentence perceived into a complete thought understood?
Questions typically have chronological precedence over answers, in that usually an answer comes after a question is asked that requests the answer—with exceptions like Jeopardy! where the contestants formulate a question to which their challenge is the answer. Unlike sequential order, the hermeneutic priority of questioning has to do with the order of understanding specific meanings. Where is the line between what can and cannot or what does and does not “make sense”? How do we transition a sentence seen or heard (but does not make sense yet) to a sentence understood (where we make sense of it)? Even with the hermeneutic priority of questioning, there is a timing or temporality involved. Yet, what practices like Jeopardy! reveal, questions might be reversed engineered, or reconstructed after reading the answer—that is, the question can chronologically follow rather than precede the answer. Nevertheless, we do not really make sense of the answer without already presupposing or formulating the question we suspect it answers. This means questions and answers (that make sense) cannot happen simultaneously. In a strict sense, whether an answer makes sense depends on the specific question to which it is a response.
So questions have hermeneutic priority in the order of understanding declarative sentences. Consider this sentence: “Christopher is Vladimir.” For those of us to whom this sentence does not make sense yet, the sentence is currently in semantic outer space. As an answer, one question that would allow it to make sense is: “Who is cast in which role for the local production of Beckett’s play?” In relation to the question, the sentence transforms into an answer, and—if we actually ask the question ourselves—the answer turns into a meaning for us.
Gadamer specifies the question-answer dialectic, which yields sentential meanings or meaningful sentences (aka complete thoughts that make sense), as a fundamental hermeneutic axiom: “To understand a question is to ask it, but to understand a meaning is to understand it as an answer to a question” (Gadamer 2013, 383). A complete thought or meaning is a sentence that makes sense. Grasping or making sense of a sentence requires placing it in relation to the question it answers. This we just covered above. What strikes me as especially interesting in Gadamer’s formulation is how we make sense of questions themselves. If sentences—in particular, declarative sentences, assertions, or judgments—transform into complete thoughts understood in light of their relevant questions, how do we make sense of… questions themselves?! In a way, we do not understand questions, specifically in that we do not need a question to which a… question… answers. That would be to confuse what questions even are—whatever they are, at the very least they are not answers. So we need a different way to “make sense” of questions. As Gadamer clarifies, we make sense of questions not merely by passively grasping them but by actually asking them. Questioning is something we do or happens to us, maybe even more than questioning is something merely cognitive. If we actually ask a question, then that just is the understanding of the question. Questions self-instantiate their sense, whereas sentences need questions to be whole in making sense.
But another interesting facet of questioning is its passivity, where it seems as if questioning happens to us more than it is something we do. Questions occur to us as much as we pose them. To even consider a question, as if it were merely a tentative consideration, is already to be asking. As Gadamer writes, “Even when a person says such and such question might arise, this is already a real questioning that simply masks itself, out of either caution or politeness” (Gadamer 2013, 383). While we might not ask a question out loud, that it even crosses our mind is enough for us to have had the question occur to us. The point I am making is about how questions exceed our deliberate intentions. Getting caught up in questioning is less an intentional activity and more a passivity, a mode of what Levinas calls “nonintentional consciousness” (Levinas 1998, 123–132). Questioning is a passion more than an action.
I am not suggesting that there are not moments when we do not understand questions. I will likely not understand a question asked in a language I do not know. I often do not understand questions asked in my own language. The point is solely that understanding a question is simultaneously to be asking it: the asking is the understanding (see Dickman 2021, 52). Understanding a question is embodied in asking it.
Allow me to tie this up neatly by bringing us back to the hermeneutic priority of questioning. Questions, that in many ways we cannot help but to ask, precede understanding judgments or complete thoughts because it is the questioning—as an activity—that transforms sentences seen into complete thoughts understood. I always think of my experience reading a difficult page of writing. I get through the whole page, and think to myself, “What did I just read?” I could understand each word by itself, but could not put the words together into complete thoughts or multiple sentences into paragraphs. This happens in light of numerous factors, such as fatigue or distraction. One factor, though, is that I did not have a specific question in mind that the sentences address. That is, the very condition for making sense of sentences is missing. And that condition is, to repeat: to understand a question is to ask it, but to understand a complete thought is to understand it as an answer to a question. That just is questioning’s hermeneutic priority.
In the following section, I turn to how the hermeneutic priority of questions matters in the classroom. It can help us understand how to open up texts and philosophical discussion with students, allowing them not only to make better sense of what they read, but also to engage in the community of inquiry that philosophy is. This will take us one step further, explaining how questioning’s priority facilitates transferring thoughts from one person to another so we can communicate more successfully.
II. A Phenomenology of Shared Questioning
How do we understand what someone else has to say to us? How does someone else understand what we have to say to them? Is it just that we put our thoughts into words, hand the words over to another, and then they unwrap the thoughts out of the packaging of our mere words? Lakoff and Johnson name this model about language the “conduit” metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 2003, 11). This metaphor is how many of us explain the way we transfer thoughts from one person to another. As Lakoff and Johnson elaborate, “The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003, 10). Language is just mere wrapping paper for the thoughts we want to convey to others. This conduit metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is the basis of more refined philosophical theories of how language works, such as Wittgenstein’s early “propositionalist” account of language (see Wittgenstein 1922; cf. Meyer 1995, 216-217). Lakoff and Johnson isolate this metaphor to open the possibility of developing alternative metaphors for how to think about the working language does in helping us to understand one another.
How might we position ourselves best to make sense of what another says? One crucial way I want to develop here is through “sharing” a question with another person. By “shared questioning” I mean those cases where one person asks a question as if to get an answer, but then the recipient of the question also asks that same question, such that the question transforms from their question to our question (see Dickman 2021, 174-189). For example, imagine someone asking you, “What year is it?” And then you respond not by specifying a year within a particular era-dating system, but instead by asking, “Yeah, what year is it, really?” I will elaborate on this example below. For now, I am not so much concerned with specifying an exact alternative to the conduit metaphor, but instead, I want to focus on this question-answer dialectic in the understanding of discourse.
I want to illustrate this with the mention of my lesson plan for undergraduate students in my intermediate ethics course, Moral Philosophy, where we examine normative moral theories such as deontology, consequentialism, and more. My current institution is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a diverse student body thanks to recruitment in Central America and the Caribbean Islands, and requires students to major or minor across diverse areas of the curriculum. To help students understand daily readings, I utilize both reading guides with questions directing attention to specific sentences and a modified version of the National School Reform Faculty’s “text rendering experience” protocol. Within this practice, students bring a single word, a single phrase, and a single sentence (with citations and brief explanations) that they find especially significant for the class period’s main topic. They take turns sharing their three things in groups of four to five, and select at least one to present to the whole class for instructor-facilitated discussion. This protocol helps promote active listening, approximates equity of voices, and creates immediate feedback opportunities between peers and instructors. The process curates an organic “lecture” specific to this class period but also generates specific questions focused on these selected words, phrases, or sentences (see Dickman 2021, 212-213).
In the unit on virtue ethics, students and I work through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. To get students hooked on the text, I assign book IX on friendship first. I do this because all students, especially traditional undergraduate students, are already asking themselves questions about who their “true” friends are. Aristotle attempts to address precisely these questions in Book IX, where he poses and then answers questions, such as: What constitutes complete friendship? What are the necessary conditions for friendship? What are the ideal aims or ends of friendship? While these are Aristotle’s questions, if students can coordinate their own questions with Aristotle’s questions, then students can achieve a state of “shared questioning” with Aristotle. Achieving this shared questioning positions students both to make sense of Aristotle’s answers to the questions and to assess the adequacy of his answers to those questions that they themselves are asking. I want to emphasize the former—the making sense of his answers. For me, this is the heart of what shared questioning helps us do. By sharing the question, students can grasp or understand what Aristotle has to say. That is, shared questioning facilitates the transfer of Aristotle’s complete thoughts to the students’ minds. When the students are able to identify what questions Aristotle is asking and ask those questions themselves, only then are Aristotle’s thoughts transferred to the minds of students. This is not true if they take what Aristotle says as a series of disconnected statements or facts to be memorized. Without sharing the question, what Aristotle says will not make sense to them. It just goes “over” their heads—not because it is too difficult, but because what he says is just a series of sentences perceived rather than complete thoughts understood. Without shared questioning, we merely speak past one another rather than with one another.
Let’s return to the topic of what year it is. Of course, if someone were to say out of the blue, “It’s 2024,” we might wonder what their issue is, or just quickly reverse engineer the question they likely are answering as, “What year is it?” In the philosophy of language and erotetic logic, such questions are called “epistemic imperatives” (see Harrah 1982). They are epistemic in that when people use them, people want to come to know something. They are imperatives because they “command” the answerer to provide the asker with that knowledge. In a way, most questions or typical interrogative sentences can be reduced to commands without loss of meaning. For example, we can transpose the question “What is your name?” to “Tell me your name.”
While sharing epistemic imperatives is all well and good, I am especially interested in what I call “genuine” questions—I set off that word to stipulate a definition of the term, but I do not have much stake in whether people prefer to use a different term to set off the kinds of questions in which I am interested. We could instead call them “question eliciting questions” (see Dickman 2009). In the case of asking the question “What year is it?” as a genuine question, the listener or reader appropriates the question in an open-ended way, by echoing it as, “Yeah, what year is it, really?” If we simply answer with, “It is 2024 CE,” then we assume Christian hegemony despite the superficial attempt at secularizing the Christian era-dating system. We know that for other religious communities, the current year is quite different. For many Buddhists, it is 2567 BE (for the Buddhist Era). For many Jews, it is 5784 AM (Anno Mundi, for the year after creation). For Muslims, it is 1445 AH (Anno Hegirae, which means the year of the Hijra when the Prophet Muhammad founded the community of Medina). Are not all of these correct? Or is one year the “true” one? What if we turned to astrophysics, to dating based on the universe’s expansion speed? Would that give us a more accurate date? Is era-dating about accuracy or about locating ourselves in time in a significant and meaningful way? How I locate myself in time reveals what I take to be most real. It is interesting to me that the question “What year is it?” as a genuine question or a question-eliciting question can lead to other issues such as the nature of truth or European colonialism and globalization.
In what ways can this hermeneutic approach to sense-making and the sharing of questions transform our teaching, and students’ experience in class and as readers, and thus their learning?
Nathan Eric Dickman
Nathan Eric Dickman (PhD, The University of Iowa) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of the Ozarks. He researches in hermeneutic phenomenology, philosophy of language, and comparative questions in philosophies of religions. He has taught a breadth of courses, from Critical Thinking to Zen, and Existentialism to Greek & Arabic philosophy. In “Using Questions to Think” (Bloomsbury, 2021), he examines the roles questions play in critical thinking and logical reasoning. In “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Priority of Questions in Religions” (Bloomsbury, 2022), he examines roles of questions in the speech of religious figures. In “Interpretation: A Critical Primer” (Equinox, 2023), he examines scaffolds of questions in the interpretation of texts.
