> If a single yes/no question is clearly stated, then it does have an answer.
Without having to reach for fancy counterexamples, how about the Empedoclean "Is the answer to this question 'no'?"?
Without having to reach for fancy counterexamples, how about the Empedoclean "Is the answer to this question 'no'?"?
It's not at all easy to recognize when a question is stated "clearly enough", and your questions provide an excellent example of this. The question "is this question more than eight words long?" refers to question itself (as a string), and in general, this kind of self-reference is perfectly harmless. The question "Is the answer to this question 'no'?" refers to its own answer, and this kind of self-reference is potentially problematic.
In other words, the fallacy is to assume the following response was fixed to be an answer to the question. If I answered "no" it would be obvious that i wasn't planning to say "no" prior ("about") to the question. There is just no context in which the question would make sense the way you suggest. It's non-sense.