Erotetics | Hacker News Reader

Erotetics

en.wikipedia.org

76 pointspizza45 comments

The idea of an implicit dialogical contract is common to the ideas of Alfred Jules Ayer, Jurgen Habermas and Carl Rogers in addition to these "Erotetic" philosophers.

An implicit question rides along with a speech act. Even ones like submitting post to HN. In this case it is:

"Oh how interesting is Erotetics.. what might this imply for digital technologies of social or commercial value?"

And the response might be:

"Oh yes, I see there's an overlap with formal query languages (indeed structured ones (SQL)), so maybe we can learn to make better databases"

"Hmm isn't it interesting that in machine learning the trainer knows both the question and the answer so; is the weight matrix essentially the proof that links the a-priori to the consequent? What can this tell us about building better neural nets"

And still, these questions carry along with them implied questions of their own, perhaps to do with the study of language as branch of computing.

Each participant "signs" (like a block-chain) their contribution not just with a response, but with an implicit expectation.

Wouldn't it be a "fun" (and strange) world, if like that scene in Mr. Robot where everyone at the Allsafe office wears a label that sums up their life, if each comment also had a "Why I am saying this and what I expect in response" field.

> language as branch of computing.

Or computing as a branch of language?

>To teach someone something is to answer that person’s questions about some subject matter.

I wonder if this would be better said, "To teach someone something is to answer the questions that a person should have about some subject matter."

I'm thinking about school children and I imagine most of them would claim they have no questions about the subject matter and can we please be finished now?

My question then would be: can a disinterested school child be taught as well as an interested school child?

Because if this is not so, then it seems to me that the first task of an effective teacher is not to plow ahead answering questions the student doesn't have (and may not even understand), but to provoke those questions in the student.

That's the principle of constructivist teaching methods - you're not transferring information, you're helping the student construct a mental model. Thus, rather than just dumping info, you have to probe the student's model to see if they truly understand, and teach to the misunderstandings.

The art of teaching (or management, or any other kind of leadership) is not communicating information and directing activities, but instilling a curiosity, want, or desire to learn and do. Once you do that, there's no stopping an intelligent person from learning. (As Jordan Peterson (among others) correctly points out, though, there is a minimum human intelligence level required for that baseline curiosity, and alas, much of humanity doesn't reach that bar, especially in certain regions of the world...)

SFW in case anyone was wondering

I was definitely wondering!

Just a discussion about human intercourse...

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/social+intercourse

I was almost expecting some new development teledildonics domain ;)

So I wasn't the only one?

You probably confused this with erotic erotetics, i.e. the part of logic devoted to erotic questions.

I noticed something along these lines when designing pages on a website that I'm working on.

Each page is the answer to a question. If you don't define the question well, it's difficult to know what that page should show.

I was ~99% sure this article was going to be about "erotic haptics", ie, remote controlled sex toys.

The actual term for that is the wonderful word "teledildonics"

Which is sad because it is a multi-billion dollar field with room for amazing amounts of innovation and discovery and it's sitting idle right now because, in general, it's icky and people don't want to be associated with it.

> in general, it's icky

Have you tried washing the field after you're done with it?

I feel like this submission was some kind of troll attempt, but I learned something from it.

Huh, for some reason I seem to remember thinking that it was going to be about like, a model logic about erotic things or something, and I was wondering why anyone would design such a thing.

Or prosthetics that replace erogenous zones.

> In proportion as a man is thinking scientifically when he makes a statement, he knows the statement is the answer to a question and he knows what the question is.

Interesting way of looking at communication!

I might be able to apply this to technical writing (my line of work). Sometimes you write some content and it feels out of place or awkward. Perhaps asking "what question is this statement an answer to?" might clarify what to do with the content.

I also find it effective to sometimes literally start each paragraph with the question that the paragraph is answering. It helps keep the writing focused.

https://diataxis.fr (or the original of that page) was posted on HN recently, and I thought it was fairly interesting; I haven't had an opportunity to apply it to my own technical writing yet (I wear many hats, and "documentation writer" hasn't been needed recently), but I'm keeping it handy for when I do.

The ideas behind Diataxis née [1] Divio's Documentation System are one of the cardinal rules of technical writing. Most if not all professional technical writers divide their documentation into content types along those lines. By the way they didn't come up with that idea; they just have the most accessible explanation of it :D

Are you just mentioning it in passing (because I mentioned technical writing) or is there a connection to erotetics that I'm not seeing?

Another very useful practice is to take an inventory of all existing documentation (in a spreadsheet for example) and mark which ones fall neatly into one of the doc types (tutorial/guide/explanation/reference) and which ones are a mix. The mixed ones are candidates for refactor. This practice also helps quickly uncover content gaps (e.g. "ah, we have a guide and explanation on the login workflow but no reference for the login APIs!").

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/n%C3%A9e (my fancy word for the day :D)

Pretty much mentioning it in passing - it's hard to tell the experience level of random commenters online, so thought I might pass that along in case you were unfamiliar; I've done _some_ technical writing for work, but not enough, and none formal enough, to be familiar with the cardinal rules, so Diataxis has been in the back of my head for the last week+ since I saw it posted on HN. Thank you for the seemingly positive review of them though X) And hey, if you have any other good resources (even if less accessible), I'm always looking to learn.

And yes, nee (or née if I just steal your accented version) is a useful word X)

Related (nice) word: supererogatory = more than what can be asked for, more than is required by duty. "In ethics, an act is supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be done."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supererogation

I always wondered if there's a way to define the group of unanswerable questions. Specifically, is there some sort of test that can be applied to a question, resulting in whether or not it is answerable. This will likely have to be limited to a certain field (say, physics) but could be useful nonetheless.

This would run up against a standard halting-type reduction: if there is any unanswerable question Q, and you feed your test the question "A and Q?", then you will be testing whether A is true.

I took a class with Nuel Belnap, Logic 1500. He spent an entire 90 minute class explaining the logical implication trees behind an incident where he fell and hit his head while walking his dog. Fascinating mind!

The inventor of the logic of questions was named Whately. That tracks.

There are no bad questions but there are plenty of bad answers

That's a good point.

I would consider a question bad that is not explicit enough about what answer would actually be "good".

But when learning new things, I'm often faced with the problem that asking the right questions isn't much different from already knowing the answer.

Shouldn't take too long to run out of "silly" questions before you get to the right ones, as long as the interest is there and it's genuine. Now how do you foster sincere curiosity is a better question :)

A question can smuggle in presuppositions. A question can clearly be asked in bad faith.

"Did you stop beating your spouse yet?" is a bad question. So is "why do atheists hate god?"

Yes, and a rhetorical question really isn;t a question at all, it's a statement disguised as one. If someone asks a question like "would you feel the same if the shoe were on the other foot?" and the reply is "as a matter of fact I would", you can be fairly confident the "questioner" would come back with "no you wouldn't".

Every question, and every answer carries with it a plethora of presuppositions. Cornelius van Til wrote some excellent works on presuppositions with respect to worldviews, but his work is much more easily understood by reading the works of Greg Bahnsen, a student of van Til's, who died at an early age about 25 years ago.

Passive aggressive questions intended to inflame a situation are bad. Especially so if the asker has no interest in a truthful (or any) answer.

Are they really?

8-)}

I wonder if this is a rhetorical question?

Yes, you do.

Objection. Counsel is leading the witness.

Can't help but think of this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLt1HoAPniM

Are you just saying this because you're angry at your mother?

(see? bad question)

Well, sometimes a good one, I suppose.

People are more complicated than this. I can take a class that I have no interest in - no questions - but by attending lectures I can learn. There was no question, at least in my mind, that preceeded the answers I received.

People say things that are not answers to anything. They sing. They complain. They stutter and repeat themselves.

I think philosophers are living in a completely imaginary world.

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