> very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want
Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers, http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers, http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history. Maybe some of those could be answered today if, say, the whole world's GNP was redirected towards that goal... but this is not going to happen. Multiple people have multiple, often contradicting, worthy goals.
Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue. Of course, you need to believe that these other perspectives offer value that Science(TM) cannot before you even begin to consider them.
Ok, so they're well-posed questions. So?
>Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue.
This sounds like the place of the argument. I think these questions aren't well-posed: they're actually being used to imply a large number of smaller questions. You can usually get a well-posed question by trying to break down one of these questions, or expose the bad reasoning that led to considering things like, "Well gosh, what's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it?" real questions.