A case for questioning all questions

By Ben Buckley

One of my favourite clichés in televised news is the way they present stories not as complete sentences, but as questions: “Could eating carrots be slowly killing your children? Details at 11.” It doesn’t matter whether the answer is “yes” or “no.” Simply by asking the question, the reporter has planted the idea, “carrots equals dead children” into your mind. Contrary to our intuitions, questions can be, in a sense, wrong. They can be misleading, if not downright incorrect.

The first kind of “wrong question” is the kind that doesn’t need to be asked in the first place. By asking a question, you are implicitly expressing the belief that the question needs to be asked. In other words, you are saying the answer to the question is probably surprising, in the sense that it might justify something something.

Often, news outlets ask questions, not because they’re worth asking, but because they present the illusion of a nice, marketable controversy. In the words of Doug Henwood, “we can’t tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.”

A concrete example from the past few years would be the question repeated by the Birthers in the United States: “Was the President of the United States really born on American soil?” This kind of misleading question was infamously parodied in an internet meme, asking: “Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?”

The second kind of wrong question is the kind that makes assumptions which might not be true. The classic example is an old joke, where the joke teller asks a married man, “do you still beat your spouse?” — the assumption in the question being that the man has ever beaten his spouse.

A more realistic example of this occurs in false dichotomies, where the question gives an incomplete set of choices, as with the question “are you with us, or are you with the terrorists?” A question can also contain a framework of background assumptions. If you ask, “what should Canada’s official languages be?” you are assuming that Canada needs official languages to begin with.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for a question to contain an assumption, provided that it’s asked in the proper context. If everybody has explicitly agreed that Canada should have official languages, it makes sense to ask which languages they should be. In that case, the question is the result of previous knowledge. The problem is when such questions are used to influence the audience’s beliefs, to introduce an idea into our minds without reason, or to narrow the discourse to an oversimplified set of options. Questions can be used to influence an audience’s beliefs under the guise of innocent skepticism.

Upon hearing a question, our tendency is to try to come up with an answer. But often it is helpful to step back and ask, “Why is this question being asked in the first place? What assumptions does it make, and how much of my time should I devote to its consideration?” This allows us to avoid useless questions and focus on thinking about what’s important.