Åqvist’s Corrections-Accumulating Question-Sequences

Abstract

David Harrah, in a recent review of Åqvist’s monograph on interrogatives, suggests that comparison as to merit between Åqvist’s approach and mine be postponed pending further development of each.¹ That makes it sound as if Åqvist and I are offering competing explications of the same ex-plicandum, and doubtless to a certain extent such is true. But I think it is even more true that Åqvist and I have different explicanda, although the fact that we each use the term ‘question’ and its cousins tends to obscure this feature of the situation. One good thing to mean by a ‘question’ is what Åqvist means: an epistemic request to lessen my ignorance along some specified dimension, a request as might be carried by an imperative like, ‘Let it be that either I know that S or I know that not-S.’ Åqvist throws an enormous amount of light on this sort of epistemic request. Another good thing to mean by a ‘question’ is what I mean: put in terms foreign to my usual vocabulary and as close to Åqvist as I can come, a question is a linguistic request to say something to me concerning a specified topic, a request as might be carried by an imperative like ‘Either tell me that S or tell me that not-S.’ One naturally could argue that these are already two explications of a given explicandum, but that seems to be fruitless. A better course is to allow that the word ‘question’ covers both epistemic requests and linguistic requests, and that both of these are explicanda standing in need of clarification.