Questions are the Engines of Thought
“Questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry.” David Hackett Fischer
Arguably there has never been a period of history where we are less inclined to take the time to ask questions, mired as we are here in the information age. Answers are readily available, just ask Google—or Chat GPT—your question. Asking questions that aren’t already answered unnecessarily slows things down. We need production, not contemplation. Besides, questions can be offensive and may cause conflict so why take the risk?
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast Why Do You Ask?
We are naturally wired to ask questions. Recall your encounters with children ages 2-5. Their dominant mode of interaction with the adults in their lives was to ask questions, especially questions beginning with “Why.” Something happens around the 5-year mark that leads to fewer and fewer questions until in junior high school it is considered dumb and inappropriate to ask questions.
Questions are the engines that drive thinking. Learning is not merely the acquisition of a body of information. Learning in the truest and most durable sense comes from being immersed in a “way of thinking” which is really a way of answering the questions the discipline was invented to address.
Join me today as we explore the power of questions and how prioritizing questions over answers powers deep and durable learning.
Douglas Estes in a helpful book called The Questions of Jesus in John makes this startling statement, “Western readers are biased against questions.” This may seem harsh but it is true. Whether we realize it or not, Western readers are biased toward statements. The pedagogical course we endure from children through adolescence to adulthood is based on making statements and defining propositions and not at all on asking questions, even though the ability to ask questions appropriately is the basis for human learning and understanding.” (p. 3) Estes goes on to call bias towards statements “propositional tyranny.” (p. 5)
I agree with Estes. We are not taught how to ask questions or why it would be a good idea to ask them.
This is strange and even perverse given the centrality of questions to learning. This distortion is the fundamental reason that educational standard practice has ensconced “teaching as telling” coupled with “learning as remembering.”
In the three previous episodes of this podcast, I developed the logic of thinking beginning with the core, which considers what questions are appropriate to a discipline and amenable to being answered. These questions are what we chew on in the working layer and answer in the output layer. Thinking is all about questions. Indeed, even the answers we generate lead inescapably to new questions.
Questions are logically prior to propositions. Propositions are the answers to questions, but the questions are never voiced in most classrooms. With the questions out of sight, it is no wonder that students find it difficult to engage. The most frequent question from students, “will this be on the test?” is a cry for justifying the importance of the propositions that are being dished out. If it weren’t viewed as impertinent the real question would be “why do we need to know this?” A good question has the justification baked in. Good questions are compelling and answer the motivation question.
This gets us back to our default setting as learners. We had everything we needed from birth to 4 to acquire significant language competence. We formulated patterns and attached language labels to those concepts. We connected concepts to other concepts to create explanatory frameworks. We learned the structure of language as a means of asking questions and understanding the answers we were given. We did all of this without any formal instruction. Our questioning moved from asking the names of physical objects when we were very young children to asking “Why?” that is, seeking satisfying explanations for nearly everything. 4-year-olds ask about 100 “Why” questions per day. Enough to weary most of their adult keepers.
Einstein said, “The important thing is to not stop questioning.” But that’s exactly what almost everyone does. 4 years of age is the peak for asking questions and there is a significant and sustained downward trend from that point on. Neil Postman put it this way, “Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”
I have a theory regarding what shuts down the desire to ask questions. Learning to read is what starts the shut-down. Don’t misunderstand, I’m a huge fan of reading and I think that the ability to read fluently is crucial to future learning. My wife and I have spent the last 18 months teaching my just turned 5-year-old grandson how to read.
Photo: pexels-magda-ehlers-1337382
The difficulty is that reading involves the acquisition of letter symbols and the associated phonemes and those are all arbitrary. Why is a certain symbol called an A? Why is that letter pronounced sometimes as a long a as in able, and sometimes as a short a as in apple? At the bottom there are no real answers to these why questions. They are not truly explanatory. There is no cause and effect. These are conventions we’ve adopted for the English language. This, in turn, means that our default wiring for learning using pattern formation assisted by question-asking is not going to be up to the job. There are better and worse ways to teach reading, but learning to read requires memorization and drill. There is no other way. Yes, phonics is helpful in decoding words and has a logic, but the symbols and their sounds are intrinsically arbitrary and rife with exceptions in English.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are all typically taught from the outset using the same approach: memorization and drill. I think the key is to teach arithmetic using mathematical concepts and logic while you are teaching reading and writing using memorization and drill. Keep foregrounding concept formation to your young reader in every other sphere of learning. Their natural curiosity loves to ask questions about the living world and the physical world around them and you should encourage their questions. Help them experience reading and writing acquisition as the exception and don’t allow it to become the paradigm for future learning.
Adult learners need to develop their ability to use questions in reasoning. Jack Mezirow (p. 3) traced an arc when he said, “The formative learning of childhood becomes transformative learning in adulthood.” Transformation is required if we are to grow in understanding and become increasingly wise. The Apostle Paul said when he was a child he thought as a child and understood as a child, but when he became a man, he put away childish things. Including especially, childish ways of thinking. At the root of transformative change is a willingness to be confronted by questions.
The logic of propositions is what we have been schooled in and is called alethic logic. The logic of questions is called erotetic. Erotetic logic employs a series of questions in the service of creating understanding. In contrast, propositions repeat understanding that someone else arrived at. You can repeat the alethic logic of propositions without necessarily understanding.
The logic of questioning will quickly unmask a lack of understanding. Perhaps that besides our habituation is another reason why we prefer propositions. Asking questions seems to presuppose a humility that desires to really understand and a commitment to change as a result.
Questions are powerful tools that can be misused. A sentence that asks a question is called interrogative but that’s dangerously close to an interrogation. To ask is also to inquire and although an inquiry may be justified, we certainly don’t want to be subjected to an inquisition.
Last year I read a book called Doesn’t Hurt to Ask, by prosecution lawyer and former congressman, Trey Gowdy. Gowdy’s prosecutorial nature surfaced again and again in the book. He maintained that the purpose of questions was either to corroborate or to contradict. That might be true of courtroom questions, but it is defective as a logic of questioning.
Questions are a powerful tool in the art of persuasion. Gowdy used them to persuade juries. Jesus used them to bring people to spiritual understanding. Martin Copenhaver in his book Jesus Is the Question points out that Jesus in response to a question was 40 times more likely to ask a question as to give a direct answer. Jesus was not using questions to avoid answering. Rather Jesus was helping his questioners to think about their own beliefs and whether they were prepared to live with the consequences.
Learning how to ask good questions is non-trivial, but doable. You’ll get better over time as you practice the craft of questioning. The key is to get started. The Right Question Institute offers their QFT, Question Formulation Technique as a simple entry point. I’ll link to this resource in the blog that accompanies this podcast.
QFT begins with the creation of a provocative prompt. This is their Q-focus, and it could be an image, a video clip, or even a short phrase like CRT-Critical Race Theory. This serves to pull people in and motivate their questions.
Step two is to generate questions—as many as you can. The rule here is no censorship including self-censorship. No judgment about quality. Initially you might allot ten minutes to generating questions.
Step three is to improve the questions you’ve generated. Open-ended questions are generally an improvement over closed questions which tend to be fact-based or that lead to yes/no answers.
In step four you prioritize your questions; you decide what the most important questions are.
In step five you decide where to go next. This is often where you begin to pursue answering the questions you’ve generated.
Warren Berger has an even simpler approach for generating questions which he calls Why–What If—How. Berger rightly says “there is no formula for questioning. [This is] more of framework designed to help guide one through various stages of inquiry—because ambitious, catalytic questioning tends to follow a logical progression, one that often starts with stepping back and seeing things differently and ends with taking action on a particular question.” Berger (2014) p. 7
A common way of dividing questions recognizes them originating from three categories of thinking. These are divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking.
Divergent thinking is sometimes called lateral thinking. It is also called ideation. It tends to generate a diverse set of questions that move in very different directions. This is where the divergent label comes from. Brainstorming is an example of divergent thinking.
Psychologist Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats constitute a toolbox of divergent thinking tools that has been used by executive teams in problem-solving and vision casting. I’ve used them myself as part of several leadership teams. The six hats include a white hat asking what information is needed to make a decision, a black hat asks what are the worst things that could go wrong, a yellow hat asks what are the best things that could result from an anticipated change. There are three more important hats and I encourage you to look at the link to all six that I’ll provide in my blog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats
Convergent thinking is also called vertical thinking. Different questions generated by the thinking all converge to point to a single solution or answer. A trivial use of the convergent label is applied to answering questions to which there is one right answer such as on standardized tests. Convergent thinking is sometimes derisively called non-creative. To the contrary, convergent thinking is what happens when the relevant pieces of a cognitive puzzle come together in a satisfying “aha” moment of understanding. Determining what is relevant as well as how the pieces fit together are unquestionably creative. Vertical thinking is logical, analytical, and sequential. It is generally what is meant by critical thinking, although there is no one template for critical thinking.
In the weeks to come I’ll be focusing your attention on asking questions using convergent thinking coupled with the third category and that is metacognitive thinking.
Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking. I don’t mean navel gazing. One aspect of metacognition is the ability to monitor the quality of your own understanding of an idea. Studies have repeatedly shown that most students overestimate the level of their own understanding. The students with the poorest understanding are the most prone to grossly overestimate their own understanding. This shows up in the common student lament, “I don’t know how I could have done so poorly on the test because I really studied, and I felt like I understood.” Very often this discrepancy is due to improper study methods such as flashcards which are stimulus-response devices that reward raw association rather than true understanding. This is a failure to ask the right kinds of questions of oneself prior to the test. The right questions would spotlight vagueness and misconceptions which could then lead to remediation. Metacognition would include asking questions that require you to analyze the premises from which you reason, assumptions you are making, evidence, and logic.
As a concrete example of the interaction between convergent thinking and metacognitive questioning consider this statement in an open access article released on Feb. 5, 2023, and published in eClinicalMedicine which is part of the British medical journal, The Lancet. “Despite bacterial coinfection rates of less than 10%, antibiotics are prescribed to an estimated 75% of patients with COVID-19.”
A relevant question to stimulate thinking might be, “What misconception is revealed in this pattern of prescribing?” To answer this, you’d need to recognize that antibiotics are not effective against viruses, including the agent of Covid. That would lead to a secondary question, “Why did so many physicians prescribe antibiotics that would treat only a bacterial infection when the patient only had a viral infection?” This would lead to the widespread practice of prophylactic prescribing of antibiotics. This “just-in-case” prescribing would be done to prevent a bacterial infection rather than to treat one. The next question would then be “What is the harm in prophylactic prescribing?” Answering this question involves multiple concepts and connections but would especially converge on the reality that antibiotics always select for antibiotic resistant bacteria. This selection process broadly implemented through inappropriate prescribing renders antibiotics now in use progressively less useful in treating actual bacterial infections as resistant organisms become dominant in human populations.
This example demonstrates how metacognitive questioning meshes with convergent thinking. It also demonstrates the process called Socratic Questioning.
Socrates was a master questioner who was executed for supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens. He taught through his use of questions. His questions were viewed as deconstructing the status quo and thus dangerous. He never wrote anything down. What we know of him comes through Plato’s Dialogues which, although fictional, often feature Socrates engaged in what has been called the elenchus.
The elenchus is often viewed as verbal warfare which was won when Socrates succeeded in getting his adversaries to contradict themselves. This may have been accurate when the audience was hostile. At other times Socrates viewed himself as a midwife “because he …assisted the labor of his companions in giving birth to ideas.” Rather than belittling them for their ignorance, Socrates helped students “find and bring forth great numbers of noble truths from within themselves.” (Chappell, T. D. J. (2005). Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (pp. 42–43). Hackett Publishing Company). Will Monroe in 1905 said that “The purpose of the Socratic Method [is] to induce the student to self-understanding and reflection, to develop the reason that is in him.” (Monroe, W. S. (1905). Art of Questioning. The Journal of Education, 61(8), p. 201)
The essence of Socratic questioning is a series of questions that are “systematic, disciplined, and deep and usually focuse[d] on foundational concepts, principles, theories, issues, or problems.” (Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2007). Critical Thinking: The Art of Socratic Questioning. Journal of Developmental Education, 31(1), p. 36).
This series of questions is contingent on the quality of responses to the questions. The enemies of good answers to questions are vagueness due to shallow thinking and misconceptions due to misunderstanding. Good questions will shine a light on what the student knows or unmask their cognitive dissonance. Like an adaptive test that offers up the next question based on your responses to previous questions, Socratic questioning probes for the depth of understanding or misunderstanding by asking follow-up questions. Was an unsatisfactory response due to a misunderstanding of the question itself or a fundamental misconception? Was an appropriate response due to recall of memorized propositions or to true understanding? Socratic questioning explores the content of the student’s concepts as well as the logic of their connection to other concepts.
Exposure of flaws in thinking requires a gentle, empathetic approach in the classroom. I call this a Socratic conversation. I always put the best light possible on a student’s responses to my questions. I may reword their response to highlight a nugget of truth that could have been better expressed. I think it is clear to my students that I intend to be helpful and empower their learning through my questions. It is possible for a Socratic classroom to be a positive experience for every student.
You don’t have to be a student in a classroom to experience the growth that results from Socratic questioning. You can practice on yourself. You don’t need an audience. You don’t need to be on the receiving end of someone else’s questions. The surest sign of cognitive flourishing is in your ability to ask good questions of yourself. Voltaire put it this way, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
The entire Einstein quote is even more sobering: "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day."
Here are some other resources that develop the power of questions:
Academic:
Crosswhite, J. (1996). The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument. University of Wisconsin Press.
Popular:
Berger, W. & E. Foster (2020). Beautiful Questions in the Classroom. Corwin.
Berger, W. (2018). The Book of Beautiful Questions. Bloomsbury Publishing, NY.
Newman, R. (2023) Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People’s Hearts the Way Jesus Did. 3rd. ed. Kregel Publications.
Rothstein, D. & L. Santana. (2011) Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. Harvard Education Press.
Here’s an interesting and fun YouTube Video about the power of questions in interviewing and networking.