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Complex Question;
Many Questions, Loaded Question, or Compound Question Fallacy

1. Description of the Complex Question Fallacy

   Fallacy of Complex Question: the fallacy of phrasing a question in a context that assumes something not contextually granted, assumes something not in evidence, contains an ambiguity, or assumes a false dichotomy in a covert attempt to establish a conclusion.

   
   
   So the fallacy results from a conclusion drawn from one or more unwarranted or objectionable assumptions in the posing of a question. If the conclusion is not stated, then no fallacy can properly be said to occur.
   
   The question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” has been used in logic textbooks as an example of the complex question fallacy over the last two hundred years. But a question by itself is not a fallacy unless it is used within a context in which a conclusion is drawn from the presupposition in the question. Unfortunately, many websites and current textbooks present questions such as this one as examples of the fallacy of complex question.[1]
   
   Semantically, a complex question is composed of a single interrogative sentence that contains at least two separate questions with a single answer ostensibly being mandated.
   
   The informal structure of a fallacy of complex question inferentially depends upon the presence of an inappropriate assumption within an argumentative context in accordance with something like the following schema:
   
   
   
   Informal Guide to Fallacy of Complex Question

   
   

   A posed complex question presupposes an unwarranted and objectionable statement A.

   Presupposed statement A is used as evidence for the truth of another statement B.

   ---

   ∴ Statement B is mistakenly thought proved.

   
   
   Example: In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras, Socrates commits this fallacy while interrogating the sophist Protagoras:

   “If [a man] next asked, ‘You say that there is also such a thing as holiness?’ we should agree I suppose?

   Yes

   “Meaning that holiness too is a thing?’ We should still assent?

   He agreed again.

   ’Do you then say that this thing is of a nature to be holy or unholy?’ Personally I should be annoyed at this, and say, ’What a blasphemous question! Nothing else could well be holy if we don't allow holiness itself to be so.’ What about you? Wouldn't that be your answer?

   Certainly, he said. [Prot. 330d-e, trans. Guthrie]

   Following the “Informal Guide to Fallacy of Complex Question” listed in the box above, we can observe:

   (1) Socrates' question presupposes that holiness is a thing.

   (2) His question is unwarranted since holiness is a characteristic of things or of people; thus holiness is not itself a thing or a person.

   ---

   ∴ (3) Holiness is not itself be holy.

   So the disputable presupposition in the above passage is “This thing holiness is of a nature to be holy or unholy.’
   
   
   
   1. Complex Questions per se are not inherently fallacious: They are not necessarily fallacious arguments nor are they in themselves deceptive reasoning if the presuppositions of the question asked are agreed to by both questioner and respondent.
      
      
      
      1. As Charles Hamlin, the logician who revolutionized the study of informal fallacies a half century ago, writes,

         “A fallacy, we must repeat, is an invalid argument; and a man who asks a misleading question can hardly be said to have argued, validly or invalidly, for anything at all. Where are his premises and what is his conclusion?” [emphasis original][2]

         Hamlin proceeds to treat the fallacy in terms of a dialectical rule, and points out a complex question better described as unwarranted or improper rather than as fallacious.
         
         
      2. And the noted informal logician Douglas Walton cautions in an early paper:

         ”At the outset we must begin to recognize that their might be nothing fallacious about a question with a multiple presupposition, even though it may be reasonable to ask a questioner separate complex question into smaller units.”[3]

         E.g., if it is known that I procrastinated starting a task required by my supervisor, then the supervisor's following complex question is not a fallacy:

         When are you going to stop goofing around and finish the job? You are stalling completion of the project.

         However, if I did not delay and had started the task promptly, then the supervisor's question is inappropriate and the accusation that I delayed the project is mistaken. In this case, the question is sometimes said to be “strategically mistaken,” but it is not a fallacy in the traditional sense of a mistaken argument.
         
         This example question might be termed defective thinking in that it disguises an unacceptable assumption, but it is not a deceptive argument.
         
         
      3. Nevertheless, complex questions are often described as “fallacious” when the term “fallacy” is defined in terms of a mistaken or deceptive belief.
         
         
      4. E.g., Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst and others view the fallacy of complex question as a violation of a rule for critical discussion as “[f]alsely presenting something as a common starting point by wrapping up a standpoint in the presupposition of a question.”[4]
         
         
         
   2. The fallacy of many questions, now mostly termed the complex question fallacy, first described by Aristotle[5], is described in numerous introductory logic and critical thinking textbooks which cover informal fallacies.
      
      But, as discussed above, not all complex questions are fallacious, and many other informal logic textbooks omit treating complex questions as fallacies altogether. Regardless of how they are viewed, the study of the complex questions is important since arguments in academic inquiry, law, and everyday life are commonly thought to be picked apart by such questions.
      
      The current fallacy literature eschews viewing every complex question as fallacious and instead develops a theory of informal argumentation which distinguishes between fallacious and nonfallacious instances of complex question. That distinction relies on techniques which determine the proper interpretation of the question on the basis of the context in which it appears.
      
      
      
      1. For example, Frans H. van Eemeren and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans state the following question is an example the fallacy of many questions (fallacy of complex question) because the speaker makes “unfair use of presuppositions”:

         ”Who have you quarreled with today?”

         The writers state:

         “[T]he question is misleading, because it creates the impression that it is a common starting point that there has been a quarrel.”[6]

         However, the question can be properly answered “I have not quarreled with anyone today” without having to fuss over tacit presuppositions. No argumentative fallacy is present in this question. This type of complex question is termed a loaded question since it contains a presupposition that is not a common starting point agreed to by the respondent.
         
         
      2. So at what point in questioning, does the fallacy occur? As J. Woo points out, “[T]he fallacy lies not in the question but what is inferred in the answer.”[7]
         
         
      3. The following two questions should help in making the distinction between questions which are fallacious and questions which are not fallacious.
         
         Consider first the following inquiry into why a person exercises:

         [1] “Do you work out for mental or physical benefits?”[8]

         The question suggests that a usual expected answer would be something like either:

         I work out mostly for mental benefits

         or

         I work out mostly for physical benefits.

         In other words the workout is being presupposed by the questioner to be mainly for one or the other purposes but not for both purposes. Although the question is leading in ordinary language, the respondent can properly answer:

         “Both, I work out for both benefits.”

         So there is no “unfair use of presupposition.” Instead, there is only a initial misunderstanding over the exclusive and nonexclusive senses of the conjunction “or.”
         
         If, at this point in the dialogue, the questioner were to insist that one or the other must be more important; the respondent would simply disagree. With no argument present, there is no fallacy (unless, of course, “fallacy” is defined as an instance of “deceptive language,” as some critical reasoning textbooks define the term). However, if the question is phrased:

         [2] “Do you work out more for mental or for physical benefits?”[9]

         The addition of the word “more” frames the question as an “either or but not both” question since both benefits cannot be “more than the other one.”
         
         Some logic texts indicate that the second question, itself, is fallacious since the question forces an answer by setting up the presupposition of a false dichotomy. However, it's perfectly acceptable to avoid the false dichotomy by replying, as one respondent did in the article:

         “Both, but mental health is slightly overtaking this year.”

         The answer is acceptable in ordinary discourse even though it does not initially answer the question as originally constructed.
         
         The stance taken in our course is the latter complex question might be deceptive and rhetorically persuasive for some individuals, but outside of the context of argumentation, deception and rhetoric do not necessarily constitute fallacies.
         
         The following dialogue presents the second question as a fallacy:

         Q: “Do you work out more for mental or physical benefits?”

         R: “Neither.”

         Q: “If you don't work out for either, I suppose you do not work out at all.”

         This conclusion does not follow any more than concluding than R works out for other reasons than for mental or physical benefits.
         
         
         
   3. Frequently, the use of complex question occurs in the context of a dialogue where, conversationally, the answer is expected to be only agreement or disagreement: The question is framed to be answered as “Yes” or “No.” These types of questions are usually termed polar questions and are discussed below.
      
      Often their fallacious nature is said not to be due to a violation of a logical rule of inference but instead is due to a persuasive, sophistical, or deceptive tactic whereby the question asked conceals the admission of a false or misleading statement not in accordance with normal background assumptions. However, a fallacy does not occur until this false or misleading statement is used to prove a conclusion.
      
      
      
      Summary

      Thus, the complex question fallacy occurs when the presuppositions of the question posed are not considered a common contextual ground of the discourse, usually because the presuppositions are thought to be false or suspect, and these disputable statements are used to prove something else.
      
      
      
      1. To be an inference-fallacy, and not just a devious rhetorical technique, the argument and its conclusion. must be either explicitly or implicitly apparent. In this form of the fallacy of complex question, a false or unproved supposition is undeclared. Any direct answer to the question (either provided by the advocate of the question or, in the case of a dialogue, the respondent of the question) would fallaciously imply the truth of the supposition.
         
         
      2. Thus, a complex question is a fallacy whenever it is an essential part of an argument in which the conclusion does not follow from its premises.
         
         
      3. Even though many logicians and many critical thinking textbooks define simple complex questions as fallacies whenever at least one presupposition of a question is false, we do not take this approach in these notes.
         
         
         
   4. Aside from rhetorical questions
      close ×

      Rhetorical Question:

      The rhetorical question is syntactically interrogative in structure, but semantically has the force of a strong assertion. It generally does not expect an answer. A positive rhetorical yes—no question is like a strong negative assertion, while a negative question is like a strong positive one.”
      
      Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (New York: Longman, 1985), 825.
      whose function is to provide information, most questions do not have truth values, but usually their presuppositions do have truth values.[10] So when a proponent of a question or a respondent to a question answers the question, the truth of what is understood to be the presuppositions of the question is tacitly claimed to be the case.

      Complex questions can be singular or can combine with other fallacies:

      
      
      1. On the one hand, if, in a dialogue, the question is ill-framed and complex, a proponent can seize upon an unwarranted presupposition or an interpretation different from a respondent's interpretation, and the resulting fallacy of complex question turns on a deception.
         
         For example, consider this complex question from Plato's Euthydemus posed by the sophist Euthydemus to the youth Clinias:

         “[W]hich of mankind are the learners, the wise or the ignorant?”[11]

         No matter which answer Clinias chooses from this proposed dilemma, a sophistic rebuttal is easily accomplished by means of the fallacy of equivocation:

         One one hand, the ignorant (i.e., the unschooled) learn from the wise (i.e., the teachers). So the ignorant are the learners.
         
         On the other hand, the wise (i.e., the intelligent) learn from the mistakes of the ignorant (i.e., the mistaken).

         So the complex question becomes in the original passage an implicit argument: the learners are ignorant people who become wise by learning. So learners include both the wise and the ignorant.
         
         
      2. If, on the other hand, a complex question fallacy is advanced and answered within a proponent's own arguments, then the unwarranted deception can embody another informal fallacy such as petitio principii, ad hominem, or false dilemna.
         
         For example, the following fallacy is used to argue against the protests raising awareness of racism by U.S. football players who “bend a knee” during the playing of the national anthem prior to a game:

         “This is an open letter to all professional football players and other athletes who bend a knee when the American flag is flown and the national anthem is sung: Millions of veterans speak as one and we want to say we agree that you have the right to bend a knee or do anything else before a ballgame starts. But is your right to do this really the right thing to do? Is this display of disrespect actually going to accomplish anything? Almost everyone knows the answer to those two questions is an emphatic No!”[12]

         The complex question fallacy develops as the writer assumes the particular point at issue between members of the public and player protests raising awareness of racism: viz. whether or not a player kneeling instead of standing at attention while the U.S. flag is flown and the national anthem is played achieves any purpose. The conclusion that this action will not accomplish anything is based on an ad populum assumption. (In this passage the writer is not seeking to prove that most persons agree both flag and country, right or wrong, ought be respected.)
         
         Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel explain the inferential non-dialogical form of the fallacy:

         [W]e often smuggle false propositions into our question and then proceed to prove other propositions by their aid. Such proofs are seen to be illusory and to have no logical force when we realize the false assumption in the question.[13]

         For instance consider this argument drawn from the U.S. health care debate:

         We don't even seem to be able to win wars anymore, so why would anyone have faith that the government can do a better job of directing health insurance … than the private sector? Obama's nominee … doesn't have the power to fix Obamacare. No one does because it is based on a weak foundation and the notion that government can do anything.[14]

         From the question's presupposition that the government cannot do as good a job of directing health insurance as the private sector can, the writer concludes that no one in the government can fix the problems of health insurance. However, the presupposition must be shown to be true in order establish the truth of the conclusion.
         
         
         
   5. Consequently, it must be emphasized that a major factor in the recognition and analysis of the fallacies related to complex question is understanding the situation, context, and intention of the speaker and respondent (or the writer and reader).
      
      
      
      1. Examination of a sentence or speech act apart from its interactive situational context is usually insufficient for adequate interpretation of the fallacy of complex question since understanding the context of the question is necessary for determining whether or not the respondent concedes the question's implicative presupposition. If, indeed, the presupposition is known by all to be factual, then, of course, no fallacy occurs. Obviously then, when a complex question with a false presupposition is posed as a starting point, a complex question fallacy can occur.
         
         
      2. As pointed out above, essential features of the fallacy of complex question are ascribable independently of a dialogical characterization. E.g., a writer can introduce a complex question and then provide a concluding answer without questioning the false or dubious question in non-dialogical forms of the fallacy.
         
         Even so, many contemporary logicians claim the dialogical form of complex question is the only form of the fallacy:

         “[T]he fallacy of many questions only occurs in argumentative interactions between two or more discussants …”[15]

         We follow Nuel Belnap, Jr. and T. Steel, Jr. who assume both forms are common — in the dialogical form, pragmatic implications are paramount:

         Pragmatic implications of complex questions relate to “the questioner, the respondent, and the empirical context in which the question is asked, rather than the topic of the question.”[16]

         So pragmatic implications of a complex questions suggest the normal or expected conditions under which complex questions are posed.
         
         
      3. In dialectical and argumentative discourse, the fallacy of complex question is not characterized in the current literature as a inference fallacy per se but as a rule violation, a mistake, or a derailment of normal interrogative procedures in everyday disputation or debate.[17]
         
         
      4. If an argument is present, the complex question, itself, is to be evaluated in terms of its presuppositional statement (or statements).
         
         

2. Some Common Types of Complex Questions

   The complex-question fallacies whose possible answers are restricted or checked can occur with any of the three major types of (English language) questions:
   
   
   1. Complex Yes–No Questions (also called “polar questions”) are answered by affirmation or negation of the question's presupposition:

      “But can you not just for once admit that you find it hard to change your mind?!”[18]

      Whether the respondent answers “yes” or “no,” the respondent tacitly admits the presuppositional implication. Many logicians see this kind of structure of complex question to be a fallacy. In these notes, this type of question by itself is taken to be simply inappropriate if the presupposition is false since an accusation rather than an argument is given.
      
      
   2. Complex Wh– Questions (informative questions) are usually answerable by any of a range of possible factual or instructive responses. Consider the following non-dialogical example of the complex question fallacy from an editorial:

      “Why does the national conversation we're beginning to have about inequality make some conservatives take leave of their senses? Why does it make them spout nonsense about ‘personal vilification ’ and the ‘abuse of government power’[?] The answer, I think is traction. I think the crazy, hair-on-fire rhetoric means progressives are making progress in winning support for policies designed to lessen inequality.”[19]

      Any number of replies other than the one given can relevantly be given for these two complex questions by someone who accepts to the emotively significant presuppositions on which they rely.
      
      How– Questions are usually included in the category of wh– questions which in turn include whom, whose, which, and the journalistic Five Ws: who, what, when, where, why. So the following example fallacy would normally included in the category of wh– questions:
      

      “How can we save our country from this political rut, utilise the international crisis to India's advantage [during early years of WWI] and win freedom for ourselves? … [W]e can … make a desperate attempt to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity on a permanent and enduring basis. … Freedom is now almost within reach. We have only to seize it with our united strength.”[20]

      The truth of the existence of the states of affairs alluded to in the proposed question would need to be established, or at least agreed upon, before evaluating the truth or logical relevance of the proposed concluding answer. Even if the presuppositions could be established, the answer to the question of how to extricate India from its political rut, make use of an international crisis to India's advantage, and win India's freedom is circularly answered by achieving Hindu-Muslim unity and “seizing freedom.” The “how” of the question is ignored.
      
      
   3. Complex Alternative Questions are answered by reply to any of the options given in the question. Similar ways of encoding presuppositions include non-neutral intonation and disjunctive constructions using whether, rather, and so forth.

      “The radical feminist movement, so ready to go ballistic at any little remark that can be twisted to mean something offensive to women, has been strangely silent while ISIS has been raping women and even little girls wholesale, and selling them as sex slaves. Is the silence of the radical feminists just political expediency or moral bankruptcy? or both?”[21]

      In this complex question, the possible responses to ISIS's treatment of women captives by radical feminists have been restricted to emotionally laden, objectionable alternatives when other more plausible reasons can be suggested or sought.
      
      

3. Historical frequency of use for the different names employed for complex question fallacy:

   
   
   FIG. 1. Historical Frequency of Use of “fallacy of many questions” and “fallacy of complex question” in Google Books 1865-2008
   
   
   
   
   FIG. 2. Historical Frequency of Use “compound question,” “false question,”and “loaded question” in Google Books 1865-2019
   
   

   4. How to Resolve Complex Questions

      The complex question fallacy is usually resolved by challenging the false or dubious presuppositions assumed in the question itself.
      
      
      
      1. The resolution of a complex question fallacy requires establishing agreement on the truth or existence of the presupposition(s) and the logical relevance or pragmatic appropriateness of the truth of the answering statement(s).
         
         Presuppositions are often said to be part the contextual common ground but are, more precisely, the assumptions presumed by the writer or speaker. Whenever a complex question is posed in a discussion or debate, a good way to refute the deception is by first identifying and then by challenging the presuppositions and their misleading composition. Often, the parts of the complex question can be divided, and the parts answered individually.
         
         
         1. The difficulty, however, is that in some constraining circumstances such as interrogation, cross-examination, testing situations, and intimidation, answering complex questions by objection to their presuppositions in this manner is in some situations proscribed.[22]
            
            
         2. In sum, the deception in a complex question is usually, strictly speaking, not a fallacy in the sense of being a mistaken inference but is a “fallacy” in the Pickwickian sense of a mistake in customary or conventional interrogative procedure.
            
            E.g., in early Greece, Lysias' brother was put to death under the Thirty Tyrants; in the following passage Lysias accuses Eratosthenes, a tyrant thought to be responsible for his brother's death:

            “It is an easy matter, O Athenians, to begin this accusation. … In other causes it is usual to ask the accusers: ‘What is your resentment against the defendants?’ But here you must ask the defendant: ‘What was your resentment against your country? What malice did you bear your fellow citizens? Why did you rage with unbridled fury against the state itself?’ The time has now indeed come, Athenians, when insensible to pity and tenderness, you must be armed with just severity against Eratosthenes.”[23]

            Notice how, by means of the use of complex questions, Lysias brings about a reversal of the conventional burden of proof for a prosecutor.
            
            
         3. In everyday discourse, however, one need not explicate the error of a many-question fallacy, instead one need only identify it as such and perhaps point to its misleading composition, much as Callicles answers Socrates' query in Plato's Gorgias:

            Socrates: Do the orators seem to you always to speak with an eye to what is best, their sole aim being to render the citizens as perfect as possible by their speeches, or is their impulse also to gratify the citizens, and do they neglect the common good for their personal interest and treat the people like children, attempting only to please them, with no concern whatever whether such conduct makes them better or worse?

            Callicles: This is not a single question you are asking, for some say what they say in the interest of the citizens, but there are others such as you describe.[24]

            The complexity of such a trick question need not be unpacked, for the disjunction proposed in this complex alternative question constrains response.
            
            
            
      2. The fallacy of complex question usually (but not always) makes use of an interrogative sentence expressing a question.[25] The fallacy involves the stating of a question (or equivalent) that tacitly assumes the truth of a statement or statements not generally granted or not given into evidence.
         
         
         1. For example, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice once condemned Hillary Clinton's Iraq and Iran policies by demanding an …

            ”explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”[26]

            The unsecured statements in this complex question presuppose, without offering any evidence, Secretary Clinton's policies of Iraq and Iran were mistaken.
            
            
         2. Or in this example from the 2016 U.S. Presidential race, editorialist Froma Harrop argues:

            “Left on the table is the biggest and most troubling question mark: whether [candidate Donald] Trump is mentally stable. Evidence overflows that he is not. That someone so clearly disturbed got this far in a presidential race is absolutely terrifying.”[27]

            Here the statement, “Evidence overflows that he is not,” refers to “the biggest and most troubling question mark” of whether or not “Trump is mentally stable.” No evidence is adduced, but is merely assumed to be “clearly” evident and “terrifying.” If the evidence were overflowing and clear as the writer suggests, then the question would not be, as initially claimed, “left on the table.”
            
            

   5. Lexical Narrowing and Varieties of the Complex Question Fallacy

      Other names for complex question and related fallacies include the fallacy of many questions (fallacia plurium interrogationum), fallacy of several questions, compound question, loaded question, fallacious question, trick question, many interrogations, and double-barreled question (among others).
      
      The definitions of many of these fallacies are usually much the same, but occasionally the following differences are accented through linguistic specialization or lexical narrowing. These differences provide a convenient way to illustrate some of the varieties of the fallacy of many questions.
      
      
      
      1. (Semantical) Complex Question Fallacy: Occasionally, the fallacy of complex question is more narrowly defined for questions whose presuppositions do not appear as, and cannot often be unpacked as, a Boolean or a logical combination. In this narrower sense of the term, the fallacy of complex question turns on a false opposition, a mistake in the applicability of the law of the excluded middle.
         
         
         1. W.D. Wilson provides this non-inferential, fabricated example as propaedeutic:

            “Are honey and poison sweet?”[28]

            We cannot assume the truth of …

            “Either honey and poison is sweet or honey and poison is not sweet.”

            … since, as Aristotle writes, “one must not affirm or deny several things of one thing nor one thing of several things, but one thing of one thing.” [Soph. El. 29 181a37–30 181b2, trans. Forster.]
            
            
         2. A well-worn, more problematic example is passed down in various forms from classical and 18th century sources:

            “Have you left off your bad habits?”

            This question is improper since it presumes the law of the excluded middle holds good for the statement …

            “Either you have left off your bad habits or you have not left off your bad habits.”

            However, if one has had no bad habits, the question is not directly answerable in situations where an authority constrains any response to a “yes–no ” (or polar) response (as in such intimidating instances as multiple-choice testing, cross-examination, interrogation and so forth).[29]
            
            Under these conditions, this complex question implies two questions:

            (1) “Have you had bad habits?”

            and

            (2) “If you have had bad habits, have you left them off?”

            The “if” used here is not the material sense of material implication. Its function allows ignoring the conditional whenever the antecedent is false — i.e., when the person had no bad habits. It will not do to rationalize that a simple answer of “No” could be a proper response for both questions. It has been suggested that the simple answering of “No” as applied to such a conjunction of questions could mean either:

            It is not the case both that I have had bad habits and that I have left off the bad habits.

            … which is equivalent to …

            Either I have not had bad habits or I have not left off the bad habits.

            In such a case, some philosophers propose that such an answer would not be deceptive because nothing untoward has been admitted.[30] After all, the question is not seen to be deceptive since the burden of proof rests with the interrogator, and having bad habits has not been explicitly admitted. Having bad habits has not been admitted since a disjunction is true whenever one (or both) of the disjuncts is the case. Nevertheless, this apparent disjunction is not an actual alternative.
            
            
         3. What such an alternative analysis involves could be Nicholas Rescher's point that a negative response for the two questions would imply for the second question either of these:

            “No, I haven't left off because I still have bad habits,”

            or

            “No, I haven't left off because I never started bad habits.”

            Additionally, William and Martha Kneale conclude, in essence:

            “[I]f a statement [e.g. ‘You have left off bad habits’] involves a presupposition [e.g. that you once had bad habits], it may be negated either in a restricted way with the acceptance of the same assumption or in an unrestricted way without acceptance of that presupposition.”[31]

            However, Rescher's interpretation[32] is only possible if the pragmatic presupposition that the respondent has had no bad habits is totally unwarranted in the circumstances.[33]
            
            
         4. Conversationally, though, having bad habits has not been denied either in this disjunction — which is specifically the point at issue. The question is deceptive precisely because whether one answers “Yes” or “No,” the answer conversationally implies that one has, or at one time had, bad habits.
            
            Donald Davidson writes:

            “Whether the effort and ingenuity that have gone into the study of … erotetic logics have been largely futile or not cannot be known until we have acceptable semantic analysis of the sentences such systems purport to treat.[34]

            Such an analysis is also necessary in order to avoid the subjectivity of concluding that a deceptive question is fallacious if it is misinterpreted by the respondent, but not fallacious if the respondent sees the question as inappropriate.
            
            
         5. This example illustrates also how presupposition is more than entailment since presuppositions are preserved under the negation of a statement. It would be contextually bewildering to state, for example:

            “I have left off my bad habits,” because “I have never had bad habits.”

            If one did answer in this manner, the presupposition is either false as Bertrand Russell argued or, in some circumstances, has no truth value as Peter Strawson maintained. [See In What Sense is Complex Question a Fallacy? below for more on this topic.]
            
            Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen aptly states:

            “[P]resuppositions can be regarded as implicit factual assumptions whose truth is taken for granted by the speaker of the presupposition-carrying statement, and must be antecedently accepted, or be ‘common ground’, among the other conversational participants in order for the utterance to be felicitous in a context.” [35]

            And so, a necessary condition of the complex question fallacy is that the presuppositions of the question are not a common ground of understanding.
            
            
         6. Again, the independent fundamental presupposition (i.e., whether one has bad habits) must be answered prior to addressing the dependent query (i.e. whether there was anything to be given up).
            
            Indeed, in the jargon of erotetic logic, the answer “No” to the felicitous, proper, or well-formed question “Have you left off your bad habits” (where the presupposition that one has bad habits is an established background assumption) would be true whenever the direct answer “ I have not left off my bad habits” is true. In this context, no fallacy would arise. As Ludwig Wittgenstein writes:

            “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.”[36]

            So, in this sense at least, a complex question with a false presupposition is not a proper or genuine question.
            
            
            
      2. The Fallacy of Many or Several Questions can unreasonably restrict answers to an intentional fraction of possible answers in a manner distinguishable from the generalized complex-question fallacy.
         
         Parts of a question (the unsecured presuppositions) can compose different questions which might not be logically related (i.e., which might not necessarily related by negation, equivalence, disjunction, conjunction, implication). So, several questions are proposed together as if there were only one question being proposed, but the question requires different answers depending upon the different ways its parts can be interpreted.
         
         
         1. Interrogative sentences can be compounded in various ways. For example, a Boolean operation on the following compound question might be, on occasion, completely answered by four alternatives depending upon its pragmatic context and circumstances:

            “Do you know whether the present House Health Care Proposal has been approved or whether the present Senate Health Care Proposal has been approved?

            If the answers to this question were known, possible expected answers could be composed from any of the following statements:

            (1) H: The House Health Care Proposal has been approved.

            (2) ¬H: The House Health Care Proposal has not been approved.

            (3) S: The Senate Health Care Proposal has been approved.

            (4) ¬S: The Senate Health Care Proposal has not been approved.

            But then again, however, the unsecured propositions of that compound question can be evaluated in terms of some logical operation, usually conjunction or disjunction. Thus, possible expected answers could be expressed by any of the following forms, where

            H represents “The House Health Care Proposal has been approved.”

            S represents ‘the Senate Health Care Proposal has been approved.”

            (1) H · S

            (2) H · ¬S

            (3) ¬H · S

            (4) ¬H · ¬S

            (5) H ∨ S

            (6) H ∨ ¬S

            (7) ¬H ∨ S

            (8) ¬H ∨ ¬S [37]

            Thus, if a Health-Care-Proposal type question were to be asked in a situation such as a test, legal cross-examination, or law enforcement interview as a “yes-no” question then the possible answers are restricted to both or neither of the conjuncts, when the proper answer might be one or the other but not both.
            
            
         2. A different kind of compound type of complex question is illustrated by this yes-no question:

            Does your farm lease joint agreement specify that the buying or selling should by done by the landowner or the renter?

            The disjunction appears to be doubly exclusive and to be answered by either selling or buying (but not both) be done by either the landowner or the renter (but not both). The unwarranted suppositions are based on the assumed lack of conjunction.
            
            
            
      3. Fallacia Plurium Interrogationum: The name of this fallacy, used often in 19th century textbooks, is the Latin equivalent of the “Fallacy of Many Questions.”
         
         
         1. As John Leechman points out several centuries ago:

            “This fallacy consists in asking several questions, which appear to be but one, in such a way, that whatever one answer is given, being of course applicable to only one of the questions, may be interpreted as applied to some one of the others. … If, however, you reply to each question separately, you detect and expose the fallacy.”[38]

            In general, both kinds questions often arise in argumentative or disputative question-and-answer dialogue.[39]
            
            
         2. Aristotle characterizes the fallacy as “making of several questions into one” in a manner compatible with a dialogical interpretation:

            “[I]f a predicate is true of one subject and not of others, or several predicates are propounded of several subjects and each is true of each but not all of all, a single answer involves confutation and must be refused.”[40]

            He describes the fault in some such questions due to an ambiguous subject or predicate, or involving more than one subject or predicate, as the case might be. Consequently, a single answer to these questions leads to confusion.
            
            
         3. In order to avoid a “dialectical error,” one must reformulate this type of question so that a single predicate is affirmed or denied for single subject.[41]
            
            In the following example of an improper polar question in which two different protocols are discussed for establishing cryptographic trust, any answer to this yes-no compound question is ambiguous.

            Should we consider “protocols in which we allow a trusted dealer and many rounds of interaction”?[42]

            The ambiguity arises since the named protocols allow either the help of a trusted dealer or trust established from rounds of interaction, but not necessarily both.
            
            
         4. Aristotle does not explicitly explain the fallacy of many questions as a failure to establish the proper presuppositions; instead, he specifies “when two questions are put as one, there is no genuine proposition at issue.”[43]
            
            
            
      4. Compound Question Fallacy is sometimes more precisely queried as a single question containing presuppositions which might not be consistently affirmed or denied. Hence, the fallacy involves more than one issue which might require different responses.
         
         
         1. The following compound question, for instance, cannot ordinarily be coherently affirmed or denied:

            “Do you believe both that people have free choice and that their lives are completely determined by environmental circumstances or do you believe neither of these views?”

            The option of exclusively believing one or the other of these choices is ruled out by the manner in which the question is posed.
            
            
         2. In law, a compound question can occur as a leading question as well. The question can be especially confusing when expressed as a leading compound negative question — i.e., a compound question containing a negative word.
            
            E.g., in State v. Debold, the victim of a robbery responded “No” to the question:

            “At that point, [the defendant] didn't have a gun to your head and say, ‘Give me your money,’ did he?”

            On the case's appeal, the court objected to the form of that question. The court wrote:

            “[W]e note that the question is a negative compound and is in improper form because it asked for two answers: (1) At that time he didn't have a gun to your head, did he?; (2) At that time he didn't say, “give me your money,” did he? The vice of compound questions is generally recognized. They are clearly misleading and confusing both to the witness being asked the question and to the jury listening to the answer.”[44]

            Note that this example of compound question is not specifically a fallacy in the sense that it is a mistaken inference so much as it is a fallacy in the sense that the language is confusing and can be interpreted to mean different things.
            
            Moreover, the U.S. Army's Human Intelligence Collector Operations manual outlines various confusions which can arise from negative questions alone. For example, the negative question …

            “Didn't you go to the pick-up point?”

            can be interpreted in either of the following ways:

            “Yes, I went to the pick-up point” or

            “Yes, I didn't go to the pick-up point”

            In other cases, negative questions can be interpreted as “impossibly open-ended” as in the following example:

            “Who else didn't attend the meeting?”

            Additionally, a negative question by itself can be interpreted differently by different cultures. [45]
            
            
            
      5. Fallacious Question Fallacy: The fallacy of complex question is frequently lexically narrowed by either a single false presupposition or by a disjunctive presupposition containing false dilemma. A false dilemma is an assumption of alternative states of affairs which omits one or more other possibilities.[46]
         
         Consider this example of a false presupposition:

         “We lose an army, and precedent consoles us: it always happens in the first campaign. Why does it always happen?[47]

         And this example with a false dilemma:

         “[President Trump] continued to cite a discredited survey … purporting to show that many Muslims in this country support ‘global jihad’ and the replacement of our legal system with Islamic Sharia Law. Is Trump just playing politics or is he truly an anti-Muslim bigot who believes this rubbish? At this point it hardly matters.”[48]

         The assumed dichotomy in this example of Trump either playing politics or being anti-Muslim omits other possible alternative states of affairs.
         
         
         
      6. Loaded Question Fallacy in its lexically narrow form is a complex question that contains terms or propositions that are emotively significant[49] or “has a presupposition that the respondent is not committed to [and] limits the respondent's options in answering it.”[50]
         
         
         1. A loaded question is often inappropriate because either a nonexistent state of affairs is being assumed in the phrasing of the question or the situation is being described in slanted or emotively significant terms. “Loaded questions tend to produce biased responses that reflect what the questioner wants to hear but not necessarily what the respondents believe.”[51]
            
            E.g. consider this fallacy of complex question as a loaded question in this restricted sense:

            “In this holiday season, a familiar question arises: Is President Trump trying to undermine democracy, or is he just irredeemably vain? It's a toss of the coin …”[52]

            The author assumes without argument that President Trump is either trying to undermine democracy or is a vain person, and the choice might as well be made by tossing a coin. The fallacy occurs since the alternatives are not exclusive and the phrasing of the question restricts the author's answer to affirmation of one or the other alternatives.
            
            Here, it is not so much the complexity of the question as it is the mistaken slanted or emotively laded presupposition which characterizes the sophistical tactic. Loaded questions need not have multiple presuppositions.
            
            
         2. An example of a loaded question with emotively significant terms is provided by this passage in a 1950's anti-communist speech by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy:

            “Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone here tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the communist world has said, ‘The Time is now’ — that this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world? Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long.”[53]

            (McCarthy's unsubstantiated charges that spies were rife in the Hollywood film industry, the universities, and the government ultimately led to his censure by the Senate in 1954.)
            
            
         3. Again, in other contexts, the term “loaded question” is often used as a synonym of complex question.
            
            
            
      7. Leading Questions: Questions which directly or indirectly suggest an answer expected to be given. Leading questions suggest presuppositions not in evidence rather than assume presuppositions not in evidence.
         
         In law …

         “Questions put to a witness which suggest the desired answer or put the answer into his mouth or, in the case of a disputed matter, permit only the reply, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Example: ‘Did you see X at noon in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 18th October last?’” [54]

         Leading questions can also involve questions which require an answer from a prearranged list of responses.
         
         
         1. Leading questions which usually suggest or call to mind information rather than presupposing information are not considered complex-question fallacies even if they are used in an argumentative context unless the presupposed information is mistaken or misleading.
            
            E.g., the following example of a leading question in a courtroom is not fallacious:

            “[A]sking ‘You were in Las Vegas in 2015, right?’ clearly suggests the desired answer and is improperly leading. Tone [of voice] can also make a question leading. For example, asking ‘You're 38 years old?’ with a rising intonation and an accompanying head nod suggests the desires answer and is improperly leading.”[55]

            The question is not fallacious when stated simply because it's not an argument. Leading questions can be “improperly leading” since frightened individuals being questioned will tend to answer in accordance with the way they think they ought to answer.[56]
            
            
         2. However, a leading question which oversimplifies an issue is an example of a complex question when aspects of the subject have been restricted as in the following:

            “Which known cause of Alzheimer's disease is the most significant — lifestyle or environmental factors? Clearly, environmental factors since not all persons with the same lifestyle acquire Alzheimer's.”

            The complex question omits other factors in its restriction to two possible cases.
            
            
         3. An example of a leading question that tends to direct a response or suggest a desired answer can be effected by phrasing a question in the negative is …

            “Don't you think all persons would profit somewhat by a logic course?”

            Such questions can help to persuade but are not considered fallacious since no argument is present.
            
            

   6. Functional Uses of Complex Question

      The problems associated with both the fallacy and the rhetorical techniques of complex question often are used as techniques of subterfuge by persons in authority to elicit a confession or to manipulate attitudes.
      
      
      
      1. Although often manipulative, unethical, and improper, complex questions in the form of leading questions occur in surveys, law courts, journalistic interviews, and police cross-examinations. Leading questions can be assumptive, implicative, or intimidating, not all of which are necessarily fallacious.
         
         
         1. Assumptive questions are designed to take for granted the very question at issue in order to induce a specific response.
            
            A former police interrogator and fraud examiner states:

            “Regardless of the questioner's surety of … guilt, it would be most sensible to start with [a] question [that] … assumes guilt, which makes the job of denial more difficult than issuing a simple ‘no.’”[57]

            Consider the example of the Indian slave Tituba, “charged with witchcrafts and sorceries” in the first Salem Witch Trial as questioned by Magistrate John Hawthorne.

            H: Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?

            T: None.

            H: Why do you hurt these children?

            T: I do not hurt them. …

            H: Who have you seen [hurt the children]?

            T: Four women sometimes hurt the children?

            H: Who were they?

            T: Goody Osburn and Sarah Good, and I don't know who the others were. Sarah Good and Osburn would have me hurt the children, but I would not. …

            H: What did they say to you?

            T: They said, “Hurt the children.”

            H: And did you hurt them?

            T: No … they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.

            H: But did you hurt them?

            T: Yes, but will hurt them no more.[58]

            In this example testimony, Tituba finally succumbed to the initial complex questions under the withering examination of the Magistrate.
            
            
         2. In one study, 9 and 10 year-old children changed over 40% of their correct responses under cross-examination nine months after viewing staged events at a police station. Prior to the cross-examination, they were previously exposed to misleading information (at 2 and 4 weeks after the event) and also a video-taped direct examination (six weeks after the event). After viewing the videotape of that direct examination, the children were asked at the later cross-examination ten standardized questions including this series of leading, complex, and tag questions:

            “You said in the video that you got your photo taken, didn't you?”

            “Are you sure that you got your photo taken?”

            “I don't think you really got your photo taken. I think someone told you to say that. That's what really happened, isn't it?”

            If the child did not change opinion or was uncertain, then the question was asked, “But that might be the case, don't you think?”[59]

            The result of the use of these kinds of complex questions in this study was designed to be similar to actual trial preparation cases indicating that the intentional use of complex questions can significantly alter testimony in many instances.
            
            Yet surprisingly, an Angela D. Evans, et al., study of 46 court cases involving child sexual abuse indicated the complexity of the defense's questions correlated strongly (over 80% of the time) with convictions, not acquittals.[60]
            
            
         3. Counselors, psychologists, and related professionals use complex question as an investigative technique, often as a bid for an explanation of a state of affairs not clearly in evidence.
            
            For example, a noted psychotherapist writes:

            “We therapists have our little cunning ways — statements such as: ‘I wonder what blocks you from acting upon the decision you already seem to have made.’”[61]

            This technique is used for persuasion in many fields including adducing supposed support for supernatural claims as in this example presupposing psychical phenomena:

            “[T]he primary question, with which the psychical student concerns himself, viz.: How is the supernormal information acquired? Why is it that the dream or vision is veridical? How does this object move without contact? How explain the evidence of personal identity obtained through the medium, when in trance? Only when abnormal psychology succeeds in satisfactorily explaining such facts will we grant that it has any right to criticize psychical research, or to do aught than acknowledge it as a sister-science.” [emphasis original][62]

            The fallacy in this example turns on ascribing the presuppositions of the preceding complex questions as factual in the concluding sentence.
            
            
         4. Although some leading questions may be asked at the discretion of a presiding judge in a court of law, in general they are not permitted in questions that relate to the issue at hand because they have been shown to alter testimony. However most judges encourage other types of leading questions that lead the witness up to the issue of concern because it saves the court time in which to clear the case.[63]
            
            After one of psychologist Hugo Münsterberg's eye-witness testimony experiments at Harvard …

            “the leading question was put to each member of the class—‘Did you notice the stove in the room?’ (there was no stove there) — and 59 per cent of the class answered ‘Yes,’ and having once admitted seeing the stove they proceeded to locate it, and tell in what part of the room it was.

            The walls of the room were painted red. The students, however, were asked whether the walls were green or blue, and this suggestive question seemed to eliminate the red color of the hall from 50 per cent of the minds.”[64]

            Francis Wellman, the famous trial lawyer, writes:

            “[I]t is easy to produce evidence that varies very widely from the exact truth. This is often done by overzealous practitioners by putting leading questions or by incorporating two questions into one, the second a simple one, misleading the witness into a ‘yes’ for both, and thus creating an entirely false impression.”[65]

            In sum, leading questions are somewhat deceptive and influential, but they are not logical fallacies per se.
            
            
         5. Finally, leading questions often have a positive use for stimulating and directing Socratic dialogues in educational classrooms.
            
            
            
      2. A compound question is objectionable because it asks more than one question at a time, and, as Aristotle pointed out, a simple answer is inherently ambiguous. [Arist. Soph. El. 17 175b.10-14.] Compound questions are sometimes termed “double-barreled” questions.
         
         Regardless of whether an individual answers “yes” or “no,” a single response might not accurately answer both questions.[66]
         
         
         1. Suppose a worker has failed to perform a task, and a co-worker asks the worker the following question to find out how their supervisor responded:

            “Did he tell you were incompetent or inexperienced?”

            If the worker answers with “yes,” the response is ambiguous. A “yes” response could be interpreted to mean the boss stated the worker was …

            both incompetent and inexperienced or

            incompetent but not inexperienced or

            inexperienced but not incompetent.

            The ambiguity of course depends on whether the co-worker was using the “or” in the sense of “one or the other or both” or “one or the other but not both.”
            
            
         2. In an attorney's examination of a witness in court of law, the fallacy of a disguised compound question can be a sophisticated fallacious linking of separate questions in order to confuse the witness:

            Lawyer: “You were motivated by your need for money in the affair?” [meaning wholly or exclusively motivated]

            Witness: “Yes.” [meaning distributively or in part motivated]

            Lawyer: “Then, by being motivated by money you acted from greed?

            Thus, the lawyer's ambiguous language entices the witness to agree to part of the witness's motivation for an action and then concludes that this motivation was the sole basis for the witness's action. The fallacy of composition is being utilized here in the subtle compounding of questions.
            
            

         3. Compound questions can also be even more subtle.

            Consider this example in the case Austria v. Bike Athletic Co. wherein the parents of Richard Austria won a suit against the manufacturer of their son's football helmet after he suffered a severe head injury during football practice. On appeal the Bike Athletic Co. argued that the following question on the verdict form submitted to the jury was erroneous:

            “Was Defendants' Bake and Kendall's helmet worn by Richard Austria unreasonably dangerous in one or more of the particulars alleged by the plaintiffs which caused Richard Austria's injury[?]”[67]

            The unproved presupposition in the question presumes the helmet caused the injury.
            
            
         4. A similar rhetorical technique can be used in philosophical disputation:

            “[T]he utilitarian puts to us the questions: ‘You deny that virtue consists in utility?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Then you deny that utility is a good thing.’”[68]

            Here. the utilitarian's sequencing of the compound question is confusing since it concludes with an ambiguous statement. I.e., we would deny the statement that “All acts of utility are good things,” but would agree to the statement, “Some acts of utility are good things.”
            
            
            
      3. A conducive question (a usually nonfallacious question with bias or polarity) is a type of leading question whereby an interrogator aims for a particular response based on a respondent's prior statement. The prior statement can be stated explicitly or merely contextually inferred.
         
         All negative questions are conducive questions whose bias can be magnified by appended tag questions (the addition of phrases such as “didn't he?” or “hasn't it”) and can also be magnified by usually nonassertive words (phrases such as ”never,” ”anything,” “yet,” ” or “any”).
         
         
         1. Positive questions with a negative adaptation of some kind are conducive questions with a negative bias as in:

            “Do you really believe that?” (Meaning: clearly, you really don't believe that.)

            But negative questions with a nonassertive word have a positive bias as in:

            “Isn't that something?” (Meaning: clearly, that is something.)

            Tag questions, are to some extent leading questions, as in the Wagner v. Gilsonite Construction Company trial where an attorney cross-examined a worker injured by an unguarded industrial saw with this question:

            “Q. So that the sawdust was piled up for about 5 inches, wasn't it, higher than the bottom of that pulley, wasn't it?

            A. I guess so.” [emphases mine][69]

            The framing of questions like these can be used as a persuasive appeal but are not per se fallacies. Since conducive questions do not necessarily secure their wanted response, any persuasive influence is usually pragmatic.
            
            
         2. Quirk et al. points that “already” (or any assertive item) in positive questions anticipates an affirmative response, whereas a “yet” (or any nonassertive item) in a negative question expects a negative response:[70]

            “Have you finished already?” Expected affirmative response: “Yes.”

            “Haven't you finished yet?” Expected negative response: “No.”

            And, declarative questions are conducive also, and as with tag questions, declarative questions encourage an agreement in response.[71]

            “You are saying that it is true?” Expected affirmative response: “Yes.”

            “You are saying that it isn't true?” Expected negative response: “No.”

            Note the ambiguity in the second statement.
            
            
         3. Conducive questions, by the way they are phrased, signal a preferred way a respondent is expected to answer. Normally the preferred response is best understood from the pragmatics or the context of conversational or argumentative dialogue.
            
            Again, conductive questions are usually nonfallacious leading questions. However, Wolfram Bublitz points out:

            “Answers to questions that were meant to be conducive but were understood by the hearer as being neutral, will of course be unexpected and surprising for the speaker and will normally cause an interruption of the exchange and the attempt to come to an agreement as to the presuppositions and assumptions involved.”[72]

            E.g., the English lawyer James Patterson relates the following example of a series of cross-examination conducive questions concluding in a witness' surprising response:

            “[O]n the trial of an action of assault and battery, a witness gave the following lucid account of the cause of action. … “I saw a stone, and I'ze pretty sure the defendant throwed it.’ ‘Was it a large stone?’ ‘I should say it was a largish stone.’ ‘What was its size?’ “I should say a sizeable stone.’ Can't you answer exactly how big it was’ ‘I should say it was a stone of some bigness.’ … ‘Can't you compare it to some other object?’ ‘Why, if I wur to compare it so as to give some notion of the stone, I should say it wur as large as a lump o' chalk!’[73]

            Finally, it should be noted that some conducive questions in dialogue are effectively expressed in declarative form with rising intonation.
            
            
            

   7. Related Complex Question Techniques in Law, Surveys, and Interviews

      Several types of linguistic devices are similar in character and relation to varieties of complex question. In themselves, they are not a complex question or many questions fallacy, but they can play a part in such a fallacy.
      
      
      
      1. Trick Questions and Fictitious-Issue Questions are questions with fabricated presuppositions designed to determine respondents' willingness to reveal their unfamiliarity with an issue or a point in question. Similar difficulties arise with questions involving existential import. Trick questions can occur in survey questions, test questions, interviews, interrogations, debate, and as discussion prompts.
         
         
         
         1. In an interview or testing situation, especially when respondents are less well educated, are stressed, or feel as though they are lower in status, the charge to answer a question can be quite compelling even when the subject deals with entirely fictitious topics.[74]
            
            
         2. With the well-known Reid Interrogation Technique, a police investigator poses an alternative question entailing two incriminatory choices to a suspect:

            “[T]he actual alternative question may be: “Did you plan this thing out or did it just happen on the spur of the moment?” — either choice is an admission of guilt. The components of the alternative question contrast a desirable action with an inexcusable, undesirable action … The alternative question should be based on an assumption of guilt; it should not be something to the effect of “Did you do this or didn't you?’, because such a question phrasing invites a denial.”[75]

         3. Skillful questioning requires disclosing a respondents' level of understanding and presence of misunderstanding by means of filter questions prior to asking a subject-question about a topic. A filter question is used to determine whether or not follow up questions are relevant to a respondents' circumstances.
            
            Bias can be introduced into questions by implicitly forcing an influence of slanting in the phrasing of an “unfiltered question.”
            
            Arthur Sterngold, et al., found that if a filter question asking how a respondent regards a particular issue is not asked before asking the question main question of interest, e.g., ”How concerned are you about [a topic]?,” actual concerns were often overstated. Without the filter question being asked first, respondents tend to presume that they either are, or should be concerned, when they were not.[76]
            
            
         4. Donald S. Tull and Del I. Hawkins note that forced-choice rating-scale questions without a no-opinion choice provide less accurate responses.[77] Also building a fictitious or nonexistent subject into a survey's complex question is used by testers as a control item. These so-called “sleeper questions” indicate to some degree how often respondents guess by choosing nonexistent answers.[78]
            
            
         5. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser summarize many of ways constraints are built into questions as follows:

            “One of the clearest findings … is the extent to which people, once they have agreed to be interviewed, accept the framework of questions and try earnestly to work within that framework. If we do not provide a particular substantive alternative to a closed question [i.e., a polar or yes/no question], people rarely give it. If we omit a don't know category or a middle alternative, people ordinarily do not volunteer one …”[79]

            Closed questions often fail to describe an adequate range of meaningful alternatives for persons questioned.
            
            
      2. Rhetorical Questions are questions, normally not requiring an answer, the answer already being known, intended to produce an appropriate expressive emphasis on information already thought evident. So rhetorical questions neither seek information nor convey information.
         
         Hannah Rohde points out that rhetorical questions are both biased and redundant.[80] The former characteristic enables their use in the implementation of the fallacy of complex question. A number of studies provide empirical evidence that the use of rhetorical questions are persuasively effective when accompanied by relevant background information.[81] E.g.,:

         ”[Rep. Keith] Ellison will perhaps make a distinction between his religious convictions and his political convictions. But do we need yet another left-wing politician telling us that religious values have no place in the public square — let alone one who will claim what is good for the public square is exactly what his religion prohibits? Who is this man? Does he stand for anything other than hunger for political power?”[82]

         In this fallacy example, the phrasing of the rhetorical question concludes Rep. Ellison is power hungry from the presuppositions of the previous two complex questions.
         
         
         1. As rhetorical questions do not request, but usually provide some information, rhetorical questions can be composed as complex-question fallacies intending to assert that unproved presuppositions are the case. Moreover, complex rhetorical questions can be exclamatory in the expectation of compelling approval or disapproval. Consider this example from an appeal to the Supreme Court involving the homicide case Jones v. State:

            “Instantly this man appeared in front of him with a pistol in his hand and applied a vile epithet to him; he heard a gun snap in an adjoining room. If such a condition and such surroundings are not enough to excite a man of ordinary intelligence, and to place his mind in such a state of excitement and fear as to cause him in the excitement to do violence to his apparent antagonist, then pray tell me what it would take to excite a man to such an extent that his actions could be said to have been done ‘in a heat of passion’?[!]”[83]

            Randolph Quirk, et al., state:

            “The rhetorical question is one which functions as a forceful statement. More precisely, a positive rhetorical question is like a strong negative assertion, while a negative question is like a strong positive one.” [84]

            The rhetorical question “seeks confirmation of what the speaker has explicitly assumed [previously] to be agreed truth.”

            E.g., “Is that the best that you can do?” → “Plainly, that is not the best that you can do.”

            “How can we expect to have a theory of everything if we do not try.” →
            “Plainly, we can expect to have a theory of everything, if we try.”

         2. When the indirect statement implied by a complex rhetorical question is not evident or well known, its intent can be difficult to interpret in an argumentative context and could result in a complex question fallacy.

            E.g., “If the U.S. doesn't preemptively strike North Korea, who will?”

            This rhetorical question conversationally implies “The U.S. has to preemptively strike North Korea because no one else will.” The less-than-evident presupposition is that North Korea requires being subjected to a first-strike attack: the reason being supposedly that North Korea is disposed to implement an imminent attack.
            
            
         3. Rhetorical complex questions can be used by a provocateur to issue an ad hominem attack without being overtly committed to the accusation. Marta Dynel relates this verbal interchange within the context of a debate:

            R: “[T]his question means that the factory in Győr is also modern, and only the building has a problem.” [my adaptation]

            P: “No. Are you really this stupid, or are you just pretending to be?” [italics original][85]

            If R were to object to P's calling her stupid, P can respond disingenuously that no assertion is being made; P is just asking a question — even though the function of a rhetorical question is to make a statement.
            
            
         4. A few empirical studies have shown that the use of rhetorical questions increase persuasive and attitudinal resistance both as a non-attacking and an attacking statement.[86]
            
            As a first example, consider this exchange of rhetorical complex questions in a U.S. Supreme Court discussion of same-sex marriage. Here, the rhetorical technique of trading rhetorical complex questions is used in a exchange of the assertion of viewpoints:

            “[Supreme Court Justice] Scalia's plight seemed all the more anachronistic because the man arguing for gay marriage was Ted Olson, the former solicitor general for George W. Bush's administration. Most of the time, Olson got the best of his ideological comrades.

            ‘When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage?’ Scalia asked Olson.

            ‘When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages?” Olson retorted.[87]

            As another example, consider the following use of a non-attacking statement in an implicit fallacy using rhetorical questions from the 2016 U.S. presidential election:

            The Big Question: Will Hillary [Clinton] run [for president]? … Few people — and far fewer women — have attracted so much attention as Hillary Clinton. … How does Hillary Clinton walk away from the job that was meant to be hers? Forget fate. What about duty? Doesn't the first woman who has a real shot at becoming president of the United States have a duty to run? And win?[88]

            The last question is rhetorical and mollifies the preceding complex and rhetorical questions presupposing that Clinton is meant to be president.
            
            
            
         5. Sometimes it is difficult to know whether or not a question proposed is rhetorical or complex as in this dialogical exchange in Plato's Gorgias:

            Socrates: [I]n my opinion rhetoricians have the least power of any in the state.

            Polus: What? Do they not, like tyrants, put to death any man they will, and deprive of their fortunes and banish whomsoever it seems best?

            Socrates: … I am puzzled as to whether you are speaking for yourself and expressing your own views, or questioning me.

            Polus: I am questioning you.

            Socrates: Well, my friend, then you ask me two questions at once. [Gorg. 466b–c, trans. W.D. Woodhead.]

            Polus answers that his question is not rhetorical (i.e. his question is not a statement of what he believes in question-form) but a question addressed to Socrates. Socrates, then, takes the question as a complex question, a question asking whether rhetoricians have much power and whether rhetoricians do what they will to do for its own sake.
            
            
            
      3. Issues arising from the fallacy of complex questions are important aspects of the general study of the phrasing of questions, especially when used to shape opinion in personal interviews and surveys.
         
         
         1. For instance, Stanley Le Baron Payne relates the results of an experiment by the Opinion Research Corporation showing the differences among the words “might,” “could,” and “should” in these survey questions:

            —Do you think anything should be done to make it easier for people to pay doctor or hospital bills? (82% agreed).

            —Do you think anything could be done to make it easier for people to pay doctor or hospital bills? (77% agreed).

            —Do you think anything might be done to make it easier for people to pay doctor or hospital bills? (63% agreed).

            Thus, 82% thought making medical payments easier expected or proper, 77% thought this it able to be done, and 63% thought it permissible or possible to be done. Slight changes in the wording of questions can distort the conventional interpretation of questions.[89]
            
            
         2. A leading question, either by form or content, can influence a respondent's answer. Rule 661 of the Federal Rules of Evidence for civil and criminal trials in U.S. Federal Courts limits the use of such questions. Psychological evidence cited for this rule is illustrated by a small number of limited studies performed many years ago.
            
            For example, in one widely cited study, participants viewed films of automobile accidents and were asked questions such as …

            [1] Did you see the broken headlight?

            or

            [2] Did you see a broken headlight?

            Whether or not a broken headlight was present in the film, subjects who were asked question [2] were twice as likely to answer, “I don't know.”[90]
            
            Since the use of the definite article “the” elicited an unequivocal answer, that question influenced participants to a particular response. Such leading questions are not inference fallacies; however, they could constitute breaches of civil discussion in a similar manner to a violation of the rules in a pragma-dialectical critical discussion.
            
            
         3. In Likert-type questionnaires (ratings measuring levels of agreement and disagreement), provision of a larger number of alternatives lowered accuracy of results, and provision of fewer alternatives produced higher scale reliability. The reason the provision of more response alternatives results in less accurate the answers is that respondents base their answers in part on their previous responses rather than basing them on direct evidence. [91] Thus in Likert-type questionnaires, accuracy can be diminished simply by increasing the number of meaningful response alternatives.
            
            
         4. Complex questions can also be used as push-questions in political polls which state negative information concerning a candidate in what appears to be an ordinary survey. E.g., during the 2000 U.S. Republican presidential primary, South Carolina voters were presented with a number of complex questions similar to the following one during a George Bush campaign telephone poll devised by Voter/Consumer Research:

            Please tell me whether you approve John McCain's “legislation that proposed the largest tax increase in United States history”[92]

            Consequently, rather than merely seeking information, this question is effectively designed to influence voter choice.
            
            
         5. Harvey Sacks observed that polar (or yes–no questions) are biased or aligned toward an affirmative response, and respondents will often attempt to answer such questions as positively as possible.[93]
            
            However, polar questions with the word “any” are biased toward a negative response. For example, Ray Wilkinson observed the experimental difference of physicians asking either:

            [1] Are there any other concerns you'd like to address during this visit?

            or

            [2] Are there some other concerns you'd like to address during this visit?

            Wilkinson writes:

            “[W]here patients have two or more concerns … we found that, while 53 percent responded affirmatively to the ‘any’ version of the question, a full 90 percent responded affirmatively to the ‘some ’ version.”[94]

            Consequently, the expectation suggested is the posing complex polar questions would tend to lead to hesitation, confusion, and biased responses.
            
            
            
      4. Identifying of the presuppositions of a complex question and clarifying what is at issue has much in common with dividing the question as is done, for example, in debating topics or in applications of the rules of order in conducting meetings.
         
         
         1. As an example of a debating topic consider the International Debate Education Association's topic:

            “This house believes science is a threat to humanity.”[95]

            The difference between the affirmative and negative positions on the issue is reflected in the complex yes/no question:

            “Is science a disadvantage or an advantage to humanity?”

            And, yet, of course, there are both advantages and disadvantages to the study of, and application of, science for human beings.
            
            
            
         2. Parliamentary Procedure helps avoid complex issues by dividing a “ complex question”:

            “When a motion embraces several parts, each of which forms substantially a separate proposition, the resolution of it into distinct motions or questions is called dividing the question. … Advantage of such division. It affords the assembly an opportunity to receive or to reject what part it thinks proper …”[96]

            Obviously, the dividing of a “complex question” or proposal in this sense is not specifically related to the fallacy of complex question.
            
            
            
      5. The technique of resolving complex questions is also comparable to understanding the need for a line-item veto where particular provisions of a list can be vetoed without rejecting all of the other provisions of a proposal.
         
         
         1. Most governors in U.S. states can veto specific lines in some legislative bills while allowing the remainder of the bill to become law. For example, a governor's approval of a ten-item bill is, in effect, a positive answer to the question,“Should items 1-10 become law?
            
            
         2. Just as a governor without the power of a line-item veto must either approve or deny all items so likewise a respondent being limited to a yes–no response for a complex question of the form, “Do you agree with items 1-10 or not?” must either agree or disagree with all of the ten items listed.
            
            
            
   8. The Fallacy of Complex Question as Deceit
      
      
      
      
      The assumption or presupposition to a complex question can only be known from the pragmatic or dialogical context. Not all questions with false, deceitful, or nonexistent presuppositions can be assumed to have inference errors, because not all such passages involve arguments. Moreover, even though disparate contexts arise as the dialogue develops, the posing and answer of a complex question are presumed to occur within the same common ground of the dialogue.
      
      Often, seemingly simple questions can be misleading, if background conditions are not known.
      
      
      1. E.g., Royal College physician Charles A. Mercier relates the example of a question put to him as an expert witness in court:

         “Would you yourself have administered this medicine in this case?”[97]

         On the one hand, here, no argument is being given, so no formal fallacy occurs. But if the notion of “fallacy” is extended to include deception and trickery, then a fallacy in this sense could be said to occur if the defendant has given no information as to the conditions under which the medicine was prescribed. If he were to answer “No” to the question, he would likely be understood by the court to think the medicine was somehow inappropriate.
         
         But Mercier points out that the reason for not administering the particular medicine mentioned could be the drug was unfamiliar to him, or he did not think of it at the time, or there were other drugs of the same benefit available which he preferred for unrelated reasons.
         
         On the other hand, obviously, the whole sense of the question changes if if Mercier's previous testimony provided reasons for using a different medicine than that actually used; the prosecutor's trick question here is not an inference mistake — it's an intentional maneuver to confuse the court.
         
         
         
      2. In the same manner, the oft-cited complex question in critical thinking and logic textbooks, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” considered by itself is not fallacious. Even if this question were to be allowable for cross-examination of a defendant in a court of law, such a question does not constitute an inference mistake. It's capricious to reconstruct this example in such a way that a mistaken inference is made.
         
         Unfortunately, this interrogative sentence, is often used as a defining example of the fallacy of complex question. Only if the reply to such a question is demanded in a constricted interlocutory context, and the term “fallacy” is defined in terms of intentional deception or trickery, can it be properly said to be a fallacy. However, nonformal judgments such as these have not been developed into a consistent theory of fallacy. In any case, the asking of the complex question singly is not a fallacy in any logical sense of the term.
         
         
         
      3. As an example of “unpacking” the pragmatic implications of a question, analyze the standard conditions or circumstances assumed in the in the following interrogative example:

         “What church do you and your family attend?”

         Some of the presuppositions can be listed as follows:

         You attend church.

         You have a family.

         Each member of your family attends church.

         You and each member of your family attend the same church.

         The question would be considered complex in certain dialogical circumstances if you and your family did not attend church, if you and not your family attend church, if your family but not you attend church, if you and your family attend different churches, and so forth.
         
         
      4. In a cross-examination or in a debate, even the deceitful construction of a foundational complex question can be used deceptively to befuddle an opponent. Consider, for example, the following question from evolutionary biology:

         “What is the transition from chemical kinetics to evolutionary dynamics, and can the transition from non-evolving to evolving systems be defined precisely and formally?[98]

         The unexamined presuppositions in the assumed common ground of this question include that such transitions exist in nature and are not simply artifacts of the current state of biochemistry.
         
         
         
      5. In order to avoid succumbing to the deception of complex question, it is well to keep in mind Stanley Le Baron Paynes' advice:

         “The tendency to take things for granted is not easy to correct, simply because is is such a common characteristic of us all. It is a subtle fault, committed most, of course, when we are least aware of it. For this reason, some conscious safeguard is needed — self-discipline to stop and ask ourselves with each question, ‘Now, just what is being taken for granted here?’”[99]

         Finally, it is important to emphasize the mere presence of a presupposition in a question is not the distinguishing characteristic of a complex question or many question fallacy. What constitutes the “loading” of the complex question fallacy is the presence of at least one false, misleading, fictitious, or deceptive presupposition in the question which has not been conceded, or admitted, by the respondent and so is not a shared background assumption.
         
         For example, in the Russian novel What Is To Be Done, the question addressed to the character Rakhmetov, “Why do you always appear to be such a gloomy monster?” arises in the course of a conversation with Vera Pavlovna. A pragma-dialectical method of analysis of this question creates the impression that a fallacy occurs since it would appear to be a breach of the rules of etiquette. However, in the novel's context, the question is not fallacious because the presupposition of the question is known by both parties to the discussion:

         “’You're not at all what you seem to be. Why do you always appear to be such a gloomy monster? And why are you such a nice, agreeable fellow now?’

         ‘Vera Pavlovna, I'm carrying out an agreeable obligation. Why shouldn't I be agreeable, too? But this is a rare occasion. In general one sees such disagreeable things; how can one help being a gloomy monster? …’”[100]

         In this context, since the presupposition that Rakhmetov is a “gloomy monster” is a shared background assumption and so no fallacy (interpreted here as a violation of the rules for critical discussion) occurs.
         
         

   9. In What Sense is Complex Question a Fallacy?

      In actual practice, question-asking fallacies usually constitute a misuse in the pragmatics of questions and answers rather than an explicit inference mistake.
      
      Questions together with answers are normally used in information acquisition[101] rather than argumentative discourse, although they are used in other ways as well. Many logicians postulate that for a fallacy to occur, a faulty inference in an argument must be present in the oral or written discourse.
      
      
      
      1. The traditional fallacy of complex question in most logic and critical thinking textbooks is not described as a mistake in reasoning per se and so is not, strictly speaking, taken as a fallacy in the usual logical sense of the word. Instead, most occurrences of complex question occur as violations of conventions of ordinary discourse. The common feature of complex question as either a fallacy or a rule violation is that their expression includes an unjustified assumption (or assumptions) which either suggests or presupposes its own answer. Yet many logicians point out making an unwarranted assumption per se in a complex question without its occurrence in an explicit argument is not an inferential fallacy.[102]
         
         
         1. Gilbert Ryle states, “This so-Called Fallacy of Many Questions is not a fallacy at all, since it is not an argument. It is a trick-question[103]
            
            
         2. Jaakko Hintikka states, “[O]ne thing is clear of the so-called fallacy of many questions. It cannot by any wildest stretch of the imagination be construed as a mistake in inference.”[104]
            
            
         3. And Douglas Walton explains, “[T]hus while asking [a question] is not arguing to one conclusion it is nevertheless leading the answer towards a conclusion by restricting the answerer's alternatives in a partial way. If asking a question restricts the set of possible answer too sharply, in a way that gives the questioner an unfair advantage and forces the answered to a flatly contravene his own commitments, it could be a form of question that gives too much power to the questioner and should not be allowed in a fair dispute.”[105]
            
            
            
      2. Many logic textbooks do not include the fallacy of complex question in their discussions of informal fallacies.[106]
         
         
         1. A question, complex or not, does not have a truth value because it is not a statement. Additionally, the propositional content of question cannot be considered a statement or a proposition.[107] So, strictly speaking, a complex question cannot be part of an argument, much less be a complete argument. Consequently, many logicians argue a complex question is not a fallacy in the normal use of the term.
            
            
         2. For example, an often asked-and-answered complex question in religious studies is something like the following passage excerpted from the writings of the Swedenborgian New Church:

            “If God did not create the universe, who did? At such a question some would pause and think; but many would meet it with the flippant answer ‘Nature,’ ‘Necessity,’ as if they really understood what such name implied. You will probably wonder that an answer so unequal to the subject should be given by any thoughtful man.” [108]

            This hypothetical question is based on the presumption that the universe was created by something. On the one hand, if this assumption is part of the contextual common ground of the discourse, then no argument is probably being offered. A question is asked and an answer is presumed in light of different answers dismissed.
            
            On the other hand, if an argument were being presented, then it most likely would be something like this:

            The universe was not created by nature or necessity.
            Nature or necessity is unequal to the task of creation.
            

            ---

            Therefore, God created the universe.

            This argument commits the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant conclusion.
            
            However, if we do not presuppose the creation of the universe, then the question founders in its purpose because the question has no direct answer and catastrophic presuppositional failure is said to occur. Whenever instances of complex questions with a questionable presuppositional premise in an argument miscarry, the fallacy of complex question occurs.
            
            
            
      3. So in what sense are complex questions such as these fallacious? A fallacy can occur when a complex question is enjoined in a dialogical context where the possible answers are constricted in order to pressure a respondent to concede an unreasonable admission.
         
         These contexts occur most often in which respondents are apprehensive in challenging the legitimacy of the question such as interrogation, testing, subservience, or accountability. So, no matter how the question is directly answered, an unwarranted conclusion can be indicated, implied, or assumed to be the case.
         
         Consider the use in a dialogic context of this question discussed by the Stoics:

         “Have you lost your horns?”

         This oft-used example is said to be an early attempt to raise a sophism of grammar, existential import, or presupposition in non-declarative sentences. The many-questions fallacy here is suggested its translated argument:

         You have what you have not lost.
         You have not lost horns.
         

         ---

         Therefore, you have horns.[109]

         Several ways have been proposed to analyze this complex question:
         
         
         1. A false presupposition is being implied by the disjunctive premise of a yes-no question: From the tacit premise of the law of the excluded middle, “You have either lost your horns or you have not lost your horns.”
            
            From this disjunction it appears that drawing the conclusion that “You have had horns” is justified. Thus, it appears that a false conclusion has resulted from a true disjunctive premise. Whichever direct answer, “Yes” or “No,” is provided to the proposed complex question, the conclusion appears to follow that you have had horns.
            
            
         2. The disjunctive premise could be false. As indicated just above, the disjunctive premise as a specific instance of the law of the excluded middle seems to imply the existence of horns:

            “You have either lost your horns or you have not lost your horns”

            However, since horns on human beings do not exist, something is incorrect about this disjunction. The list of things both having horns and not having horns are empty. So, since no such entity can be lost in such a case, it would appear that the disjunctive premise cannot be true.
            
            
         3. The disjunctive premise could be ambiguous or meaningless: For this reason, on Bertrand Russell's analysis, “having horns“ is not a referring phrase. On his analysis, the statement that one does not have horns is true, and the statement that it is not the case that horns exist is also true.[110]
            
            Russell would regard the disjunctive premise as ambiguous on account of “horns” not being a denoting phrase. Consequently, on his analysis, “You have lost your horns” is false. And “You have not lost your horns” is also false if it means:

            ”There exists something which are horns, and are not lost by you,”

            but is true if it means:

            “It is not the case that there exists something which are horns and are not lost by you.”

            Consequently, one account for a complex question being fallacious is that the question is logically based on an ambiguity.
            
            
         4. The disjunctive premise could be meaningless. P.F. Strawson argues that a straightforward syntactically well-formed statement has no truth value when it contains a non-referring singular term.[111] On a Strawson-type analysis, unlike Russell's, the above disjuncts are said to have a truth value only if their presupposition of the entity of “horns” is the case. But the presupposition is false. Strawson believes, “Singular terms are what yield truth-value gaps when they fail in their role”[112]:

            “‘S presupposes S´’ is defined as follows: ‘The truth of S´ is a necessary condition of the truth or falsity of S.’ … Whether or not S has a truth-value depends on one thing, viz., whether S´ is true. …[113]

            In the horns example, for Strawson, since S´ is the presupposition that horns exist, S, the statement that you have or have not lost your horns, does not have a truth value. I.e., the statement “Horns were had by you” is not contradicted by the statement “No existent entity is horns” because the first statement has a non-existential referring expression and thus has no truth value.
            
            On a Strawson-type analysis, then, a fallacy of complex question can be based on a presupposition without a truth value. Current practice more or less follows Strawson, recognizing that in some instances of presuppositional failure, the complex question can be meaningful. As Anne Bezuidenhout argues, presuppositions, as background statements, are non-assertions. Thus, their falsity can be allowed and “The main point of the utterance may still survive and meet the standards for issue content.”[114]
            
            
         5. The paradox rests on the presupposition that “You have lost your horns” implies in some sense “You had horns.” But this variety of entailment is not preserved under negation since both “You have lost your horns” and “You have not lost your horns” implies in some sense “You have had horns.”
            
            This entailment would seem to lead to the nonsensical result that the contingent statement “You have horns” is actually a necessarily true statement. I.e., whether or not you lost them, you have had them. The only way to avoid this result is to reject the law of the excluded middle which would mean that standard logic does not hold for presuppositions.
            
            
         6. For this reason, the current view is that presuppositional entailment is one kind of entailment which differs from classical entailment.
            
            
            
      4. Diogenes Laërties' provides the reasoning which was thought to provide a justification for the horns question to be genuine (i.e., one that has a direct answer) as follows:

         “If you never lost something, you have it still; but you never lost horns, ergo you have horns.” [115]

         However on the standard account of fallacy as an inference mistake (i.e., an argument that “seems to be valid but is not so”)[116] the justification assumes that by the meaning of the concept of “having,” one possesses every existent thing except those things that one has lost — which is, clearly, a mistaken assumption. For this reason, there is no direct answer to the question as posed, and the question is said to be improper or unsound. [117]
         
         Diogenes Laërtius relates the following possible refutation attributed to either Diogenes or Eubulides:

         ”A man once proved to him syllogistically that he had horns, so he put his hand to his forehead and said, ‘I do not see them.’ — thus pointing to the ‘nonexistent object.’”[118]

         As noted above, on the standard account, the complex question, “Have you lost your horns?” implies two questions:

         (1) “Have you had horns?” and

         (2) “If you have had horns, have you lost them?”

         A negative response here to these two implicative questions is a direct answer to the first question but not to the second, if the first is not assumed contextually.
         
         Just as the syllogistic refutation by Diogenes or Eubulides denies the unwarranted assumption of having horns so likewise the proper answer to the complex question is to deny the unwarranted assumption of having horns.
         
         
         
      5. On the dialectical and pragma-dialectical approaches, a fallacy is considered to be a “wrong move” or a violation of rules for a critical discussion. E.g. Douglas Walton writes:

         “The term fallacy is … a move that is not allowed by the rules of dialogue.” [119]

         E.g. Frans H. Van Eemerem and Rob Grootendorst specifically provide the following rule:

         “A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.”[120]

         Consequently, the fallacy of many questions is an attempt to evade the burden of proof by deceptively concealing an assumption.
         
         So on the dialogical understanding of informal fallacies, the horns question is not directly answerable whenever one is constrained to answer as a yes-no question. The presupposition of a question need be established before the question is posed. (In the many-questions fallacy, the complex question is not considered meaningless, but is considered misleading.)
         
         
         
      6. Finally, Jaakko Hintikka sees the fallacy of many questions, just as he does all of the traditionally recognized fallacies as an interrogative mistake in a dialogue, not as a mistaken logical inference. In his formulation of a Socratic interrogative model of inquiry, Hintikka argues that the fallacy of many questions is an interrogative mistake in question dialogues — a breach of the rules of questioning games.[121]
         
         

   10. Other Nonfallacious Uses of the Phrase “Complex Question”

       Other uses of the phrase “complex question” include rhetorical techniques, as explained above. Again, in these notes, we are assuming for a fallacy to occur an argument must be present.
       
       
       
       1. If a question's presuppositions are legitimately assumed by all parties, and the presuppositions are all relevant, then no fallacy has been committed.
          
          
          
       2. Often the phrase “complex question,” and in law the phrase “compound question,” is used in a descriptive, nonfallacious sense to describe a topic that contains several elements or factors, as in the following three examples describing complicated or difficult conditions in science and law:

          “It's not always possible to answer a complex question about how something works with one experiment. The question needs to be broken down into parts, each of which can be formulated as a hypothesis.”[122]

          And similarly in this example:

          “[IBM scientists] demonstrated that a computing system — using traditional strengths and overcoming assumed limitations — could beat expert humans in a complex question-and-answer competition using natural language.”[123]

          This example is taken from a widely cited North Carolina Supreme Court decision:

          ”Fraud is a compound question of law and fact. The facts going to establish it, are to be decided by a Jury.”[124]

          Consequently, rather than any sort of logical error occurring in these passages, a heterogeneous topic is being described.
          
          

   11. Practice Examples of Complex Question

       Analyze the following passages and state whether or not the fallacy of complex question or compound question has occurred.
       
       
       Show All Answers Hide All Answers Print with Answers
   
   
   
   1. “If a choice must be made, I'll adopt God's nonexistence as a working assumption. If I am mistaken, I hope He is not offended by my demand for evidence. (Many believers seem to think that God is offended by atheists. Is he overly proud or merely insecure?)”[125]
      
      

      Answer
      The rhetorical question “Is he [i.e., God who is offended by atheists] overly proud or merely insecure?“ is a complex question; also, the working presupposition of the question suffers from the problem of existential import as well as the presupposition of a false dichotomy.
      
      
   2. “Look very closely. You will see that no person and no circumstance can prevent you from becoming a self-understanding man or woman. Who is stopping you at this very moment? No one.”[126]
      
      
      Answer
      This modern stoic point of view is couched in a complex question fallacy. The inference expressed is that there is no excuse other than yourself that prevents you from self-knowledge. Many times an individual is be overpowered by external tragic circumstances including torture, trauma, or disaster.
      
      
      
   3. “It's not just the likes of the Dow industrials or the S&P 500 at record levels; money is sending all manner of stuff soaring. Last week's auctions at Christie's in New York marked the beginning of ‘a new era’ in the art market, the auction house declared, with nearly a half-billion dollars' worth of 20th-century works being snapped up by bidders who coveted them as much as stores of value as pieces of art. How else to explain Jackson Pollock's drip painting, Number 19, 1948 going for a record $58.4 million, about twice the $25 million to $35 million it had been expected to fetch?”[127]
      
      
      Answer
      The fallacy of complex question can be analyzed in this passage by noting that the presupposition of the challenging question posed is that desire for money is the only credible explanation for the high purchase price of the Pollock painting. Since the painting is an example of, rather than a proof of, “all manner of stuff” of value, the fallacy of accident does not occur. The example of the high price for the sale of the Pollock painting is intended to illustrate the growth in diverse kinds of investments.
      
      
      

   4. The following passage on the problem of redistribution is discussing whether people should be paid on how hard they try, rather than on how much they are able to accomplish:

      “How hard you're willing to work is powerfully influenced by how much skill nature has given you and thus how much chance you have of achieving a satisfying success. The case for redistribution is not without its troubles: Anyone who says that what nature has given you has nothing to do with what you should be allowed to keep must ultimately answer questions like why couples who produce beautiful children shouldn't be made to give some of them to parents who can only turn out ugly ducklings.”[128]

      
      
      Answer
      The complex question is accomplished by basing an inference on a false analogy relating the heritability of one's relative abilities in the workplace to one's relative beauty in a family.
      
      
      
   5. “An almost equally exasperating aspect of the autonomy struggle is the toddler's inability to make choices. The parent asks whether the child wants a cookie or a lollipop. First the child says, ‘Cookie,’ but as soon as he gets the cookie, he wants a lollipop. The parent patiently takes away the cookie and gives the toddler a lollipop, but now the child wants the cookie again. The problem is that the child wants the right to choose, but does not want to make a choice. From the child's point of view, he does not have a choice unless he can choose them both.”[129]
      
      
      Answer

      From the child's point of view, the fallacy of complex question is evident: the question is seen as a loaded question “What do you want?“ with the choices surreptitiously limited. Implicitly, the child's want is inclusive rather than exclusive. This example points to the ambiguity that Aristotle points out in the many question fallacy (Arist. Soph. El. 17 175a).

      From the adult's point of view, No argument is being given, so no fallacy occurs. Perhaps, the passage is best analyzed as a miscommunication based on the ambiguity of ‘or’ as being either the exclusive or inclusive sense of the word.

      
      
      

   6. Socialist historian Edward Thompson quotes Mahatma Gandhi's defense of India's caste system as follows:

      “We cannot choose at this stage our own parents, or our own birth-place, or our own ancestry. Why should we claim as individuals the right during this present brief life-period to break through all the conventions wherein we are placed at birth by God Himself?’[130]
      
      

      Answer
      This complex question presupposes the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation: the recurrent process of birth and rebirth first described in the Upanishads where the intentions and actions of the previous life establish the present conditions of one's soul.
      
      
      
   7. “[Global News Agency] Agence France-Presse concluded its story by noting, ‘Studies have described a rise in the prevalence of mental disorders in China, some of them linked to stress as the pace of life becomes faster and socialist support systems falter.’ [This] is sheer preposterous propaganda. What ’study‘ could possibly prove that stress regarding ‘the pace of life’ and the decline of ’socialist support systems‘ (whatever they are) had increased mental illness? Western intellectuals, very much including the press, are still in love with socialism — even its communist variant.”[131]
      
      

      Answer
      Agency France-Presse makes use of a complex rhetorical question to argue that since no study could possibly prove that stress in life and the lack of socialist support systems increase mental illness, they do not do so. The presupposition of the question is used to produce a fallacious ad ignorantiam argument of the following kind: “If X cannot be proved, then X is not true. However, no reasons are provided for the presupposition that X cannot be proved.
      
      
      
   8. “Concerning the July 16 Cover Story, ‘The Euro's Fate’ Is that the best Europe can do? Print, print, print money; destroy the middle class by crushing savers and stoking inflation; enforce unnaturally low interest rates that only serve to provide cover for irresponsible politicians; destroy the dreams of the next several generations that will be impoverished with debt[?]”[132]
      
      

      Answer
      In this example, a rhetorical, loaded question is used to assert a prediction of the European economic policies of that time. No argument is present — only the rhetorical question is posed. An opinion is expressed but no fallacy is present.
      
      
      
   9. “There is a tale, probably apocryphal, told of that notoriously merry monarch Charles II. There was a dinner to commemorate the foundation of the Royal Society. At the end of the evening, ‘with the peculiar gravity of countenance which he usually wore on such occasions,’ he put a challenge to the Fellows. ‘Suppose two pails of water were fixed in two different scales that were equally poised, and which weighted equally alike, and that two live bream, or small fish, were put into either of these pails.‘ He wanted to know the reason why that pail, with such additions should not weigh more than the other pail which stood against it. Many suggested possible explanations, and argued for their own suggestions with more or less vigour. But at last one who perhaps remembered that the motto of that great society is ‘Nullium in verba’ (Take no man's word for it!) denied the assumption: ‘It would weigh more.’ The King was delighted: ‘Odds fish, brother, you are in the right.’”[133]
      
      

      Answer
      Originally, the King commits the fallacy of complex question because in the phrasing of the question an inference is assumed which is incorrect. However, the “argument’ is being advanced in a less than sincere sense.
      
      
      
   10. 
       
       “Bion, that was an atheist, was showed in a port city, in a temple of Neptune, many tables of pictures, of such as had in tempests made their vows to Neptune, and were saved from shipwreck: and was asked, ‘How say you not? Do you not acknowledge the power of the gods?’ But he said, ‘Yes, but where are they painted that have been drowned after their vows?’”[134]
       
       

       Answer
       Bion's complex question is not fallacious with respect to the assumption that some sailors who paid tribute to Neptune were, despite that, lost at sea. The question posed by Bion sensibly presupposes some shipwrecked sailors who made vows to Neptune were not protected and were lost at sea — an assumption not granted by the believer who assumed Neptune saved sailors who paid homage.
       
       Bion's presupposition is used as reason to doubt the power of Neptune to save lives at sea. From the point of view of the believer who would argue that no proof exists that any sailors who bowed down to Neptune were lost at sea, an implicit ad_ignorantiam fallacy is arguably in the passage even though the burden of proof would be on Bion to prove his assumption that Neptune does not have to power to save lives.
       
       
       
   11. “Joe, let's take a look at what is happening for you in the [therapy] group. Here you are, after two months, not feeling good about yourself in this group and with several members impatient with you (or intimidated, or avoidant, or angry, or annoyed, or feeling seduced or betrayed). What's happened? Is this a familiar place for you? Would you be willing to take a look at your role in bringing this to pass?”[135]
       
       

       Answer
       The fallacy of complex question occurs since the question presupposes without evidence that Joe's not feeling good about himself is to blame for causing the impatience of several members of the group. The argument to the conclusion that Joe's attitude (and not his behavior or some other factor) is the cause of the impatience of others in the group is based on a questionable and manipulative presupposition.
       
       
       

   12. An argument given in a debate prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election:

       “To many women, the Donald Trump who debated Hillary Clinton was painfully familiar.…Only two candidates stood in that stage. Only one will name the next Supreme Court Justice. Who do you want that to be? The bully or the nerd? The good girl or the bad boy? There is no third option.”[136]
       
       

       Answer
       Complex (and loaded) question fallacy: the decision for the next Supreme Court Justice should be based on qualifications of the individual rather than the slanted personality characteristics of the nominators. The question presupposing that Hillary Clinton is a nerdy good girl while Donald Trump is a bad boy bully grounds the fallacy on an ad hominem argument. The presumptive epithets chosen are neither emotively neutral nor, in this context, literally pertinent descriptions of the presidential candidates.
       
       
       

postscript

“The fallacia plurium interrogationum consists in trying to get one answer to several questions in one. It is sometimes used by barristers in the examination of witnesses, who endeavour to get yes or no to a complex question which ought to be partly answered in each way, meaning to use the answer obtained, as for the whole, when they have got it for a part. …

We are often reminded of the two men who stole the leg of mutton; one could swear he had not got it, the other that he had not taken it. … The answer of the owner of the leg of mutton is sometime to the point, ‘Well, gentlemen, all I can say is, there is a rogue between you.’”

Augustus De Morgan, Formal Logic: or, the Calculus of Inference, Necessary ad Probable (London: Taylor and Walton, 1847), 270.

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Readings: Complex Question; Many Questions