Complex Question;
Many Questions, Loaded Question, or Compound Question Fallacy
Abstract: The fallacy of Complex Question
(traditionally known as fallacia plurimum interrogationum)
is discussed and explained with illustrative examples and self-grading
quizzes. The “fallacy” is said to occur when an answer is
demanded in response to a question composed of several questions.
In logic textbooks the fallacy is also cited as the Many Questions, Loaded
Question, False Question, Double Question, Assumption of the Previous Question,
Trick Question, or, in law, the Compound 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.’
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.
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.
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.
Nevertheless, complex questions are often described as
“fallacious” when the term “fallacy” is defined
in terms of a mistaken or deceptive belief.
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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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]
If an argument is present, the complex question, itself, is to be
evaluated in terms of its presuppositional
statement (or statements).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
How to Resolve Complex Questions
The complex question fallacy is usually resolved by challenging the false or dubious
presuppositions assumed in the question itself.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
(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.
W.D. Wilson provides this non-inferential, fabricated example
as propaedeutic:
“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.]
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Fallacia Plurium Interrogationum: The name of this
fallacy, used often in 19th century textbooks, is the Latin equivalent of
the “Fallacy of Many Questions.”
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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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]
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.
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.)
Again, in other contexts, the term “loaded question”
is often used as a synonym of complex question.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this example testimony, Tituba finally succumbed to the initial
complex questions under the withering examination of the Magistrate.
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]
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.
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.
Finally, leading questions often have a positive use for stimulating and
directing Socratic dialogues in educational classrooms.
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]
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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”).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
Many logic textbooks do not include the fallacy of complex question in their
discussions of informal fallacies.[106]
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
For this reason, the current view is that presuppositional entailment is one
kind of entailment which differs from classical entailment.
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.
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.)
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]
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.
If a question's presuppositions are legitimately assumed by all
parties, and the presuppositions are all relevant, then no fallacy has
been committed.
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.
Practice Examples of Complex Question
Analyze the following passages and state whether or not the fallacy of complex
question or compound question has occurred.
“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]
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.
“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]
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.
“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]
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.
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]
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.
“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]
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.
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]
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.
“[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]
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.
“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]
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.
“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]
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.
“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]
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.
“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]
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.
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]
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.
Links to Online Quizzes with Complex Question
Test your understanding of Complex Question and other arguments with
the following quizzes:
“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.’”
1. Many recent textbooks regard a single-sentence complex question as a fallacy.
These textbooks assume, without justification, that the presupposition of the
complex question is, by itself with no additional statements, the claimed tacit
conclusion of an argument. Such an approach would, at best, implicitly wrest
the simple complex question into a circular argument.
Some textbooks which treat complex questions by themselves as fallacious
include the following:
John A. Oesterle, Logic: The Art of Defining and
Reasoning 2nd. ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 259.
Frances Howard-Snyder, Daniel Howard-Snyder, and Ryan
Wasserman, The Power of Logic 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2009),
186.
T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoing
6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), 167.
Irving M. Copi, Carl Cohen, and Kenneth McMahon,
Introduction to Logic 14th ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 134-136.
Stan Baronett, Logic 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016),153-154.
Patrick J. Hurley and Lori Watson, A Concise Introduction
to Logic 13th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage, 2018), 169-170.
However, for a fallacy to occur, the question and its presupposition must be part
of an argument. The presupposition itself must be not only unwarranted but also objectionable to the respondent because as Lauri Karttunen, David Lewis, and
Robert Stalnaker point out, presuppositions are introduced often in conversational
contexts and are usually accepted once the previously unspoken assumption
is accommodated. Stalnaker writes:
“Accommodation is an essential feature of any communicative
practice. If common ground is (at least close to) common belief, then
it will adjust and change in the face of manifest events that take
place, including events that are themselves speech acts.” [Robert
Stalnaker, Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
58. doi
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199645169.001.0001]
Presuppositional failure occurs whenever the question implies the truth
of the false presupposition. Not all cases of false presupposition in
complex questions are unwarranted; those that are unwarranted are called
“catastropic, if fallacious.“ Stephen Yablo writes:
“Failure is catastrophic if it prevents a thing from
performing its primary task, in this case making an (evaluable)
claim.” [Stephen Yablo, “Non-Catastropic
Presupposition Failure,” in Content and Modality: Themes
from the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker eds. Judith Thomson
and Alex Byrne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164. doi:
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199266487.003.0012]
In sum, since a complex question fails in its purpose because of its failure
of presuppositional reference, the complex question has no direct answer.↩
2. Charles Hamlin, Fallacies (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1970),
39. Hamlin notes that most questions, not just complex questions, involve
presuppositions which have need of different kinds of answers.
Christopher W. Tindale sums up: “[F]ew theorists
are inclined to include ‘Complex Question’ in any stable of
fallacies.” Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007),
69. doi:
10.1017/cbo9780511806544↩
Many other logicians do not consider complex question to
be a fallacy. See for example:
Jaakko Hintikka, “The Fallacy of Fallacies,”
Argumentation 1 no. 3 (September, 1987), 225. doi:
10.1007/bf00136775
Gilbert Ryle, “The Academy and Dialectic,” in
Critical Essays: Collected Papers Vol. 1 (1971 London: Routledge,
2009), 121. doi:
10.4324/9780203101667-12
4. Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Argumentation,
Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective (1992
London: Routledge, 2016), 214. doi:
10.4324/9781315538662↩
5. Aristotle writes:
“In dealing with those who make several questions into one,
you should draw a distinction immediately at the beginning. For a
question is single to which there is only one answer, so that one
must not affirm or deny several things of one thing nor one thing
of several things, but one thing of one thing. But just as in the
case of equivocal terms, a predicate is sometimes true of both
meanings and sometimes of neither, and so, though the question is
not simple, no detriment results if people give a simple answer, so
too with these double questions. When, therefore, the several
predicates are true of one subject, or one predicate of several subjects,
no contradiction is involved in giving a simple answer, though he
has made this mistake. But when the predicate is true of one subject
but not of the other or several predicates are true of several subjects,
then there is a sense in which both are true of both but another sense,
on the other hand, in which they are not; so one must be on one's guard
against this.” Arist. Soph.
El. 29 181a37–30 181b2, trans. Forster.
doi:
https://doi.org/10.4159/dlcl.aristotle-sophistical_refutations.1955 ]
This passage well describes the “workout”
example cited in footnote references 8 and 9 below.↩
6. Frans H. van Eemeren and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans,
Argumentation: Analysis and Evaulation 2nd ed. (2002 New York:
Routledge, 2017), 114. doi:
10.4324/9781315401140↩
7. J. Woo, “Many-Questions Fallacy” The Oxford Companion
to Philosophy ed. Ted Honderich (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 553.↩
10. For example, from an empirical study of the multiple ways question can
function for speakers in casual conversation, Alice F. Freed states:
“The taxonomy developed illustrates how questions vary along
an information continuum; those which seek factual information,
characterized as public information, are situated at one end of the
continuum; at the other end are questions which are the expressive
choice of the speaker, and communicate rather than elicit information.
[Alice F. Freed, “The
Form and Function of Questions in Informal Dyadic Conversation,
Journal of Pragmatics 21 no. 6 (June,
1994), 625. doi:
10.1016/0378-2166(94)90101-5]
Some critical thinking texts indicate that expressive language is, in
itself fallacious when viewed rhetorically. The view taken in these notes
is that fallacies can only be viewed as characteristic of the informative
function of language when viewed as statements in an argument.↩
15. Much of the literature of the Amsterdam School and other dialogical
interpretations of the complex question fallacy assume that “the
fallacy of many questions occurs in argumentative interactions
between two or more discussants.” Quite so, but occurrences of the
fallacy are also present in disparate discursive contexts. The quotation is
an excerpt from pragma-dialectical theorists Roosmaryn Pilgram and Leah
E. Polcar in “Questioning
the Fallacy of Many Questions,” in Proceedings of the
Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of
Argumentation eds. F.H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Sic Sat,
2007), 1062. Persistent Identifier: urn:
nbn:nl:ui:29-407602↩
16. Nuel Belnap, Jr. and T. Steel, Jr. The Logic of Questions and
Answers (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale, 1976),
111.↩
17. Analyzing informal fallacies by means of differing nonclassical logics
results in an unsystematic theory of philosophy. As Frans H. van Eemeren
and Rob Grootendorst state:
“This approach amounts to applying an appropriate logical system
in analyzing a particular fallacy.… For practical purposes this
approach is not very realistic. In order to be able to carry out the
analyses, a considerable amount of logical knowledge is required …
one only gets fragmentary descriptions of the various fallacies, and
no overall picture of the domain of the fallacies as a whole.”
[Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Argumentation,
Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective
(1992, London: Routledge, 2016), 152. doi:
10.4324/9781315538662 (preview)]
The introduction of a few conventions might be beneficial for understanding
some terminology in the logic of questions (i.e., erotetic logic).
Questions are studied syntactically, semantically and pragmatically. The
foundational issues of semantic and pragmatic accounts of the context of discourse
remain contentious.
Syntactical study is the study of interrogatives and
their denotation without consideration of their use within a context.
Interrogative sentences normally express questions just as declarative
sentences normally express statements. Interrogative sentences, as a
grammatical formula, can perform other actions than questioning, and
questions can be stated without interrogatives. E.g. How
questions can function in deductive arguments is discussed in Andrzej
Wiśniewski, “The Logic of Questions as a Theory of Erotetic
Arguments,” Synthese 109 no. 1 (October, 1996) 1-25.
doi: 10.1007/bf00413820
The semantical study of questions deals with the content
and meaning of questions, their grammar and syntax, rather than consideration
their form or their implied meaning. Robert Stalnaker regards “semantics
to be the study of propositions,” in particular, their truth conditions.
[Robert N. Stalnaker, Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality
in Speech and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32.
doi:
10.1093/0198237073.001.0001 And also Stalnaker, “Context”
(2014), 23.]
Jerrold J. Katz writes semantics consists in “taking senses or
meaning, as they present themselves in our ordinary linguistic
experience, to be the proper objects of study ….”
(italics original) [Jerrold J. Katz, “Common
Sense in Semantics,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
23 no.2 (April 1982), 174. doi:
10.1305/ndjfl/1093883626]
Question pragmatics attends to the use, contextual interpretation,
and conveyed meaning of questions by users of language. Pragmatics are based
on semantics.
Essential to the logical analysis of questions is the notion of a true,
direct answer; otherwise, even though a reply can be given, the question
is not answerable. Consequently, a question without a direct answer is
not considered a legitimate question. Questions with false presuppositions
or non-existent entities are not meaningless and are still considered
questions. Nuel Belnap and T. Steel point out that asking a question
with a false presupposition is “very much like making a false
statement.” They note that the notion of question-presupposition
must differ somewhat from the usual concepts for sentence-presupposition:
“A question, q, presupposes a statement, A,
if and only if the truth of A is a logically necessary condition
for there being some true answer to q.”
By this analysis, the complex question …
Have you stopped beating your spouse?
can be a proper question, i.e., a question with true, direct
answers of either “You have stopped beating your spouse” or
“You have not stopped beating your spouse,” given the truth
of the presupposition “You used to beat your spouse.” The
situational context under which the question is asked are pragmatic
conditions involving dependent presuppositions (not the unique
presupposition of the question) and include “You are married“
and “You used to beat someone.” [Belnap, Logic of
Questions, 108-15.]
Belnap also proposes that “a sentence expresses the
presupposition of a question if its truth is both necessary and
sufficient for the question's having some true answer,” so “a
question[is] ‘true’ just when some direct answer thereto
is true.” [Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., “Questions, Answers, and
Presuppositions,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 63 no.
20 (October 27, 1966), 610-611. doi:
10.2307/2024255]
As an improper question, there is no true, direct answer. Instead of an
answer, replies are such as “I am not married, so
there is no spouse to beat” or “I am married and I have never
beaten anyone” are possible. So, the reply in this case is an
explanation why there is no answer to the question.
There is no true, direct answer to the complex question. The kind of fallacy,
then, can be viewed as unreasonably leading the respondant to an
improper conclusion from imposed, restricted “premises.” Very
often recognition of the pragmatic implications of a complex question are
essential in its analysis. The pragmatic circumstances under which a question
is posed can be the determining factors of its fallaciousness. Since,
following Belnap and Steel, there is no correct or true answer to a complex
question, C.L. Hamlin's objection to David Harrah's or Henry S. Leonard's
analyses that questions are not statements does not pose a problem for this
manner of viewing complex questions since these theories describe direct
questions only. Hamlin writes, “[T]he difference between questions
and statements is at least in part pragmatic, whence we should find it in
the difference between the pragmatic implications of an act of question-asking
and an act of statement-making.” [C.L. Hamlin, “Questions Aren't
Statements,” Philosophy of Science 30 no. 1 (January, 1963),
63. doi: 10.1086/287913]↩
Randal Marlin describes his experience with a yes-no question during
this cross-examination:
“Our community association was fighting (unsuccessfully,
as it turned out) a proposed seat expansion to Lansdowne
Park Stadium, which is in our area. We had presented a petition
of 2,000 signatures opposing the expansion to the Ontario
Municipal Board. The grapevine had alerted me to the fact that
the Ottawa Rough Riders (a team in the professional Canadian
Football League) had sent an opposing petition to all Rough
Riders season ticket subscribers. In the witness box during the
OMB hearing I was asked by the Rough Riders' lawyer: ‘Are
you aware that there was another petition that obtained 8,000
signatures in favour of the seat expansion?” If I answered
‘Yes’ I would have appeared to be confirming
numbers that I had no knowledge of, and discrediting my own
petition to boot so far as numbers were concerned. If I answered
‘No’ I would merely have seemed factually ignorant,
or perhaps suppressing knowledge of a petition whose existence
I did not wish to face.” [Randal Marlin, “The
Rhetoric of Action Description: Ambiguity in Intentional
Reference,” Informal Logic 6 no. 3 (1984), 29.
doi:
10.22329/il.v6i3.2737]
To answer the compound question with “Yes” would be either
false or misleading.]↩
21. Thomas Sowell, “ Random Thoughts On the Passing Scene,”
Index-Journal 97 No. 14 (March 5, 2015),
6A.↩
22. In accordance with some U. S. laws of evidence in the 19th century,
such questions were lawful in cross-examination:
“When a witness is cross-examined, he may … be asked any
questions which tend … [t]o shake his credit, by injuring his
character. (And to this end … his interest, his motives, his
way of life, his associations, his habits, his prejudices, his physical
defects and infirmities, his mental idiosyncrasies, if they affect his
capacity … (Com. v. Shaw, 4 Cush. (Mass.) 593.) He may be
compelled to answer any such question, however irrelevant it may be to
the facts in issues, and however disgraceful the answer may be to himself,
except in the case of self-incrimination.” [James Fitzjames Stephen,
A
Digest of the Law of Evidence 3rd. ed. (Boston:
Little, Brown, and Company, 1877), 185.]
Compound questions (questions involving two or more questions) are
subject to objection. Leading questions (questions which suggest the
answer) are not allowed in direct examination of a witness (except for
testimony development) but are allowed in cross-examination. See “Rule
403: Exclusion of Relevant Evidence on Ground of Prejudice, Confusion, or
Waste of Time”Rule 611: Mode and Order of Interrogation and
Presentation Public
Law 93-595: Federal Rules of Evidence↩
23. “Lysias
Against Eratosthenes,” in William Jennings Bryan, ed.,
The World's Famous Orations: Rome (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906),
I: 61.↩
25. Suitable paraphrases for the same question given in an interrogative
sentence can also be expressed using an imperative or a declarative sentence.
Consider the following example:
Interrogative: When did you start so many atrocious habits? Imperative: Tell me when you started so many atrocious habits. Declarative: I want to know when you started so many atrocious
habits.
The varieties of questions include many question-types, so this guide
is only suggestive. Differing catalogs of question-types are provided by
Mary Prior and Arthur Prior, “Erotetic Logic,”
Philosophical Review 64 no. 1 (January, 1955), 58-63. doi: 10.2307/2182232;
Greg P. Kearsley, “Questions and Question Asking in Verbal Discourse:
A Cross-Disciplinary Review,” Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research 5 no. 4 (October, 1976), 365-375. doi:
10.1007/BF01079934; Nuel Belnap and T. Steel, The
Logic of Questions; David Harrah, The
Logic of Questions in D. Gabbay and
F. Guenther eds. 2nd. ed. Handbook of Philosophical Logic
(Dordrecht: Springer Science, 2002), 716, doi: 10.1007/978-94-010-0387-2_1;
and many others.
Confusion about the meaning of presuppositions in a complex questions are
often due to syntactical ambiguity in their interpretation. This point was
recognized early on by Aristotle as he wrote:
“Fallacies connected with the union of several questions in one
are due to our failure to differentiate or distinguish the definition
of the term ‘proposition.’ For a proposition is a single
predication about a single subject. … If, therefore, a man has
given an answer as though to a single question, there will be a
refutation … for we fail accurately to carry out the definition
of ‘proposition’” [Arist. Soph. Re.,
169a 6-8, 14-18; 169b 16-18 trans. Forster.]
Some problematic presuppositions are made explicit for complex questions
are negative existential statements. For Strawson and others (including
Aristotle), the existence of the subject class is a necessary condition
of the truth or falsity of statements. [See P.F. Strawson,
Introduction to Logical Theory (rpt. 1964 London: Methuen &
Co. Ltd., 1952), 175 doi:
10.4324/9780203828779. ] Otherwise, the negative existential statement
simply reflects a “confusion” for Aristotle and others taking
this approach.↩
26. Dana Milbank, “Susan Rice's Tarnished Résumé,”
Index-Journal 94 no. 202 (November 20, 2012), 6A. Also
see Washington
Monthly here↩
29. Although there is no direct answer to the question, the short
reply, “Neither“ would be appropriate if one had no bad
habits. However, in some constricting circumstances, this answer would be judged
non-responsive in use.
Examples such as this one perhaps illustrate why courses in symbolic
logic do not seem to help much for facility in the logic of questions.
Although this example seems to make sense from the standpoint formal logic,
it does not seem to pass the test of conversational implication.
Classically, Menedemus provided such an account.[Diogenes Laërtius,
“Menedemus”
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers trans. C.D. Younge
(London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), ii.135 (p. 109)].
A similar account outlined by John Woods, et al. appears to
say in response to a disjunction such as this one that:
“Eliciting this answer does the questioner no good. It gives him
no information as to whether I now have bad habits or whether I ever
did. …[A] ‘no’ answer still does the respondent no
dialectical harm whatsoever.” [John Woods, A.Irvine, and D. Walton,
Argument: Critical Thinking, Logic and the Fallacies 2nd. ed.
(Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 55].
It might be supposed that since the question, “Have you left off
your bad habits” means …
“Have you had bad habits?” and
(2) “If you have had bad habits, have you left them
off?”
Aulus Gellius replies to an answer like this that “[O]ne need not
answer catch questions.” Aulus Gellius, Noctium Atticarum
ed. John C. Rolfe, (1927), Bk. 16, II. The Perseus Catalog].
Peter Geach's analysis shows how an answer along the lines explained by
Menexenus and John Woods, and others, would simply be “out of
place.” [P.T. Geach, “ Russell's Theory of Descriptions,”
Analysis 10 no. 4 (March, 1950), 84-86. doi: 10.2307/3326446].
Mary and Arthur Prior write with respect to a similar example, the answer
of “Neither … would be a correction of the question rather
than an answer to it. With a false antecedent, there is no proper question
present. If the interrogative were to be evaluated in accordance with material
implication, the conditional would always be evaluated as true regardless of
any consequent being provided. Thus, the form of the statement to which (2)
applies is not a material conditional. [Mary Prior and Arthur Prior,
“Erotetic Logic,” The Philosophical Review 64 no. 1
(January, 1955), 51-4. doi:
10.2307/2268271↩
30. For example, Jaakko Hintikka explains the possibility of understanding
the complex question fallacy in this manner:
“There can be a separate, nonpsychological theory of fallacies
[i.e. a theory apart from violations of definitory rules of logic] only
so far as fallacies are thought of as strategic mistakes, not
violations of the ‘rules of inference’ in logic”
[Jaakko Hintikka, Inquiry as Inquiry:
A Logic of Scientific Discovery (Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Springer Science+Business Media, 1999) 5. doi:
10.1007/978-94-015-9313-7]
Traditionally, the fallacy of complex question was not thought to be a
fallacy of rhetoric in the same sense of a proponent asserting the complex
question in the manner of a rhetorical question expecting no reply. Instead,
the fallacy was noted by Aristotle and defined in terms of its origin in
the oral disputations of cross-examination in the dialectic of the Socratic
Schools. As Hintikka points out:
“[F]or the Aristotle who wrote the Topics and
De Sophisticis Elenchis … what we now call logical
inferences were merely a species of question-answer steps.”
[Jaakko Hintikka, “What Was Aristotle Doing in His Early Logic,
Anyway? A Reply to Woods and Hansen” Synthese
113 no. 2 (November, 1997), 241. doi:
10.1007/1-4020-2041-4_11]
With Richard Whately's assumption of “the Fallacy of
Interrogation” occurring in written argumentation (rather than in
question-and-answer oral disputation) in the early 19th century, the fallacy
became no longer viewed in many logic textbooks as an inference error
per se but a fallacy of ambiguity. Whately appears to take the
fallacia plurium interrogationum as a rhetorical
question. For him, a complex question as a premise within the context of
an argument becomes the syllogistic four-term
fallacy.[Richard Whatley, Elements of
Logic 2nd. ed. (London: J. Mawman, 1826), 162-4.]
31.William and Mary Kneale, The Development of Logic (1962
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 114.↩
32. See Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and
Resolution (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), 140.↩
33. Robert Stalnaker, Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
54-55. doi:
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199645169.001.0001I.e., semantic presupposition
is computed from the meanings of the parts of complex sentences, and truth functional
connectives here prove to be problematic.
Lauri Karttunen states:
“[O]rdinary discourse is not always fully explicit … I think
we can maintain that a sentence is always taken to be an increment to a
context that satisfies its presuppositions. If the current conversational
context does not suffice, the listener is entitled and expected to extend
it as required.” [Lauri Karttunen, “Presupposition and
Linguistic Context,” Theoretical Linguistics 1 no. 1-3
(1974), 191. doi:
10.1515/thli.1974.1.1-3.181.
Pragmatic presupposition involves the shared background assumptions of
the persons in dialogue.↩
34. Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001), 32. doi:
0.1093/0199246297.003.0002↩
A presupposition is not an entailment; usually a complex question implies
its presupposition is true. Strictly speaking, presuppositions are not made
by sentences, but are made by speakers. Bart Geurts writes:
“[W]henever it is said that sentence φ presupposes that χ,
what is actually meant is that normally speaking a speaker who utters
χ would thereby commit himself to the presupposition that χ is
true.” [Bart Geurts, “Presupposition and Givenness,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics ed. Yan Huang (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 182. doi
0.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.21]
Of course, the presupposition of truth would not be necessarily the
case in instances of trying to force a confession in cross-examinations or
trying to cajole an innocent person to confess an indiscretion.↩
36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosiphicus
(1921 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), ¶ 6.51.↩
37. Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. and Thomas B. Steel, Jr. The Logic of Questions
and Answers (New Haven: Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1976),
87.↩
39. Jaakko Hintikka, “The Fallacy of Fallacies,” Argumentation
1 no. 3 (September, 1987), 224. doi:
10.1007/bf00136775
A U.S. Army field manual defines this type of question differently:
“Leading questions are questions that are constructed so to
require a yes or no answer rather than a narrative response. …
They make it easier for the source to lie … A source …
will tend to answer in the way that he thinks the … collector
wants him to answer.” [Headquarters, Department of the
Army, Human
Intelligence Collector Operations Manual FM
2-22.3 (September 2006), 9.4.]
Yes-no type questions are usually to be avoided in interrogation
since they make deceit more likely.↩
40. Arist. Soph. El. 30 181b4–8 trans. Poste. [Aristotle,
Aristotle
on Fallacies: Or The Sophistici Elenchi trans. Edward Poste
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1866), 83.] The fallacy of many questions in
Aristotle's De Sophisticis Elenchis is not viewed by him
specifically as a mistaken inference — the fallacy lies in the confusion
when “several questions are united as one.” Arist. 7
Soph.El. 6 169b14.↩
41. More precisely, he writes, “If one does not make two questions
into one then the fallacy which depends on equivocation and ambiguity
would not exist …” Arist. Soph. El.17 175a,
trans. Forster. Aristotle discusses the many questions fallacy in these
passages: Soph. El. 5 (167b38–168a17), 6
(169a6–18), 7 (169b13–17), 17 (175b39–176a19), and
30.↩
42. Arist. Soph. E. 8 173a–175, trans. Poste. Aristotle
writes, “Fallacies connected with the union of several questions in
one are due to our failure to differentiate or distinguish the definition
of the term ‘proposition.’ for a proposition is a single
predication about a single subject.” [Soph. El. 6 169a,
trans. Forester].↩
43. Example adapted from Ran Canetti, ed., Theory of Cryptography:
Fifth Theory of Cryptography Conference (Berlin: Springer, 2008),
504. ↩
49. Cory S. Clements explains, “When an investigator uses loaded
language to question an eyewitness immediately after an event, the cognitive
bias of suggestibility makes the eyewitness's account prone to distortion.
This is particularly true after a highly traumatic event because the
eyewitness's emotional levels are already aroused. Investigators may feel
they are attempting to help the eyewitness to recall the event;
the truth is that the investigator is helping the eyewitness to
reconstruct the event. The formal rules that guard against
leading questions in the court room cannot prevent an interviewer on the
scene from inadvertently changing the witness's memory. 355. Cory S. Clements,
“Perception
and Persuasion in Legal Argumentation: Using Informal Fallacies and Cognitive
Biases to Win the War of Words,” BYU Law Review no. 2
article 9 (May, 2013), 357.↩
50. Richard Robinson states, “Every question implies a proposition.
… A question is fallacious, therefore, when the proposition which it
implies is false.” [Richard Robinson, “Plato's Consciousness
of Philosophy,” Mind 51 no. 202 (April, 1942), 97-98.]
Normally the use of the terms “fallacious question” and “false
question” are eschewed in today's logic jargon but is occasionally
present in debating texts.↩
51. Wendy A. Schweigert, Research Methods in Psychology
3rd. ed. (Waveland Press, 2011), 205. ↩
52. Dana Milbank, “ Trump Rams Greatness Down Our Throats,”
Index-Journal 99 no. 286 (December 29, 2017),
8A. ↩
54. L.B. Curzon and P.H. Richards, The Longman Dictionary of
Law 7th ed. (1979 Harlow, England: Pearson Education Ltd., 2007),
342.↩
55. Thomas A. Mauet, Trial Techniques and Trials, 10th ed. (New
York: Wolters Kluwer, 2017), 137. “[C]ourts will permit leading
questions on direct examination in cases involving children as witnesses or
where the inquiry is directed at delicate topics such as sexual matters,
where a witness may have difficulty testifying in the absence of prompting
leading questions.” [Jefferson L. Ingram, Criminal Evidence
12th ed.(New York: Elsevier, 2015), 310.] Even so, complex or compound questions
would not be allowed.↩
60. Angela D. Evans, Kang Lee, and Thomas D. Lyon, “Complex Questions Asked
by Defense Lawyers But Not Prosecutors Predicts Convictions in Child Abuse Trials,”
Law and Human Behavior 33 no. 3(June, 2009), 258-264.
doi: 10.1007/s10979-008-9148-6↩
61. Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2009), 140.↩
”To ask a complex question … will give the witness an
opportunity to play games. If they can say no to a part of the question,
the other parts fall, as well. The correct way to form the cross-examination
question, therefore, is to break it up into one fact at a time.”
Diogenes Lärtius provides a similar argument attributed
the disputatious Menedemus of Eretria:
“‘Is the one of two things different from the other?’
‘Yes.’ ‘And is conferring benefits different from the good?’
‘Yes.’ ‘Then to confer benefits is not good.’”
[Diogenes Laërtius,
“Menedemus”
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers trans. C.D. Younge
(London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), ii.135 (p. 109)].↩
69. “Wagner
v. Gilsonite Const. Co. (No. 21163 )”
Supreme Court of Missouri, Division No. 1 (April 10, 1920),
Southwestern Reporter 220 (May 12 — June 9, 1920)
(St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1920), 893.↩
70. Randolph Quirk, et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language (Longman: London, 1985), 581n (8.97n); 808-810
(11.6-8). doi: 10.2307/415437
The presumptions of conducives usually initially influence the persuasive effect
of the question and later can influence the recall of their answers.
E.g., see Samuel Fillenbaum, “Recall for Answers
to ‘Conducive’ Questions,” Language and Speech 11
no. 1 (January, 1968), 46-53. doi:
10.1177/002383096801100107.↩
Dawn Archer notes in her historical study
of the English courts:
“[T]he controlling capacity of question (in the historical courtroom,
at least) had more to do with the institutionally/legally inscribed roles
of the participants than any inherent characteristic of the question-types
themselves.” [Dawn Archer, Questions and Answers
in the English Courtroom (1640-1760): A Sociopragmatic Analysis
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005), 143.
doi:
10.1075/pbns.135.]
See also Richard Kortum's study of the effects of intonation
and verbal mood in conducive questions: Varieties of Tone: Frege, Dummett
and the Shades of Meaning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), §
2.18.
Gillian Brown et al. points out that using a low terminal tone
can produce a conducive question, but ”the resources of intonation are very
limited.” Questions of Intonation (1980, London: Routledge, 2015),
36-37. Abstract: doi:
10.4324/9781315688664.↩
73. Croake James (pseud. for James Patterson), Curiosities
of Law and Lawyers, New enlarged ed. (Samson Low, Marston, 1896),
467.↩
74. George F. Bishop, et al. “Opinions of Fictitious
Issues: The Pressure to Answer Survey Questions”
The Public Opinion Quarterly 50 no. 2 (Summer, 1986),
240-250. Preview: doi:
10.2307/2748887↩
75. Brian C. Jayne and Joseph P. Buckley, eds, “The
Reid Technique,” The Investigator Anthology: A
Compilation of Articles and Essays about the Reid Technique of
Interviewing and Interrogation, 2nd.ed. (John Reid and
Associates, 2004), ch. 1.
The Supreme Court held in Bram v.
United States (1897), that a confession “must not
be … obtained by any direct or implied promises, however
slight,” and Bram was cited in the landmark Miranda
v. Arizona (1966) with the rejection of the Reid Technique
which, according to the court, uses tactics that:
… are designed to put the subject in a psychological state
where his story is but an elaboration of what the police purport
to know already — that he is guilty.”
A justification for using the “alternative
question” is offered by Fred E. Inbau, et al.:
“A defense attorney may criticize the use of an alternative
question, arguing that the investigator offered his client only two
choices and thus his client was forced to incriminate himself. The
investigator should explain that the defendant had three possible
choices. He could have accepted either one of the alternatives
presented or as happens frequently, reject them both.” [Fred E.
Inbau, et al., “The Reid Nine Steps of Interrogation,”
Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, 5th. ed. (Chicago,
Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2013), 294.]
However, of course, an uneducated client might not be aware
that the question as posed can be rejected.↩
76. Arthur Sterngold, et. al., “Do Surveys Overstate Public Concerns?,”
The Public Opinion Quarterly 58 no. 2 (Summer, 1994), 256. Abstract:
doi:
10.1086/269421↩
77. Donald S. Tull and Del I. Hawkins, Marketing Research: Measurement and
Method (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1984), 379.↩
78. Stanley Le Baron Payne, The Art of Asking Questions
(Princeton, New Jersey, 1951), 100-102. doi: 10.1515/9781400858064↩
79. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude
Surveys (London: Sage Publications Inc., 1996),
298-299.↩
80. Rohde Hannah, “Rhetorical Questions as Redundant Interrogatives,”
San
Diego Linguistic Papers, 2. (accessed October 16,
2018)↩
81. E.g., see the summary provided by Daniel J. Howard, “Rhetorical
Questions Effects of Message Processing and Persuasion: The Role of Information
Availability and the Elicitation of Judgment,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 26 no. 3 (May, 1990), 217-239.
Abstract: doi: 10.1016/0022-1031(90)90036-L↩
82. Star Parker, “The DNC's Keith Ellison Dilemma,”
Index-Journal 98 no. 282 (January 07, 2017),
9A.↩
83. Robert Powell, reporter, “Jones
v. State 92 South 578 No. 22193,” Cases Reported:
Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of Mississippi 127
(March & September, 1922), 459.↩
84. Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum, et al, A University Grammar
of English (London: Longan, 1973), 200, and Quirk, Comprehensive
826 (11.23↩
90. Elizabeth F. Loftus and Guido Zanni, “Eyewitness Testimony: The Influence
of he Wording of a Question,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society
5 no. 1 (1975), 86-88. doi:
10.3758/bf03336715↩
91. Danny Weathers, Subhash Sharma, and Ronald W. Niedrich,
“The Impact of the Number of Scale points, Dispositional Factors,
and the Status Quo Decision heuristic on Scale Reliability and Response Accuracy” Journal of Business Research 58 no. 11
(November, 2005), 1516-1524. doi:
10.1016/j.jbusres.2004.08.002 and Madhubalan Viswanathan, Seymour
Sudman, and Michael Johnson, “Maximum versus Meaningful
Discrimination in Scale Response: Implications for Validity of
Measurement of Consumer Perceptions About Products,”
Journal of Business Research 57 no. 2 (February, 2004),
108-124. doi:
10.1016/s0148-2963(01)00296-x↩
92. Michael A. Genovese and Matthew J. Streb, Polls and Politics:
The Dilemmas of Democracy (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New
York, 2004), 102-103. ↩
94. Ray Wilkinson, “Changing Interactional Behaviour: Using
Conversation Analysis in Intervention Programmes for Aphasic
Conversation,” in Applied Conversation Analysis: Intervention
and Change in Institutional Talk ed. Charles Antaki (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19-31. doi:
10.1057/9780230316874_3↩
98. Question taken out of context from “Evolutionary Origins
and Dynamics,” FQEB 2009-2014: Foundational Questions in
Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.↩
101. Jaakko Hintikka, “Semantics and Pragmatics for Why-Questions,”
Journal of Philosophy 92 no. 12 (December, 1995),
636. doi: 10.2307/2941100↩
102. Lawrence H. Powers, “Equivocation” in Fallacies: Classical
and Contemporary Readings eds. Hans V. Hansen and Robert C. Pinto (University
Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995),289.↩
103. Gilbert Ryle, “The Academy and Dialectic,” in Critical Essays:
Collected Papers Vol. 1 (1971 London: Routledge, 2009), 121. doi:
10.4324/9780203101667-12↩
Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair, Logical
Self-Defense U.S. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
Trudy Grovier, A Practical Study of Argument
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010).
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin,
Understanding Arguments 9th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadworth, Cengage
Learning, 2015).
Merrrilee H. Salmon, Introduction to Logic and
Critical Thinking 6th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013).
John Chaffee, Thinking Critically 12th ed.
(Boston: Cengage, 2019).
David Zarefsky, The Practice of Argumentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ↩
107. Hamlin, 217, and Gerald Gazdar, Pragmatics: Implicature,
Presupposition, and Logical Form (New York: Academic Press, 1979),
26. ↩
108. New Church General Conference, The Intellectual
Repository 41 no. 214 (July/September, 1871) (London: General
Conference of the New Church, 1871), 473.↩
109. Diogenes Laërtius, “Chrysippus” Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Loeb
Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959),
vii.187 (p.297). ↩
116. Hamlin, Fallacies, 12. Irving M. Copi and Carl Cohen,
Introduction to Logic 13th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson:
Prentice Hall, 2009). 657.↩
117. This is implied by what Carl Prantl indicates when he writes:
“Here, the point is to show that the connection of
a single idea (e.g. ‘having’) with the innumerable differing
references in which it appears only brings about confusion, and therefore only
an individual occurrence of such a connection would provide clarity.”
[my translation]
“[H]ier handelt es sich darum, zu zeigen, dass die
Verdindung eines verinzelten Begriffes (z.B. des Habens) mit den oft unzahlig
verschiedened Bezierhungen, in welche er treten kann, ur Verwirrung bringe, und
also nur das je einzelne Stattfinden einer einzelnen solchen Verbindung eine
Sicherheit gewähre.“
118. Diogenes Laërtius, Lives 41. For a contemporary account,
Samuel Wheeler analyzes how the horns-example “is the problem of accounting
for intuitions about presupposition in two-valued logic.” Samuel C. Wheeler
III, “Megarian Paradoxes as Eleatic Arguments,” American
Philosophical Quarterly 20 no. 3 (July, 1983), 290-291.
doi:
10.2307/20014009↩
119. Douglas D. Walton and Erik C. W. Krabbe, Commitment in Dialogue: Basic
Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning (New York: State University of New York,
1995), 180.↩
120. Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Argumentation, Communication,
and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective (1992 London: Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 214.doi:
10.4324/9781315538662↩
121. Jaakko Hintikka, “The Fallacy of Fallacies,”
Argumentation 1 no. 3 (September, 1987),
225.↩
122. Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, Developing Bioinformatics Computer
Skills (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2001),
38.↩
123. John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm, Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the
Era of Cognitive Computing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013),
1.↩
125. Kent Bach, Exit-Existentialism: A Philosophy of
Self-Awareness (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,, 1973), 4. The
presuppositions to Kent Bach's complex question either suffer from the
problem of existential import (his “working assumption”)
or suffer from the problem of a false dichotomy.↩
126. Vernon Howard, The Mystic Path of Cosmic Power (Nottingham,
U.K.: New Life Foundation, 1999), 64.↩
127. Randall W. Forsyth, “This Time, Gold Bugs May Have a Point,”
Barron's 43 no. 20 (May 20, 2013), 7. The meta-claim in this
passage is intended to provide a reason for the adequacy of the explanation
of the high price of the sale of a work of art. Converse accident does not
occur since the Pollock painting would be an appropriate example of “all
manner of stuff. The false presupposition in this passage is that the explanation
provided is the only credible account for the facts provided concerning
the sale of Pollock's painting.”↩
128. “Up Against the Wall,” Wall Street Journal
165 (June 18, 1979), 22.↩
129. Frank Caplan, The Second Twelve Months of Life (New York:
Random House, 1982), 188.↩
131. Mona Charen, “Capitalism Did It,” Index-Journal
94 no. 98 (August 7, 2012), 6A. Also here.
See also story quoted: Manasi Gopalakrishnan,
“Asia:
Man on Rampage Kills Six in China,” DW (September 14,
2011).↩
132. Paul Lindberg, “The End is Near,” Barron's 92 No.
31 (July 30, 2012), 34.↩
134. Attributed to Plutarch quoted in Francis Bacon, Apophthegms in
The Works of Francis Bacon ed. Basil Montagu (Philadelphia: Parry
& McMillan, 1859), Vol. I, 109.↩
136. Cokie and Steve Roberts, “Women Have Seen This Trump Before,”
Index-Journal 98 no. 192 (October 4, 2016),
6A.↩
Readings: Complex Question; Many Questions
Dawn Archer, Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640-1760):
A Sociopragmatic Analysis (John Benjamins Publishing, 2005).
doi: 0.1075/pbns.135
Angeliki Athanasiadou, “The
Discourse Function of Questions,” revised ed. of paper 9th World
Congress of Applied Linguistics, April 15-21 1990, Halkidtk, Greece.
Beaver, David I., Bart Geurts, and Kristie Denlinger, “Presupposition,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., “Questions, Answers, and Presuppositions,”
The Journal of Philosophy 63 no. 20 (27 October 1966), 609-611.
doi: 0.2307/2024255
Susanne Bobzien, “How to Give Someone
Horns. Paradoxes of Presupposition in Antiquity,” Logical
Analysis and History of Philosophy 15 (2012), 159-184. Also
available in the Special Issue: “Fallacious Arguments in Ancient
Philosophy,” Christof Rapp and Pieter Sjoerd Hasper, eds.
Analysis and History of Philosophy / Philosophiegeschichte und
Logische Analyse 15 (Münster, Germany: Springer-Verlag
GmbH, 2013), 159-184. All versions of paper
here.doi:
10.30965/9783897858589_002
Marie Duži and Martina Čihalová, “Questions,
Answers and Presuppositions,” Computaciō y Sistemas
19 no. 4 (2015), 647-659.
doi: 10.13053/CyS-19-4-2327
Frank Fair, “The Fallacy of Many Questions: Or, How to Stop Beating Your
Wife,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 4 no. 1 (Spring
1973), 89-92. doi: 10.5840/swjphil19734111
Charles L. Hamlin, “Questions,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy
ed. P. Edwards (New York: Macmillan:, 1967) 7:49-53.
Charles L. Hamlin, Fallacies (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1970), 38-40,
73-77.
Dale Jacquette, “Many Questions Begs the Question (but Questions Do Not
Beg the Question),” Argumentation 8 no. 3 (August, 1994),
283-289. doi: 10.1007/bf00711194
Roosmaryn Pilgram and Leah E. Polcar, “Questioning
the Fallacy of Many Questions,” in Proceedings of
the Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of
Argumentation eds. F.H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Sic
Sat, 2007), 1059-1064. Persistent Identifier:
urn:nbn:nl:ui:29-407602
Richard Robinson, “Plato's Consciousness of Fallacy,”
Mind 51 no. 202 (April 1942),
97-114. doi:
10.2307/2250768
Andrzej Wísniewski, “The Logic of Questions as a Theory of Erotetic
Arguments,” Synthese 109 no. 1 (October, 1996), 1-25.
doi: 10.1007/bf00413820
Rachel Zajac and Harlene Hayne, “I Don't Think That's What Really
Happened: The Effect of Cross-examination on the Accuracy of Children's Reports,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
9 no. 3 (2003), 187-195.
doi:
10.1037/1076-898x.9.3.187
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