When Questions Fail

All of us, most probably have thought that if we think long enough, we will eventually reach the truth as truth is certainly there, all we need to do is that we need to grasp it. But what if the problem is not that truth is hard to find, but that the question we posed was in itself wrong. This blog explores what kind of question ought to be asked.

Introduction

We often assume that every question has an answer to it, which is a claim, maybe even a justified one. But have you ever stopped for a moment and thought: what if the questions that are being asked are, on their own, wrong? Or that the question could not demand an explanation because the question was weak and could not hold an answer?

The holding of an answer may be somewhat understood by thinking of the question as a basket, an empty one, and the answer as the thing that you have to fill the basket with. What if the basket had a hole?

That is what we are going to explore: when a question has no truth.

First, we will go through a passage, or rather a story, and understand a situation.

You are sitting in the verandah on a Sunday morning, scrolling through social media. You stumble upon a news report: schools have been shut down due to fuel shortages. Buses can no longer afford to run. It is said this will affect the economy.

Then another reporter asks, “Why only buses? Why not private vehicles?” There is a pause. The first reporter hesitates, begins to answer—and you lose interest. You scroll past.

Later that night, just as you are about to fall asleep, a car speeds past with loud music, breaking the silence. Annoyed, you curse the driver. And suddenly, that question returns: Why not private cars?

They consume more fuel. They pollute more. Why are they not restricted? You begin to think. If private cars were stopped, how would people reach their workplaces? How would the economy function? Then another thought appears: why not use public transport?

But that brings another problem—timing. Delays. Inconvenience. That leads you further: Why are we always late? Why do we rush? Why do we structure our lives this way? Then the question shifts again: Why do we even do anything at all? Why not just sit and do nothing?

But that cannot work. The world would collapse. So you leave that thought behind and move on. And yet, the chain continues. From fuel… to transport… to time… to action… to purpose… And somehow, without realizing it, you arrive at a completely different question: What is truth? But now something feels strange.

Was this question really connected to the first one? Or did you simply move from one unclear question to another, each leading you further away rather than closer? Perhaps the problem is not that truth is hard to find. Perhaps the problem is that we do not notice when our questions stop being clear. And if a question itself is unclear, can it even have a truth to begin with?

The Analogy

The story itself seems so weird that not many can relate, but that is not the point. We are analysing the reporter’s question: “Why only buses? Why not private vehicles?”

The reporter’s question led you to making looping questions about the very basics. It is because most of the things in our world are related; one can also say everything is related. But the question in itself led oneself to the basics, as I already said.

But what if the reporter had posed the question differently? What if he had thought and made a question that really was the cause of the question? One might say government corruption, but that too does not do much justice to the question. What if he had made the question: Why is it that the government is greedy and does not want to actually spend money on citizens?

Most of you might probably think that this question is nowhere near the main idea of the question, but hey, even if it is not the best, or as one might argue, the question to be asked, it is because we had earlier declared the government to be corrupt. Then there is the thing that if buses can go down, the fuel will remain available for much more time, which may run the economy to some extent. Also, the families are already paying for the tuition of their child; if we could save some oil from the buses, then people will still be able to afford oil that may keep things going, and maybe that way, and only then, the corruption could also have its way.

But here, that was also not the question to be asked, as I made a presumption that the government is corrupt and made many assumptions during answering the question, like accepting that closing buses could fuel the economy.

There are many questions like these that could form around the reporter’s question. Such questions do not hold truth, as they are built on assumptions, and one must stop assuming and then build questions upon them.

Also, one might argue the possibility of the assumption being true, but a justified belief is not a truth. That is what the next blog is going to revolve around.

Though we did not really discover questions that do not hold truth, we did discover that there are questions that can almost certainly not hold any.

Conclusion

You may have realised, up until now, that we are looping and leaping all over the place. But the thing is that one thing leads to another, and when we build things on assumptions, we will end up in a process where we really do not have anything to stand upon.

The reporter’s question seemed ordinary, yet from it emerged countless other questions. Some of them may have been reasonable, while others rested upon assumptions that were never established. Once those assumptions were accepted, further questions were built upon them, and the further we went, the harder it became to notice where the problem had begun.

Perhaps this is what it means for a question to fail. Not that it lacks an answer, but that it demands one before it has earned it.

Of course, we did not discover exactly which questions hold no truth, nor did we create a complete method for identifying them. What we did discover is that there are questions which almost certainly fail to hold truth because they are built upon assumptions, presumptions, and conclusions that were never justified in the first place.

Before searching for truth, then, perhaps our first task is not to seek answers but to examine the questions themselves. For if the basket has a hole, no matter how many answers we place into it, they will simply fall through.

And this leaves us with another question, perhaps the most important one of all: if a justified belief is not necessarily truth, then what is truth itself?