Making an Ass out of You and Me: Questioning the Answers in Our Questions

I remember a friend once asking me the following question,

A man is approaching the center of a field. When he gets there he will die. Why?

I could ask as many questions as I liked, but could only receive “yes” or “no” answers. The point was to try and answer it as quickly as possible. What made it difficult to solve lay in the assumptions that I brought to the question. Assumptions that could be seen in the type of initial questions I asked,

Is it a minefield

Is he ill

Is the field a metaphor

We all have a whole host of assumptions hard-baked into our minds. Things that we don’t think about, but that influence the way we think.

One of the traditional roles of philosophy has been to bring these assumptions to the surface and interrogate them.

What everyone in our community takes for granted, the philosopher places into question. In the process many seemingly insoluble problems are not answered as such, but dissolved.

Basically, our questions have implicit answers hidden within them. Things that we take for granted as correct.

If we take a question at face value, we accept the inherent answers that the question relies on. One obvious example can be seen in the playground question I remember from school: Have you ever been caught spying on the girls in gym class.

In response to the inevitable “no,” the questioner would smugly reply, “well you must be very good at it then.”

The way the question was formed meant that any answer implicated you in spying on the girls. The only way out involved rejecting the assumption hidden in the question.

For Wittgenstein, philosophy was able to address many of the most difficult philosophical problems by showing how they were really pseudo-problems posing as real issues. That once you posed it in a different way the seemingly impossible question evaporated.

This process of questioning our basic assumptions can be a difficult and even dangerous activity, one that made Socrates the first martyr of philosophy.

Part of being a good preacher involves the ability to isolate and bring to light the various assumptions that a community is making. Doing this in a way that avoids activating peoples defense mechanisms. In this way the community might be able to consider and question those assumptions rather than simply being influenced by them.

One of the ways that we can come to see the assumptions we make is when we are confronted by different communities. When this happens we are often confronted with what we take for granted, and put in a position where we can assess them. A confrontation that can help us see ourselves in a new light and perhaps even to change in positive ways.

This is one of the reasons why I developed “The Evangelism Project,” which is described below.

Oh, and the answer to the above puzzle is that he’s falling from the sky after his parachute failed to open.