The importance of asking questions was forcefully conveyed in 1843 when John Stuart Mill wrote The System of Logic, in which he noted the emptiness of a set of opinions accumulated without the help of strong-sense critical thinking. “He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may have been good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, he has no ground for preferring with opinion.”15
