Open Ended Questions

“Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer.”

-          Rowena Cherry in Knight's Fork

That line describes the perfect sense for a lawyer to have. After all, he doesn’t want the witness to answer with something that harms his client!

But what about areas other than the law? Asking truly open ended questions is harder than you think. In Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer asks:

“If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” … in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question.”

The point Langer is trying to make is that (unconsciously or not) the way a question is phrased can sometimes be very leading:

“There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense.”

In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit points out that asking truly open questions can be a scary proposition because you don’t know where the rabbit hole might lead you:

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.”

If that is scary, she suggests we remind ourselves:

“One does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender.”

On the plus side, she says:

“You get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.”

To conclude, as Solnit says it is probably better to have gotten lost than never to have gotten lost:

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.”

Better or not, it would certainly be more interesting…