For all yes/no questions that are not gibberish (i.e. are reasonable and coherent), there has to be an answer, right? — dimension72

Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Steve Bannon comes to mind whenever I see your profile

:grin:

It's a snapdragon seedpod from my garden.

For all yes/no questions that are not gibberish (i.e. are reasonable and coherent), there has to be an answer, right? — dimension72

Isn't this circular? You have to determine what questions are reasonable and coherent. How would you do that, unless you already knew which questions have an answer?

For most philosophical questions I do not think it would be possible to come up with yes or no answers.

Only really basic questions like is it raining at the moment could be answered in such a basic way. Even then, the answer could change within a minute. For some questions we could make some answers like yes or no, based on the development of knowledge. For instance, if we were asked if the world was flat or round. It all depends on our knowledge limits.

The main problem with yes and no questions in philosophy is that we are not even talking about physical reality. Questions about the existence of God, what is real, the relationship between mind and body, how we should live and most of the issues are complex and require contemplation.

I cannot see why you would seek questions which are simply yes or no. The human imagination can do so much more. Any attempt at a mere yes or no would be about simplification to the point of the ridiculous.

You say that there are so many theories and I cannot see why this is a problem. We can learn to navigate this world and find out own position. I cannot see why yes and no answers would give comfort. It seems as ridiculous as barracading oneself in a room for life as a means of safety.

Surely, we need to take risks and develop full answers, rather than look for the most basic answers. The basic questions requiring yes and no world short circuit exploration and the imaginatiion which are at the heart of the philosophical journey.

Would you accept yes/no questions about matters of taste as counter examples? Or are they irrelevant to you?

If you ask people "Do you like Marmite? Yes or no", either answer can be correct because "you" varies. Furthermore, for a given person, they might not know what Marmite is, so it might require an "I don't know", or if not then "no" changes interpretation to "No or I don't know".

This is wrong and there are just so many circumstances which make it wrong but even more fundamentally, yes/no questions are likely to be contentious due to the simplicity. For instance, you ask "do dimensions exist" but have we agreed on what constitutions a dimension? Or on what proof is required to be certain either way? In other words, both yes and no are possible or could each answer could mean entirely different things depending on how the nuances are fleshed out. Answers to even simple questions necessarily depend upon the answers of more complicated matters which aren't necessarily agreed upon.

What about the replies:

1. I don't know
2. Maybe

?

The first is a confession of personal ignorance and the second, in addition to being like the first, indicates a much wider state of ignorance i.e. will involve, for instance, disagreement among the ranks of experts on a given topic.

It appears that yes/no questions are typically about confirming/disconfirming a suspicion i.e. the questioner has a hunch regarding the answer and seeks to validate/invalidate it.

What is his name? Not a yes/no query
Is his name Carroll? A yes/no query

Where is the party? Not a yes/no query
Is the party at Carroll's? A yes/no query

When will Carroll arive? Not a yes/no query
Is Carroll arriving at 10? A yes/no query

How is Carroll? Not a yes/no query
Is Carroll fine? A yes/no quert

Which Carroll is it? Not a yes/no query
Is it Lewis Carroll? A yes/no query

Why is Carroll here? Not a yes/no query
Is Carroll here to meet me? A yes/no query

Who is Carroll? Not a yes/no query
Is it Lewis Carroll? A yes/no query

For all yes/no questions that are not gibberish (i.e. are reasonable and coherent), there has to be an answer, right? — dimension72

"Yes/No" questions are assuming that there are either Heads or Tails, but not two sides of the same coin.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who pays such close attention to stuff like that.

It's cool looking.

Give me any major philosophical work, and I guarantee it can be split up into yes/no questions. Einstein said “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Your answerer isn't a human. It's an all-knowing being aware of all the constituents.

See my reply to Judaka, which can I suppose be applied to your discourse as well.

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil offered to you to reduce to a yes and no scrutiny.

I'll get started right away.

No, given the answerer is an all-knowing being, it should have no problem. All complex problems can be summarized and broken down into its foundational parts. You learn the basics first then go on from there.

That is a totally inadequate interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil. From your response I wonder if you have even read the book as what you are saying sounds like a projection of your own thoughts.

If that is the yes and no approach you want I do not think that you will develop much of a philosophical point of view.

I am quite that your method was not what Einstein meant in the quotation you gave. He was saying how people try to get too bound up into theories in their writing, not saying that we should reduce everything to yes and no.

Give me any major philosophical work, and I guarantee it can be split up into yes/no questions. — dimension72

This is just an optimal cognitive strategy. We employ counterfactual reasoning - if not 'yes', then necessarily 'no' - to extract the most possible information from reality.

So there is a logical technique - the bivalent frame we seek to impose. And then there is the material reality - which we have good reason to believe is fundamentally ambiguous or under-determined in nature.

Thus in a general way, we see why there is this air of paradox. Nature is some kind of unbroken whole. Everything is relative. Everything is quantumly indeterminstic. Everything is shades of grey.

Yet our best success at describing nature is to break its wholeness with a dichotomistic analysis. We seek to extract the black and white alternatives that themselves would now define the ontological limits of any grey. Every shade of grey must be a little lighter or darker than another. So by extrapolation, we presume that eventually we can arrive at some absolute state of light and some absolute state of dark. With these two epistemic options - black and white - we can logically construct any possible ontological mix. We can compute every shade of ambiguity we find back in the ambiguity of the material reality.

So we have a way of thinking about reality that works. And it works for good logical reason. It extrapolates what exists towards two opposing limits of being that then must encompass all the states that actually could exist.

But this descriptive apparatus, this habit of rational analysis, should never usurp the reality it is so handy for describing. We also need to accept that the reality is a wholeness and thus has fundamentally "ambiguous" parts. Or to be more technical, reality itself is at base, logically vague. The PNC fails to apply in the way it likes to pretend.

For all yes/no questions that are not gibberish (i.e. are reasonable and coherent), there has to be an answer, right? — dimension72

Well, yes and no.

The sun rises in the east. A simple, readily observable provable fact. Except that the sun doesn't rise.

From one perspective the answer is clearly yes. From another perspective the answer is clearly no.

That's just terminology/nomenclature

Fair enough, though it only changes my examples because the issues here aren't bypassed by being all-knowing. I assume you are really talking about things which can be known rather than are merely opinions, if I ask "is blue a prettier colour than green?" then although one may agree or disagree with that, there's no answer. So talking about only questions which an all-knowing being would theoretically have a definitive answer for really becomes a question of which topics.

Language is a problem because many words are not clearly defined - even if we know what they mean. Such as "is this batch of apples bad?" it depends firstly on what makes one apple bad and secondly on what percentage of apples need to be bad for us to describe the entire batch as bad and these questions don't have clearcut answers.

"Do dimensions exist?" can fall under similar problems, what exactly is meant by "dimensions"? I don't know much about dimensions but if we ask "do vampires exist?" then we run into the problem of having to define what a vampire is and people may not agree. Therefore even if an all-knowing being says they exist, the reason for that conclusion may not be satisfactory due to differences in opinion about what a vampire is.

It really depends on the specifics of each yes/no question and the topics which are allowed/disallowed.