Do you mean that when it comes to things intellectual, asking questions is always a matter of the Socratic method?

No, I mean this in the literal sense. The answer is known before the question is asked.

So the questioner is applying the Socratic method to themselves?

I am not really sure I understand what you mean by that.

Occasionally, in engineering and mathematics one discovers what seems to be a solution in search of a problem. I'm guilty of this. But this is mundane and not the philosophical nugget to which the OP refers. :cool:

Let's consider the question, "What's on the other side of the Universe?"

An interested observer might say, "There!!, I've got you, there is no way you can know what's on the other side of the Universe.........right?

Wrong. After all, isn't conceptualization, knowing? Is it possible to speculate on the existence of something you do not know anything about?

I’m a little confused by the question (if there is one) posed. Maybe there isn’t one and that’s cool. Is your post about whether or not conceiving of something means that you “know” about it?If so, know what about it? Anything?

Like I could speculate over the existence of unicorns and have a preconceived image of what unicorns look like in my head, but it doesn’t follow from those facts alone that I know all there is to know about unicorns, right? Moreover, I could conceive of what a moral life is like, but does the mere fact that I posed the question prove that I know what a moral life is? So I could use some clarification.

Or if the question has to do with “knowing the answer before the question is asked”, I’m not sure that is necessarily true for all questions. Maybe I could ask my teacher for clarification on a math problem without having a clue of their response, right?

The wonderful thing about thinking is that nobody knows anything about it (although you would never ascertain that gem from reading many of the contributions on this forum). And (of course) nobody really knows anything about anything, but I would like to add my specimen to the pile by suggesting that contrary to the accepted order of things intellectual, the answer must be known before the question posited. After all, how could you possible know what to ask without this knowledge? — synthesis

I would argue that only a possible answer must be consolidated - not necessarily known - before the question posited.

It's certainly true that asking the right question is often 90% of the quest to find the right answer.

I’m a little confused by the question (if there is one) posed. Maybe there isn’t one and that’s cool. Is your post about whether or not conceiving of something means that you “know” about it?If so, know what about it? Anything? — Anthony Minickiello

The question still stands, "Is it the answer that precedes the question?" IOW, must one conceptualize the answer before the question can be posited?

I put this out there because people become stuck in patterns of thought that are nothing but habitual. As well, what's really happening is taking place outside of our conceptual thinking so perhaps that is playing a part, i.e., feeding clues to our conscious intellect or some such thing.

Like I could speculate over the existence of unicorns and have a preconceived image of what unicorns look like in my head, but it doesn’t follow from those facts alone that I know all there is to know about unicorns, right? Moreover, I could conceive of what a moral life is like, but does the mere fact that I posed the question prove that I know what a moral life is? So I could use some clarification. — Anthony Minickiello

This would be more specific. If you don't know about the subject-matter, how can you formulate a question? What I am saying is that we know a great deal more than what we think we know.

Or if the question has to do with “knowing the answer before the question is asked”, I’m not sure that is necessarily true for all questions. Maybe I could ask my teacher for clarification on a math problem without having a clue of their response, right? — Anthony Minickiello

In your example, how would you know what to ask?

The idea is that all true knowledge is gathered before the intellect kicks-in. Think about the processing that goes on in your brain when you are driving on the freeway at 85mph and there are vehicles all around you. There is no time to figure out what to do, you just do it by absorbing infinite data points and making constant adjustments to your vehicles speed, position, etc., all without being conscious of this process. How does that work?

I would argue that only a possible answer must be consolidated - not necessarily known - before the question posited — Possibility

I guess that's a possibility but it becomes complicated because answers vary with constantly changing conditions that give rise to questions.

It's certainly true that asking the right question is often 90% of the quest to find the right answer. — fishfry

I believe it is a matter of awareness. It also seems reasonable to assume that people who are really good at what they do are able to tap into this store of knowledge and formulate answers in the form of questions. Perhaps that's simply the intellectual process of finding out what we already know.

...contrary to the accepted order of things intellectual, the answer must be known before the question posited. After all, how could you possible know what to ask without this knowledge? — synthesis

Wittgenstein (and Socrates) view "knowing" as a kind of remembering (what you already know). Of course this is not an emperical investigation, it is based on the fact that we grow into society at the same time we pick up the langauge intertwined with our practices. So, you may not normally consider what differentiates running or hopping or skipping from walking, but if I made a claim about what counts for it, i.e., how we would judge it, what matters to one and not another, etc., you could agree with me. This is much as Socrates asked people on the street about justice, etc., and they had answers (or could agree with Socrates') seemingly before the question is asked.

And Cavell will draw out Witt's use of his example of a simplified language at the start of the Philosophical Investigations to show that we have a whole entire world of concepts (practices) mastered like pointing, and asking, and seeing, and calling, before we can tell someone to give us a slab. A "question" thus already stands in a world of conditions and categorical possibilities, with our only, say, not knowing how to proceed, possibly into a new context. But the "answer" lies around us (behind us to turn and see as Plato and Emerson and others will say).

The wonderful thing about thinking is that nobody knows anything about it.... — synthesis

And here we may want to reserve "thinking" as something like a secret or new or similar to imagination (and the sloppiness of language allows for this) and to hold "knowledge" to be: for certain or universally for all of us. But if we examine what we imply when we say "I think..." we are sometimes using it as a hypothesis, much in the way we use "I believe...." (it is raining). Or, if I ask you "What do you think?" it could be in its use to solicit an opinion (about prospects for peace in the Middle East?) or asking for agreement (about getting Thai food?). There is also the sense of solving a problem, mulling over options, e.g., "Let me think about it."

Now can we say these aren't things we know about thinking? even that we already knew about thinking? And yet we skip past them to create an idea of something personal, something special to me (or something impersonal, to erase my unpredictability, my human failings). And maybe in asking the question why, we are looking for an answer that has always been there.

Asking a question presupposes the question has an answer, else the asking is a nonsense question. But certainly the asking is not the answer itself.

And maybe in asking the question why, we are looking for an answer that has always been there. — Antony Nickles

My suspicion is that we have stored everything we have come into contact with since our inception. Asking the question might be the final conscious effort to find specific information.

The fact that there are individuals that can perform complex mathematical computations in their head suggests that we are all capable of this. Way beyond doing math in your head, just think how it is possible (and I use this example frequently) of preforming tasks like driving at high speeds in traffic.

It seems quite apparent that 99.999...% of our brain power is used for matters of which we are never aware. And just perhaps, questions that seem immensely complex to our conscious mind are ultra basic to that mind which lucks beneath.

Asking a question presupposes the question has an answer, else the asking is a nonsense question. But certainly the asking is not the answer itself. — tim wood

All things are fluid, so just as the question changes its form moment by moment, so must the answer. The key becomes accessing the flow of change...accomplished through awareness alone.

Asking the question might be the final conscious effort to find specific information. — synthesis

Not to psychologize philosophy, but Cavell uses the term repression for the impact that the traditional search for certainty has on our ability to see and take seriously our ordinary criteria and the contexts they live in (as if everything is out in the open; seen all at once; I am understood immediately, or you do not). So finding our way back to a simple truth is a process that digs deeper (though not a hidden process) than rationally deciding the right framework to allow philosophy to stand over the world and know it, where others, say, simply believe it.

I guess that's a possibility but it becomes complicated because answers vary with constantly changing conditions that give rise to questions. — synthesis

Yes. The idea that the answer must be a consolidated, certain and invariable knowledge went out at least with the advent of quantum physics. The relationship between answer and question is more complex and fluid than we once thought.

In some sense it does. In my humble opinion, a certain strain of information/knowledge, whatever you want to call it, must become important enough to our lives before a question requesting it can be meaningful.

I dabbled in erotetics a couple of years ago, primarily to discover whether or not there could be more ways of asking questions over and above the familiar 7 (what? when? where? which? how? who? why?), and I came to the conclusion, right or wrong, that a specific area of knowledge/information must acquire a certain level of significance to us before a question requesting it takes form. For instance, location and time are crucial to living an organized life which itself is indispensable to living a meaningful life and that being so, the questions where? and when? were created out of that necessity. A similar argument can be made for the other 5 questions (who? what? which? how? and why?).

For instance, location and time are crucial to living an organized life which itself is indispensable to living a meaningful life... — TheMadFool

Please explain both parts of this statement.

I'll give it my best shot. Here goes...

It appears to me that, in terms of temporal sequence, a certain aspect of nature has to acquire some kind of significance in and of itself and this significance can be in the cultural, social, physical, technological, epistemological, etc. spheres/domains before a question pertaining to it can make sense and questions have to make sense for them to be answered, right?

My preliminary investigation suggests that time (when?) and space (where?) were conceived of by the human mind before when? and where? became meanigful. When? and where? would be meaningless without a frame of reference in which space and time didn't/doesn't exist. Likewise, it's my suspicion that without an established sense of personhood, free will, and responsibility, among other things, the question who? would be devoid of meaning.

It appears to me that, in terms of temporal sequence, a certain aspect of nature has to acquire some kind of significance in and of itself and this significance can be in the cultural, social, physical, technological, epistemological, etc. spheres/domains before a question pertaining to it can make sense and questions have to make sense for them to be answered, right? — TheMadFool

When you get down to it, the very nature of a question itself is pretty bizarre. For instance, let's say you Google, "What is the so on and so forth?" What you are getting back is a canned answer, the standard default that has no chance of being correct even it it was considered with great care.

Even something like, "What year was the American Declaration of Independence signed?" The answer would be 1776, but this would be true only if you are counting your years using the Roman calendar. It would also be ten other answers using ten other calendars, right? Applying this to something much more subtle, you can see the rabbit hole becoming large enough to take us all down (and it does on a regular basis).

My preliminary investigation suggests that time (when?) and space (where?) were conceived of by the human mind before when? and where? became meaningful. When? and where? would be meaningless without a frame of reference in which space and time didn't/doesn't exist. Likewise, it's my suspicion that without an established sense of personhood, free will, and responsibility, among other things, the question who? would be devoid of meaning. — TheMadFool

Yeah, but what all this have to do with living a meaningful life?

I think there is an consciousness that exists in all that life or don't life. Call it Tao or holy spirit or whatever. And these awareness is the answer of all questions and beeing. Maybe my coment is a little bit religious but I think that's ok:)

The method of questions and answers is one of the ways to organize one's thoughts. "Where have I put my red socks? -- In the bottom drawer."

In this method, the question isn't a true question of the kind "What is the half-life of caesium-137?", but simply a part of the means to organize one's thoughts.

The Socratic method is a way to help another person organize their thoughts in a particular way; and one can use this same method in one's own thinking as well (after one has learned the method). It's more dynamic than just using declarative sentences and it makes it easier to point out the salient bit of information.

the answer must be known before the question posited. — synthesis

Is this what you mean?

“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.... As questioning about, . . questioning has what it asks about. All asking about . . . is in some way an inquiring of... As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way.” (Heidegger, Being and Time)

On a spiritual level, I would agree, but on an intellectual level, it can get considerably more complicated.

Is this what you mean?

“Every questioning is a seeking. — Joshs

Not quite. It is as if the question is prompted by an already known (but unaccessible) answer.

You know what they tell
young courtroom lawyers-barristers : Never
ask a question you don’t already know the answer
to.

If you assent to the idea that you know when you’ve learned something new,( regardless of whether it turns out later that you were mistaken) , that is , there is an ‘ah ha’ feeling, a sense of relief or excitement, the sense that you have connected
two things that previously seemed
unrelated. So it seems to me that when we ask a question, we already know about the domain the answer willlikely be in. But we don’t know the answer. Or at least we don’t feel we know the answer , based on the feeling that normally accompanies questioning , a certain anxiety, uneasiness, tentativeness. If we get an answer that produces that feeling of having learned something new , then the feeling of unease and unsettledness turns into satisfaction and pleasure , which indicates
that the asking of the question was the preparation for that new learning. If the question already knows the answer, then when the official answer comes out attitude will likely be boredom and complacency.