Question - Varieties of Questions

Varieties of Questions

Questions have a number of uses. 'Raising a question' may guide the questioner along an avenue of research (see Socratic method). A rhetorical question is asked to make a point, and does not expect an answer (often the answer is implied or obvious). Pre-suppositional questions, such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?" may be used as a joke or to embarrass an audience, because any answer a person could give would imply more information than he was willing to affirm. Questions can also be titles of works of art and literature (e.g. Leo Tolstoy's short story How Much Land Does a Man Need? and the movie What About Bob?), or a scholarly monograph (e.g. Who Asked the First Question?). McKenzie lists 17 types of questions in his "Questioning Toolkit" and suggests that thinkers must orchestrate and combine these types in his article "Punchy Question Combinations". Examples of his question types include the irreverent question, the apparently irrelevant question, the hypothetical question and the unanswerable question. Questions can be infelicitous as well, based on incorrect and illogical premises (e.g. "Why do cats have green wings?").