Are Questions More Important Than Answers?

John_C_87

Great argument..................

JulesKorngold

John_C_87 said:

Great argument..................

Thanks.  Great response on your part.

Nomenclature

Technically, I suppose. An answer without a question is always useless. A question without an answer isn't necessarily useless.

Swolliw

@Nomenclature

Technically, I suppose. An answer without a question is always useless.

I would have to agree with you on that one.

For example: "Jesus is the answer"

Nomenclature

@Swolliw

I would have to agree with you on that one.

A shame. That would suggest I'm probably wrong.

MayCaesar

Cleverly asked questions can often help one discover something that would be virtually impossible to even consider otherwise. One technique I learned from David Burns' "Feeling Good" book is to ask oneself loaded questions that are based on possibly false assumptions, but contain a grain of truth in them.

Suppose you are feeling unworthy of someone you like, but cannot pinpoint the reason. Asking yourself simply, "Why am I unworthy of that person?", will get you nowhere, for the intellectual answer would be, "Why, I am worthy!", and the inquiry is terminated. Similarly, asking yourself, "Why am I feeling unworthy of that person?", will be followed by the answer, "I do not know", and, again, we are back at square one.

Here is a better question to ask: "If I was unworthy of this person, what could be possible reasons?" Now you are speaking about hypotheticals, with no pressure to accept that you are either worthy or unworthy of that person; your mind is loosened. You could come up with tentative answers, such as, "It could be because of my looks". Aha! You just discovered some insecurity that you might have, and now you can work on exploring that. You asked yourself a question andwering which does not have you admit anything you do not want to admit and keep your ego intact, and that allowed you to do some introspection with an open mind and discover something obstructed from more direct lines of inquiry.

In political discussions, a similar discovery could be triggered by asking yourself, "If my stance on issue X was wrong, why would it be?" In scientific research, being stuck unable to do anything with the data, one could ask, "If I could extract some valuable insight from this data, what could it be?" When answering these questions, you are allowed and even encouraged to let your mind wander and fantasize. It is not important that the answers you come up with are accurate; rather, answers you come up with tell you something about the object of inquiry, show it to you from a new angle, and that can help you understand the object better.