The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. The Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

Ideological Questions

Lecture by Ege Yumusak
Chaired by Thomas Dodman

Questions are rarely innocent. We might be tempted to characterize questions that a political opponent asks as ideological: “Why are some people getting rich by making everyone get vaccines?”, “How will the government pay for a national healthcare plan?”, “When will cities be safe enough for children to play on the street?”. Not only do many people think that these questions are ideological, they can even name the ideology that's promoted by each question. It is not controversial to claim that questions don’t just solicit information. Questions’ informative aspect has long been recognized by linguists and philosophers who have argued that questions presuppose information. Just as the sentence “Even George could win” presupposes that George is an unlikely candidate, the question “Who left the lights on?” presupposes the truth of the proposition <The lights were left on>. But as the questions listed above show, questions carry more epistemic baggage than the presuppositions embedded in them. When Karl Marx wrote, in his essay “On the Jewish Question”, that “The formulation of a question is its solution”, he was most likely referring to this more insidious way in which questions mislead. It is easy for the epistemologist of ideology to account for distortions in the representation of reality due to presuppositions. Marx’s claim, however, is hard to make sense of epistemically without trivializing the sense in which questions are ideological. This talk will address the problem of “ideological questions”

This event also will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

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