who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...
who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ... who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...
330There are no questions and answers in this dialogue, although during theconversation they share ideas and opinions, agree and disagree with each other. The sameway we may ask questions of ourselves (“What should I do now?”) or to animals(“Pussycat, where did you get your stripes?”) or even others (“Why are you doing this tome?”) without a real dialogue, or when we do not expect to hear the answers. But ofcourse, questions are predominantly asked of others in order to hear their replies.Few Basic Questions about QuestionsAs the years passed after 1996, I became more and more convinced that thehuman ability to ask questions was something crucially important and deep in theevolution of human language and intelligence. During the last few years I delivered a fewpapers, talks and seminars on this subject at conferences and seminars and published afew articles on the subject (Jordania, 2000b, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005). And of course, Iwas constantly looking for any existing publications on the origins and evolutionaryimportance of human ability of asking questions.Let me ask a few very simple and very straight questions about the ability ofasking questions that I am going to discuss in the following few pages:• Why do we ask questions?• What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questionshave given to human individuals?• What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questionshave given to human groups?• Who asked the first question?• Is asking questions a uniquely human ability or do we share thisability with a few other species, at least with the apes?• Where did the phenomenon of questioning came from – are thereany evolutionary prerequisites for questioning behavior?• Who could answer the first question when it was asked?• Is the question one of the higher functions of syntactic structures?• Is there a genetic component for questioning behavior?• Do we learn to ask questions? And if “yes”, how do we learn toask questions?These and a few other topics are discussed on the following pages.
331• Why do we ask questions?This is one of the easy questions to answer, and I was wondering whether I needto ask this question at all, but then decided that we need to recall to ourselves howimportant is questioning behavior in our lives. We ask questions for lots of differentsocial and scholarly purposes, generally to find out something that we do not know andwe think others might know. Of course, we may sometimes ask questions to checkwhether others know the answer (I loved making quizzes in my school years), but mostlywe ask questions when we want to gain some knowledge about totally different things,such as the social plans of our teenage children for the coming weekend, the result of thesoccer game that finished in the early morning hours, or the name of the first composer touse polytonality. According to the information requested in our questions, we may askmembers of our family, call our friend, go to the Internet, or go to the library. Throughoutour life we ask questions. We ask our first questions even before we can articulate whatwe want to ask, we start every scientific query formulating questions to which we want tofind answers, we support everyday communications asking questions, we have hugelibraries and a staggering amount of available information because people wereconstantly asking different questions and were looking for the answers. Sometimes aquestion raised in the 16 th century was answered in the 20 th century; and some of theoldest questions have not been answered yet; we even have a talent to answer questionswith other questions (I remember a clever “Jewish” joke popular in Tbilisi: “Tell me,please, why you Jews always answer questions with questions?” – “So, do you think thisis bad? ”).I hope everyone would agree that it is absolutely impossible to imagine humansociety , human intelligence and language without our ability to ask questions. Withoutour ab ility to ask questions our brain would be a closed system, limited by theknowledge of our immediate experience.• What evolutionary advantage could the ability ofasking questions have given to human individuals?If the reader can imagine two individuals, one of whom is able to ask questions,and another one who for some reasons does not have this ability, the intellectual andsocial advantages of the “questioning” individual will be quite obvious. A questioningindividual can solve problems more easily, can easily access and use the knowledge ofother members of society, and can better manipulate people and information for her/hisown advantage. Even without asking questions of other members, just being able toformulate questions in her/his own mind would help tremendously in finding the rightstrategies to achieve different short-range and long-range goals. Human reasoning musthave started with the emergence of the ability to ask questions.Readers might object that this comparison is artificial, because there are nohumans who cannot ask questions. First of all, there are some rare cases when for somereason humans are not able to ask questions (and we will discuss such cases soon), butmost importantly, let us not forget that we are not discussing our contemporary societyonly. We are trying to discuss the evolution of language and the mental abilities of our
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330There are no <strong>question</strong>s and answers in this dialogue, although during <strong>the</strong>conversation <strong>the</strong>y share ideas and opinions, agree and disagree with each o<strong>the</strong>r. The sameway we may ask <strong>question</strong>s of ourselves (“What should I do now?”) or to animals(“Pussycat, where did you get your stripes?”) or even o<strong>the</strong>rs (“Why are you doing this tome?”) without a real dialogue, or when we do not expect to hear <strong>the</strong> answers. But ofcourse, <strong>question</strong>s are predominantly <strong>asked</strong> of o<strong>the</strong>rs in order to hear <strong>the</strong>ir replies.Few Basic Questions about QuestionsAs <strong>the</strong> years passed after 1996, I became more and more convinced that <strong>the</strong>human ability to ask <strong>question</strong>s was something crucially important and deep in <strong>the</strong>evolution of human language and intelligence. During <strong>the</strong> last few years I delivered a fewpapers, talks and seminars on this subject at conferences and seminars and published afew articles on <strong>the</strong> subject (Jordania, 2000b, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005). And of course, Iwas constantly looking for any existing publications on <strong>the</strong> origins and evolutionaryimportance of human ability of asking <strong>question</strong>s.Let me ask a few very simple and very straight <strong>question</strong>s about <strong>the</strong> ability ofasking <strong>question</strong>s that I am going to discuss in <strong>the</strong> following few pages:• Why do we ask <strong>question</strong>s?• What evolutionary advantage could <strong>the</strong> ability of asking <strong>question</strong>shave given to human individuals?• What evolutionary advantage could <strong>the</strong> ability of asking <strong>question</strong>shave given to human groups?• Who <strong>asked</strong> <strong>the</strong> <strong>first</strong> <strong>question</strong>?• Is asking <strong>question</strong>s a uniquely human ability or do we share thisability with a few o<strong>the</strong>r species, at least with <strong>the</strong> apes?• Where did <strong>the</strong> phenomenon of <strong>question</strong>ing came from – are <strong>the</strong>reany evolutionary prerequisites for <strong>question</strong>ing behavior?• Who could answer <strong>the</strong> <strong>first</strong> <strong>question</strong> when it was <strong>asked</strong>?• Is <strong>the</strong> <strong>question</strong> one of <strong>the</strong> higher functions of syntactic structures?• Is <strong>the</strong>re a genetic component for <strong>question</strong>ing behavior?• Do we learn to ask <strong>question</strong>s? And if “yes”, how do we learn toask <strong>question</strong>s?These and a few o<strong>the</strong>r topics are discussed on <strong>the</strong> following pages.
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