Field and Swamp: Animals and Their Habitats |
|
Click on arrows to show pull-down menus:
How to Ask a Good
Naïve
Question You can’t study science or work in the field long before the issue of the “stupid” question comes up. It gets quite a bit of discussion and there are at least two firmly held camps on the subject. One person I used to work with was fond of saying, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question!” although he generally delegated the answering of work-related questions to me. I hold a different point of view: 1) there are naïve questions (generally a positive thing) and 2) there are genuinely stupid questions (definitely bad!) Honorable people may disagree about the dividing line between the two, although I suspect there is general agreement about the nature of the extremes. From my point of view, a good naïve question is likely to get the answer "No, no! You've got it all wrong! Let me explain..." On the other hand, a typical stupid question often elicits the response "What do you think?" or, generally sarcastically, "Howdja guess?"
My topic here,
though, is much less ambitious:
how to ask a good “naïve” question and how not to provide a
stupid answer to one.
Let’s go back to the basics.
Remember the old joke starting with “Why did the chicken cross the
road?” The joke is funny
because the answer to this ordinary question is a stupid one: “to get to
the other side.” This
answer provides no new information: it’s implied in the question.
But maybe the question, too, is stupid:
it gives too little information about the ultimate purpose of the
person asking the question.
There are many logical answers, e.g., “to escape a fox that came up
behind it when it happened to be standing at the side of the road” or
“it was moving in a northeasterly direction and its path crossed the
road” or “chickens tend to cross any roads that they see.”
Or maybe even: “In
our experiment, we tried to find out what would motivate a chicken not
to cross a road so we wouldn’t have to put up a fence by the side of the
road.” These answers are not
necessarily all true or plausible, but all have a certain validity.
Each could conceivably satisfy the curiosity of the person
wanting to know why a chicken crossed a road.
|