A World of Questions & Answers—Part VIII
Investigating Singular Situations
Introduction
This final instalment of the present article, the 9th in our series that started with “Questioning Truth,” completes our introduction to Collingwood’s “logic of question-and-answer” and its importance for understanding the situations in which we find ourselves, and for designing interventions for creating change.
—The Editors
A World of Questions & Answers—Part VIII: Investigating Singular Situations
A Musical Interlude
On the evening of May 29th, 1913, “a glittering audience” assembled at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris for the premiere of the composer Igor Stravinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring, “[n]ow recognised as one the most significant musical masterpieces of the 20th century.”1 Le tout-Paris was there.
This was meant to be the highlight of a dazzling season of the now legendary Ballets Russes—a company of extraordinary Russian dancers performing new works by the world’s leading composers (including Debussy, Prokofiev, Ravel, Satie and Stravinsky himself) teaming up with the top emerging choreographers of genius (including the great Fokine, Massine, and Balanchine to name a few), with set designs by the most celebrated avant garde artists of the day (including Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso), and with costumes designed by the likes of the now legendary Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel—all assembled by Serge Diaghilev, indisputably the greatest impresario of the 20th Century, and in the view of many cultural historians, perhaps the greatest of all time.
According to Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), at performances of Les Ballets Russes “the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes.”2
Les Ballet Russes had been all the rage in Paris for the previous four years since it first took the city by storm, and Stravinsky had entranced Parisian audiences with his previous ballet Petrushka two years before. And now headlining as a principal male dancer in Stravinsky’s new ballet was once again the great Nijinsky, the leading male dancer in the world, who could appear to defy gravity in his solos in a way the ballet world had never seen before, and convey character more poignantly than anyone, and who, this time, was also the choreographer of the new work.
Expectations were high, and advance publicity led the audience at the premiere to be duly ‘warned’ that the new ballet would be a shock to the senses, with a primitivist theme. How enticing!
And indeed, no sooner were the house lights dimmed than the audience began to experience a shock to their senses, and far more than they could ever have bargained for.
Right from the start they were scandalized and outraged, or at least more than half of them were, and the audience were soon at one another’s throats. Reports are conflicting as to what really happened that night, wild stories abound, exaggerated or understated no one seems to be sure, but the result was, by most accounts, a literal riot amongst these distinguished representatives of Parisian high society.
Almost from the opening bars, many in the crowd were first whispering and then loudly joking amongst themselves, shouting their protests and humorous jibes and insults across the concert hall to one another and to the performers on stage and in the orchestra pit. One wag cried out for someone to urgently call a doctor to attend to the obviously sick performers.
The dancers and musicians were booed and jeered, and the escalating disturbance among the audience soon grew so loud that Stravinsky stormed out in fury and went backstage to support the dancers and help them keep time. There were reports that missiles were thrown, challenges to a duel offered, and eventually the police had to be called in to quell a literal riot of the beau monde.3
What had caused all the commotion? For one thing, according to contemporary observers, the classically trained dancers “seemed to jerk rather than dance” and their movements and poses “defied every canon of gracefulness.”4 But more shockingly still,
Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be. The sounds [were] often deliberately harsh, right from the opening Lithuanian folk melody, which [was] played by the bassoon in its highest, most uncomfortable range. The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way. In the “Ritual of the Rival Tribes” the music unfold[ed] in two speeds at once, in a ratio of 3:2. And it [made] lavish use of dissonance, i.e. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. “The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,”5 wrote one exasperated critic.6
Nearly a decade and a half earlier, the Austrian composer Schoenberg (1874–1981), starting to get known for elegantly bridging the opposing German romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner, had composed his string sextet Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) Op. 4, which was, in time, to become one of his best loved and best known compositions, both as the original sextet and in later versions he adapted for string orchestra. But its novel harmonies and programmatic nature (unified by the poem Verklärte Nacht by Richard Dehmel) so outraged professional programme committees in 1899 that Schoenberg didn’t manage to get it performed until 1903, only for it to be violently rejected at once by uncomprehending audiences.
Undeterred, Schoenberg, more scandalously still, produced his even more radical 1904 String Quartet No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 7, with its unusual form in which a single uninterrupted 50-minute stretch replaced the previously obligatory four movements of a classical string quartet, and especially when combined with the high density of the piece’s musical texture, conspired to leave audiences utterly baffled when the work first premiered in 1907.
Even Schoenberg’s friend and mentor the great Gustav Mahler, who had conducted Wagner’s most difficult scores and had himself composed symphonic music vastly more complex that his protégé’s latest piece, complained that he was unable to read let alone understand the score.
As for Schoenberg’s second string quartet Op. 10 (1907-08), Well! It not only introduced a vocal part (what the hell!?), but from the beginning of its last movement, had no key signature and transcended musical tonality altogether, bewildering the dumbstruck, head-shaking audiences, who were only unsurprised to hear the opening words of the sung Finale from a poem by Stefan George: “Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten”—“I feel air from another planet”!
By February of 1909, with the first of three piano pieces making up his Op. 11, Schoenberg had dispensed with tonality altogether, with a purely “pantonal” (as he preferred to call it, or what has since been called “atonal”) composition, “in which no one tonal centre exists and in which any harmonic or melodic combination of tones may be sounded without restrictions of any kind.”7 One can only imagine the utter befuddlement of listeners, who had never heard anything of the kind before, not even from Schoenberg from whom they’d by now come to expect the unexpected.
Going back nearly 75 years earlier, the most frequently performed opera composer during the whole of the 19th Century was the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), whose operas were considered a remarkable bridge between Mozart and Wagner. His masterpiece was probably Les Huguenots, which premiered in Paris on the 29th of February 1836, and is widely considered one of the most spectacular of all grand operas ever composed, and certainly ranks as one of the most popular grand operas of all time.
When the great composer Rossini (1792–1868) went to hear Les Huguenots for the first time, he was eagerly asked by his entranced younger students, “What do you think of this music, maestro?” Rossini frowned and, looking rather bemused and tilting his head slightly to one side, replied, after a pause, “Music? …I did not hear any music.”8
Collingwood on Understanding Music and Understanding Anything at All
I have dwelt at some length on a few well-known examples from the history of music, because in trying to help us understand what is involved in understanding anything, and in distinguishing between what Collingwood calls “historical understanding” and the kind of natural scientific understanding deployed in physics and chemistry for example, Collingwood particularly highlights the example of a presumably knowledgeable, musically trained listener, even a musician or a composer, perhaps someone sympathetic like Mahler trying to read Schoenberg’s score, who complains in all sincerity, albeit without Rossini’s delightful, humorous hyperbole, that he simply “can’t understand” a particular piece of music.
Obviously, Collingwood argues, he’s not complaining that he cannot subsume the various sound-sequences in the music to general types. He is presumed here to be an expert in such things, as fluent in the language of music as he is in speaking his native tongue, if not more so. Rather his complaint is that “he cannot hear one sound as leading to the next.”9 What’s missing for him is being able to hear the sequence of notes as intelligible sequences, whose continuity he can grasp in musical terms.
The same kinds of considerations regarding understanding music, Collingwood says, apply to understanding a poem or novel, for example. “In all these cases there is a flow or movement of events, and to understand this is simply to see its continuity, to see how the events flow each into the next.”10
Of course, the same phenomenon that we have noted in the musical examples above has occurred endlessly in the history of the visual arts, literature, philosophy, and so on, but particularly, and perhaps most often, in science, where the general consensus—if ever achieved to any degree—is constantly shifting, by the very nature of the scientific enterprise.
One of the best-established and most fundamental of all scientific laws, Ohm’s Law in physics (that current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the two points), a discovery which introduced the notion of electrical resistance, has long been considered so undeniable amongst physicists and electrical engineers as to be almost self-evident.
But when its discoverer, the German physicist and mathematician Georg Ohm (1789–1854) first attempted to publish his findings in the scientific literature in 1826–27, Ohm’s Law was greeted with derision, no less from the President of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, and Ohm finally had to arrange for publication of his findings as a scientific monograph, only for it to be derided by his learned scientific colleagues as “a web of naked fantasies” and “the result of an incurable delusion.”11
It would not be until the 1840s that Ohm’s findings finally started to gain acceptance in the scientific community, and they were accepted increasingly as the century wore on—thanks to recognition from eminent later scientists, who were working at a time when much more had been discovered about the nature of electricity, and only from this new vantage point could the significance of Ohm’s Law be more widely grasped. In music too, as new forms take root and as the new musical idiom begins to be understood, pieces which were incomprehensible at the time can be appreciated and enjoyed by music lovers. This of course happens in popular music every bit as much as in classical music.
The principles Collingwood elucidated regarding understanding music, a novel or a poem apply equally to understanding any scientific account, and indeed, to understanding anything in nature.
More broadly,
What makes a succession intelligible is its continuity. And to understand, in the most general sense, is simply to see continuities. Scientific understanding is one way of doing this: it is seeing general types of continuity, the continuity between anything of one general kind with something of another general kind. Historical understanding is another way of doing it: seeing the continuity of this individual thing with this other individual thing.12
Understanding things versus understanding kinds of things
“The dandelion-head whose seeds I now watch a sparrow eating,” wrote Collingwood (probably in late 1938 or early 1939),13 “is as individual and unique a thing as the French Revolution.”
The sparrow is this sparrow, not any sparrow. Its appetite for the seed I now see it eating is, no doubt, an example of a kind of appetite common in sparrows; but if I cannot be content to say that the French Revolution happened because oppressed populations rebel against rulers too weak to control them, I cannot be content to say that this sparrow eats this seed because sparrows like dandelion-seeds. In both cases, the ground of my discontent is the same: it is, that the general rule, just because it explains every case of the kind indifferently, does not explain this case in its concrete actuality, but only those features of it in which it resembles the rest. In short, if I am content with a scientific explanation of a natural fact, the reason is that I am content to think of it not as the unique fact which it is, but merely as an example of a certain kind of fact.14
Scientific explanation of the kind deployed in physics and chemistry, is only concerned with generalities, that is, in phenomena—general kinds of things which occur more than once and which at first seemed to be exceptions to previously known scientific laws. A one-off event, depending on what it is we are curious to understand about it, may be interesting and readily explicable, but it is not even a phenomenon amenable to such traditional forms of natural scientific investigation and explanation—it’s just something that happened one time and one time only.
Sometimes, explanation in terms of generalizations about abstractions may be quite enough for our purposes. For sometimes, Collingwood says, this is all that we care about—as long as this razor-blade is sharp and fits his razor, any other blade answering to this same description would do equally well. And if a suitable gardener can be hired by him at such-and-such a rate, anyone else fitting that description would do. He may not care about any other aspects of the particular razor blade or the particular gardener. “In both cases, he says, “I am attending to features shared by many pieces of metal and many human beings; in so far as these features are all I wish to understand, a scientific understanding is all I want.”15
Similarly, when a scientific explanation in terms deduced from general laws is put forward to explain a particular recurring phenomenon that puzzles us, such a scientific explanation may in some instances account for all that we happen to want or need to know at the time.
For example, if I want to know why, on a sunny day, my shadow is invariably shortest at noon but in the afternoon gets progressively longer, I can be referred to the scientific law that light travels in straight lines (the Principle of the Rectilinear Propagation of Light), and therefore as the sun gets lower in the sky, anything in its way casts a longer shadow.
And to show me why this must be so, I can be drawn a nifty little scientific diagram with a stick figure of a person standing on a horizontal line representing the ground, and the sun at a certain point in the sky, and an angular line from the sun to the ground skimming the top of the stick figure’s head. And now I know why, in general, anything casts a longer shadow the lower in the sky the sun happens to be. I can understand it as a matter of geometry, and it applies to me or you or a lamppost anywhere in the world, any day of the week.
Similarly, if I want to know why something or other occurred I might be given an explanation in terms of so-called “causal” laws, informing me that “A is followed by B because it is a general law that any A is followed by some B.”16
But, Collingwood points out, “however far it was pressed,” such explanation in terms of general laws can only explain why something describable as a B kind of thing had occurred, but can never explain why this particular B had occurred. “Any other B would have satisfied the requirements of the law equally well.”17 Meanwhile, the actual thing itself, in all its idiosyncrasy and particularity, “this B and no other B,” Collingwood reminds us, “remains unintelligible.”
The Limits of Nomological Explanation
When it comes to historical events, which is to say, for Collingwood, anything specific that has transpired in the universe—and not just in the human realm, or in living nature, but any specific thing whatsoever that has ever happened in the universe, animate or inanimate—this traditional form of “[s]cientific thought does not answer the question asked.”18
Instead of explaining why this and nothing else happens, it explains why something of this kind happens. And scientific thought only succeeds so long as we are content with thus altering the question. If we fix our minds resolutely on the original question, we see that any [nomological] scientific explanation of facts, that is, any explanation of them in terms of general laws, is not so much untrue as irrelevant, an ignoratio elenchi…, therefore…methodically evad[ing] the real question, the question how this came to be what it is.19
“The only kind of thinking that does not evade the question,” he insists, “is historical thinking.”20 Indeed, so much that passes for scientific thought is in fact, in Baconian scientific terms, anything but. The usual sort of “scientific” thought, aping in any and every field the peculiar, comparatively narrow kind of explanation native to physics or chemistry, fails to recognize that only “certain peculiar kinds of things need to be thought of in that peculiar way.” Instead it ignorantly presupposes that this is the only way in which anything is to be thought about scientifically.21
Such crude “scientism”—which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation”—arrogates to itself an unearned monopoly over the scientific explanation and investigation of anything and everything, even in the domain of human affairs where it is most obviously inapplicable.
If it is said: “on September 5 Great Britain went off the gold standard; on September 26 there was an earthquake in Japan,” that statement exhibits a succession but not its necessity. If it is said: “on September 25 Great Britain went off the gold standard; on September 26 we changed what was left of our francs back into pounds and recovered the whole cost of our holiday in France,” not merely a succession, but the necessity of that succession, is exhibited: the second event could not have happened unless the first had happened already. The function of history is to make statements of this second kind.…22
Unlike natural scientific understanding in terms of general laws regarding kinds of things categorized in particular ways, historical understanding, Collingwood explains, enables us to understand a succession of events by “exhibiting a portion of the flux as it really happened…seeing how events happened, and to do this is to see why they happened. Our thought follows the movement of the events themselves, and in so doing finds them intelligible.”23
The principle of historical understanding in the widest sense, then, as a form of understanding distinct from scientific, is that the flux of things in itself and as it actually flows is intelligible. If I take the whole sequence of events which I call my visit to France, the story of those events is intelligible as it stands. It does not first appear or become intelligible when I extract from it this or that feature which it shares or might share with other sequences and subsume this feature under its general law. So far from its being true that the single sequence in itself is unintelligible, and only becomes intelligible when thus subsumed, in fact the opposite is true: unless the sequence in itself, as a single and unrepeated sequence of events, were already intelligible, it could not be made intelligible by showing it to be an example of a general law. For in that case the general law would merely be a statement that events of this unintelligible kind frequently happen, or might happen, elsewhere in space and time; and what is intrinsically unintelligible does not become any more intelligible for being repeated, whereas if something is intrinsically intelligible we may very well come to understand it better for seeing it, or something like it, again.24
If we recall once again Stuart Hampshire’s principle that description of reality is inexhaustible, and remember that there is no limit to the kinds of questions we curious human folk are wont to be interested in asking, we can see why “[t]here is no finality in any knowledge whatever. There is nothing about which we have any knowledge at all, about which there is not more to know.”25
Collingwood goes on to remark:
If anybody thinks that in any field, however narrow, he has exhausted the possibilities of knowledge, he is not only under a dangerous delusion, he is demonstrating the feebleness and sterility of his thought concerning that field itself. If it is truer in history than elsewhere (which I doubt) that here the incompleteness of all we know is peculiarly manifest, it follows, not that history is a peculiarly futile form of thought, but that it is a peculiarly privileged one, where the thinker is more than commonly aware of what he is doing and more than commonly exempt from delusions about the nature and extent of his achievement.26
Question-and-Answer Logic and the Scientific Analysis of Idiosyncratic Situations
When Collingwood refers above to “historical understanding in the widest sense,” he includes not only the work of scientific historians and archaeologists like himself, but refers equally, for example, to the work of detectives and investigative journalists, and to the work undertaken in criminal legal investigations and proceedings—and in the latter case, most explicitly in an inquisitorial system like that of France, where under French criminal law, before a case can be brought for prosecution, the examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) actively investigates the crime, examines the evidence and directs the search for further evidence, interrogates witnesses, and so on, in an effort to piece together objectively and reconstruct the truth of what actually happened, much the way a detective would, and often works closely with the police detectives on the case while it is in progress.27
Collingwood himself uses as a prime example of historical understanding the kind of question-and-answer logic deployed by the detective protagonist in crime novels. He even takes the trouble to invent and elaborate at length—going on to analyze it in detail for its implications—a highly detailed, fictional, Agatha Christie-style mystery narrative of his own invention (“Who Killed John Doe?”) running to some 3000 words28 (replete with rectors, parlour maids, blackmailers, thunderstorms, disputed wills, false confessions from elderly spinsters, muddy footprints, traces of paint, etc.).
All this in order to illustrate the kind of historical understanding that he is interested in, as an alternative to the narrow kind of science concerned with kinds of things rather than scientifically investigating and trying to understand a singular event or circumstance the way a detective or investigative journalist would—or an historian or archaeologist.
He is at pains to note too, not only similarities but differences in the types of inference used in history and in detection. In both cases, however, the questions are “not put by one man to another man, in the hope that the second man will enlighten the first man’s ignorance by answering them. They are put, like all scientific questions, by the scientist to himself.”29
Collingwood explains that he has gone into such extensive illustrative detail with his fictional detective-story example in order to illustrate and draw attention to the kind of questioning activity which, he says, is definitive not only of all serious historical research (as opposed to scissors-and-paste history), but also of all true scientific work.
Every step in the argument, he says, depends on asking a question, and the questions must be asked in the right order, an order which is by no means determined in advance. Far from it. The possible list of questions is infinite, and there can be no such “catalogue of all the questions that have to be asked” with a box next to each that must be checked-off.30
On the contrary—for not only is every question a new question, but it arises in the scientist’s or detective’s mind from the answers he has obtained to his previous questions, deploying his own systematic logic of inquiry. The questions must nevertheless be asked in the “right” order31—and Collingwood credits Descartes with having been the first to insist on this as a cardinal point in scientific method.
Collingwood calls Socrates, Descartes, and Bacon “the three great masters of the Logic of Questioning: that is to say, the “Logic of Question-and-Answer,” first anticipated by Descartes (in Collingwood’s generous view) and first exemplified in great detail by Bacon in 1620, but which is really due in its modern formulation to Robin Collingwood. This is the epistemology that has been the topic of our own nine-part exposition here in the pages of Change.32
To recap33 Collingwood’s “logic of question-and-answer”:
A body of knowledge consists not of ‘propositions’, ‘statements’, ‘judgements’, or what have you, but these together with the questions they are meant to answer, every knowledge-claim being the answer to an explicit or implicit question.
And it follows that you can’t even know what any such “answer”—any assertion at all— even means without first understanding correctly the precise question the individual was asking, implicitly or explicitly, to which the assertion made was intended as an answer.
Nor can you understand that question in turn without first appreciating the precise context in which that question was originally being asked. If you make a mistake about the context you’ll make a mistake about the question. And if you make a mistake about the question you’ll make a mistake about the answer. Question and answer form an indissoluble complex, often highly detailed and particularized, always in context, and typically quite idiosyncratic to the individual and their situation.
The same goes for truth, which is also relative to the specific implicit question being asked in a specific context. Meaning, agreement, truth and falsehood, contradiction and consistency, among other terms wrongly applied to assertions taken on their own and in the abstract, can never in fact apply to assertions alone at all, according to Collingwood, but can only ever be legitimately applied to whole question-and-answer complexes considered in all their rich, idiosyncratic contextual detail.
Nor can we begin to judge the soundness of anyone’s answer to any question until we know what their own question was, as distinct from what others may have been wanting to ask, when asking what may have sounded deceptively like the selfsame question, expressed in much the same words, but which was really a different question altogether on this particular occasion.
This is for Collingwood the very essence of any scientific investigation, which he knew firsthand as a practicing scientist, working lifelong in the archaeology and history of Roman Britain, in parallel with working as an Oxford philosophy don.
For Collingwood, as for us, the real power of scientific thinking is harnessed not only in seeking general patterns in nature regarding general kinds of things, but in understanding singular situations rigorously and scientifically, like a first-rate detective or investigative journalist or scientific historian of Collingwood’s calibre. From my own reading of Bacon, I’m sure he would agree.
The prize for making this shift in epistemology, and having to dig deeper than we usually do, is a true, and very Baconian science of the idiosyncratic, enabling everyday life and work to be approached with a thorough blend of rigour and imagination—an endeavour which has also been at the heart of my own life’s work in science from day one.
Envoi
If I were a maker of maxims, I would make it a maxim never to undertake an intervention to create a desired change unless and until you have thoroughly understood what you are seeking to intervene in. And not in the abstract but in all its glorious, rich, idiosyncratic detail.
And not from the outside by way of assigning things to predetermined kinds or categories, no matter how detailed and “multidimensional,” but from the inside, making the succession of patterns and sequences you observe fully intelligible, so that you can see why what you are observing could hardly have turned out otherwise.
That is everywhere and always your only reliable starting point. Hence all that we have conveyed in previous instalments of Collingwood’s view of all history as the history of thought. We have to think all over again for ourselves the very same thoughts of those who did or are currently doing the things that we cannot otherwise correctly comprehend.
As Stravinsky would intone, rather than start a riot over it, try and understand the music, and what the composer and choreographer were actually trying to do.
This is the adventure of inquiry and judgement on which Collingwood first embarked when he found himself face-to-face with the Sphinx of Kensington Gardens, and discovered that the only way to answer the riddle of the Sphinx was by posing the questions himself, and also posing the questions, ultimately, to himself. Not only in our change efforts, but in all our interpersonal interactions, we would do well to follow his example.
And in exactly the same spirit, if I may quote once more the words of the late great American Oxford philosopher Prof. Elmer Sprague, if you really want to understand another person, a good place to begin is to ask them what they mean by the words they are using.
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Ivan Hewitt of the British Library, in an article published on bl.uk on 25 May 2016, from whom my account here is largely adapted, and to whom I am indebted.
Jean Cocteau, 'Cock and Harlequin', trans. Rollo H. Myers (London: Egoist Press, 1921), quoted in Richard Buckle, Nijinsky: A Life of Genius and Madness (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), p. 300
Hewitt, op. cit.
ibid.
You may be reminded here of the Thelonious Monk story in an earlier instalment of this article, where the musicologist complained that Monk was playing the wrong notes on the piano.
Hewitt op. cit. italics added
Kathleen Kuiper and Dika Newlin, writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica
Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949, p. 3
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, ed. WH Dray and W J van der Dussen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 184
ibid.
B. C. Blake-Coleman, Copper Wire and Electrical Conductors—the Shaping of a Technology, Reading, Berkshire: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992, pp. 168-69
Collingwood, op. cit., p. 184
Beginning in his late 40s. Collingwood suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes over several years. To recover from one of these, he sailed to the Dutch East Indies in 1938–9, and realizing he was living on borrowed time he wrote his landmark Essay on Metaphysics (published in 1940), and started writing his unfinished magnum opus, The Principles of History, which would not be published for more than half a century after his death. The passage quoted is from The Principles of History.
Collingwood, op. cit., p. 181
ibid.
ibid., p. 178
ibid., p.179
ibid.
ibid. (italics added)
ibid.
ibid.
ibid., p. 183
ibid. p. 184, italics added
ibid., pp. 185-86
ibid., p. 189
ibid.
For those who have followed the award-winning, critically acclaimed French television series Spiral (Engrenages), think of the work of the judge, Roban.
Collingwood, op. cit., pp. 21-29
ibid., p. 29
ibid.
Beginning with “Questioning Truth,” and continuing throughout the present 8-part article on “A World of Questions and Answers”
This is elaborated in detail in our article “Questioning Truth,” here in Change, and in the whole of the present Article published in eight instalments over the past couple of months.
re The questions must nevertheless be asked in the “right” order, it might be interesting to say more about how to know that you are asking the right question and in the right order.
Of course, as there is an infinite amount of detail, you must stop somewhere. how do you know where to stop?