Questioning Truth

If you don’t know the question, you can’t understand the answer

Introduction

Today’s post is a longer piece than usual, inspired by a recent rereading of Collingwood’s Autobiography.

It was in this small book, published in 1939 near the end of his life, that Collingwood offered his most complete account—in passages scattered here and there throughout the text¹—of his underlying epistemology, based on what he called a “logic of question and answer.”

In our experience, the topic is key to achieving fast and effective desired change.

It is also key not only to learning from other thinkers, but to much else of even greater import besides.

—The Editors

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Questioning Truth—If you don’t know the question, you can’t understand the answer

The Sphinx of Kensington Gardens

In 1916, R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943), then a young philosophy don at Pembroke College, Oxford and a practicing archaeologist,² was living in London while serving during the First World War in the Admiralty Intelligence Division, based in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. 

Each day, Collingwood walked to and from work across Kensington Gardens past the Albert Memorial, and this notoriously kitsch, neo-Gothic structure, still widely unloved to this day by Londoners and visitors alike, began to take on an “air of significance” for him,³

Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment. 

And it began to obsess him.

Everything about it was visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, venomous; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it?  To say that Scott was a bad architect was to burke the problem with a tautology; to say that there was no accounting for tastes was to evade it by suggestio falsi.⁴ 

Here in Kensington Gardens, this hideous carbuncle, this extraordinarily offensive eyesore, became for Collingwood a Sphinx that posed a most extraordinary, and ultimately eye-opening riddle.  

After all, Sir Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), a leading architect of the Gothic Revival, had been perhaps the most celebrated British architect of his time and was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

The monument had been commissioned by Prince Albert’s widow Queen Victoria to commemorate the remarkable life of the man who had been the obsessively adored love of her life as well as a major figure on the world stage. 

When Prince Albert died at the age of only 42 in 1861, Queen Victoria went into mourning and, never recovering from her loss, retired from public life, spending her remaining forty years wearing only black. The memorial in Kensington Gardens could not have been more significant for her.

The world’s most powerful ruler had clearly approved every detail of the finished work which was as much for her as for Scott a true labour of love, and both Queen Victoria and Sir Gilbert Scott must have judged the result to have been a complete success or it would never have been built over the course of more than a decade, at a cost of around $20,000,000 in today’s money, financed by public subscription. Queen Victoria insisted on paying herself, however, for the monumental, gleaming golden sculpture of her beloved Albert, seated 14 foot high at the centre of the Memorial.

The riddle posed to Collingwood by the Sphinx of Kensington Gardens would not leave him, and twice a day the question tortured him. 

As a scientist, an archaeologist and the son of an archaeologist, Collingwood knew that for the scientist, ever since Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum of 1620, “What was called Nature … had henceforth no secrets from man; only riddles which he had learnt the trick of answering. Or, more accurately, Nature was no longer a Sphinx asking man riddles; it was man that did the asking.…”

So he approached the riddle of Scott’s sphinx scientifically, as an archaeologist or an historian would.

Now Scott was a serious, accomplished architect, revered in his field, and entrusted with perhaps the most important commission of his stellar career. What on earth could the man have been thinking to create such an ugly monstrosity?

What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing; a thing, I meant, which we should have thought beautiful?  If so, he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something different? If so, he might possibly have succeeded. If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did?⁵

Collingwood’s musings led him, he said, to “a thought already familiar to me.”⁶ 

My work in archaeology…impressed upon me the importance of the ‘questioning activity’ in knowledge…a principle in logic which I found it necessary to restate:  the principle that a body of knowledge consists not of ‘propositions’, ‘statements’, ‘judgements’, or whatever name logicians use in order to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for ‘knowledge’ means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic.⁷

Every Statement Can Only be Understood as the Answer to an Implicit Question

For Collingwood, the most important product of his twice-daily musings on Scott and the Albert Memorial, was the notion that every knowledge-claim is the answer to an explicit or implicit question. 

But more than this, one cannot understand the answer without first understanding what precise question the person making the claim thought he was trying to answer. 

Even if the answer is clearly and unambiguously stated, “with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention,” you cannot know what a person’s answer even means without first knowing “what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer.”⁸  

Nor can we even properly understand that question in turn without first appreciating the precise context in which that question was originally being asked.  For even if the words used are the same, it will be an altogether different question according to the context. “If you cannot tell what a proposition means unless you know what question it is meant to answer,” Collingwood argued, “you will mistake its meaning if you make a mistake about that question.”⁹

Here Collingwood was at pains to point out that question and answer, as he conceived them, “were strictly correlative. A proposition was not an answer, or at any rate could not be the right answer, to any question which might have been answered otherwise. A highly detailed and particularized proposition must be the answer, not to a vague and generalized question, but to a question as detailed and particularized as itself.”¹⁰ 

For example, if my car will not go, I may spend an hour searching for the cause of its failure. If, during this hour, I take out number one plug, lay it on the engine, turn the starting-handle, and watch for a spark, my observation ‘number one plug is all right’ is an answer not to the question, ‘Why won't my car go?’ but to the question, ‘Is it because number one plug is not sparking that my car won't go?’ Any one of the various experiments I make during the hour will be the finding of an answer to some such detailed and particularized question. The question, ‘Why won't my car go?’ is only a kind of summary of all these taken together. It is not a separate question asked at a separate time, nor is it a sustained question which I continue to ask for the whole hour together. Consequently, when I say ‘Number one plug is all right’, this observation does not record one more failure to answer the hour-long question, ‘What is wrong with my car?’ It records a success in answering the three-minutes-long question, ‘Is the stoppage due to failure in number one plug?’¹¹

Truth is Question-Relative

Collingwood never ceased to emphasize the importance of recognizing how idiosyncratic to the context every question is, and therefore how idiosyncratic the meaning was, of every statement to which it was an implicit answer. 

He saw at once, however, that this inescapable conclusion applied not only to the meaning of whatever someone says is the case. For what is more, “[t]he same principle applied to the idea of truth.”¹²  

If the meaning of a proposition is relative to the question it answers, its truth must be relative to the same thing. In fact, “[m]eaning, agreement and contradiction, truth and falsehood, none of these belonged to propositions in their own right, propositions by themselves; they belonged only to propositions as the answers to questions: each proposition answering a question strictly correlative to itself.”¹³  

Accordingly, Collingwood denied all the major contending theories of truth.¹⁴  For all the extant theories, then as now, presupposed that truth was something that applied to propositions, that is, statements or assertions considered in isolation, rather than applying, as he now realized it only could apply, to whole question-and-answer complexes.

This principle held not only for propositions put forward by our interlocutors whom we can question directly, getting curious about what they mean and asking them, and then trying patiently to learn from them what specific question lay behind their remark, but held equally when trying to understand the work of those who are no longer around for us to interrogate.

During the War, in the course of my meditations on the Albert Memorial, I [also] set myself to reconsider [the prevailing] attitude towards the history of philosophy. Was it really true, I asked myself, that the problems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eternal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attempts to answer the same questions? I soon discovered that it was not true; it was merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences.¹⁵

His meditation on the Albert Memorial had taught him, he said, to make it a principle for his students, to “‘reconstruct the problem’; or, ‘never think you understand any statement made by a philosopher until you have decided, with the utmost possible accuracy, what the question is to which he means it for an answer’.¹⁶

We have to say ‘here is a passage of Leibniz; what is it about? what is the problem with which it deals?’ …Then comes the question ‘Does Leibniz here deal with [this specific problem] rightly or wrongly?’ ... If Leibniz when he wrote this passage was so confused in his mind as to make a complete mess of the job of solving his problem, he was bound at the same time to mix up his own tracks so completely that no reader could see quite clearly what his problem had been. For one and the same passage states his solution and serves as evidence of what the problem was. The fact that we can identify his problem is proof that he has solved it; for we only know what the problem was by arguing back from the solution. …How can we discover what the tactical problem was that Nelson set himself at Trafalgar? Only by studying the tactics he pursued in the battle. We argue back from the solution to the problem.¹⁷

Working Backwards from the Answer to the Question Behind It

I had a delightful and entertaining sociology tutor at Oxford, a brilliant scholar in his own right, who did not appreciate the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–1982), to put it mildly. Goffman may have been widely regarded as one of the greatest sociologists of the past century, but he most certainly wasn’t my tutor’s cup of tea. 

On one occasion he made the remark that, “reading Goffman is like having a hot bath; either you have some good ideas while you’re reading him, or you don’t.” But one of his most memorable humorous swipes at Goffman was to say, “If God came down tomorrow and said, ‘Goffman was right’, we wouldn’t know what he was right about.” 

My tutor saw this as a shortcoming of Goffman’s. I would rather see it today as a shortcoming of his reading of Goffman, which could not have been very serious or to have gone very deep, for it is the student’s or scholar’s job, if he really wants to understand the work of a scientist or philosopher, to work out what specific question it was that the thinker in question thought he was trying to answer. 

Consider the case of Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753),¹⁸ who infamously put forward the doctrine that esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived, often summarized in the form of the claim that all that exists are minds and their ideas.  Well, that might sound at first like a rather foolish idea, but George Berkeley was nobody’s fool. 

In fact, Berkeley was one of the most brilliant and learned men of his time, outstanding as a philosopher and theologian, who made important contributions to the foundations of both mathematics and the sciences, and was a practicing scientist himself.  Could such a great mind have made such an elementary mistake? 

Is it not far more likely that the fault lies with us, that we do not understand Berkeley’s answer because we have not yet properly grasped the question to which it was an answer?  

Even Dr Johnson, as his biographer Boswell records, famously missed the point,

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—“I refute it thus.”

And Jonathan Swift, a friend of Berkeley’s and a fellow Anglican cleric, refused to open the door to him when Berkeley came to call, insisting that Berkeley perceive an open door for himself so that he could walk through it!

What if, unlike the redoubtable Dr Johnson and Dean Swift, we were to begin with the premiss that Berkeley’s answer was indeed the right answer, and that we must work backwards from there to figure out what the particular question was that troubled him, and the context in which he was asking it—the very specific question to which “esse is percipi”—as Berkeley understood it—was in fact the only possible answer?

Collingwood would tell his students, when approaching the work of any thinker:

‘At first sight you cannot tell what he is trying to say. But if you will think carefully about the passage you will see that he is answering a question which he has taken the trouble to formulate in his mind with great precision. What you are reading is his answer. Now tell me what the question was’.

But he cannot have it both ways. He cannot say ‘our author is here trying to answer the following question. . .. That is a question which all philosophers ask themselves sooner or later; the right answer to it, as given by Plato or Kant or Wittgenstein, is. . .. Our author is giving one of the wrong answers.  The refutation of his erroneous view is as follows.’  His claim to know what question the author is asking is a fraud which any one could expose by asking for his evidence. As a matter of fact, he is not basing his assertion on evidence; he is only trotting out some philosophical question of which the passage vaguely reminds him.¹⁹

It is for this reason that for Collingwood, “there were not two separate sets of questions to be asked, one historical and one philosophical, about a given passage in a given philosophical author. There was one set only, historical. The study of Plato was, in my eyes, of the same kind as the study of Thucydides. The study of Greek philosophy and the study of Greek warfare are both historical studies.”²⁰ 

We can nevertheless go on to consider, he emphasized, whether or not Plato was right in answering the question as he did, just as we can ask whether Phormio was right to row round the Corinthians’ circle, for “[w]hat lunatic idea of history is this, which would imply that it is history that Phormio rowed round the Corinthians, but not that he beat the Corinthians by doing it?”²¹ 

We cannot begin to judge the soundness of Plato’s answer to some question until we know what his own question was, as distinct from what other philosophers in other times may have been wanting to ask, when asking what may have sounded like the same question, expressed in much the same words.  

People Rarely Contradict Themselves or Talk Nonsense:  The Art of Listening

Two weeks back we quoted the late Professor Elmer Sprague as having urged that if you want to understand another person, the best place to start is to ask him what he means by the words he is using.

In organizations, in daily life, indeed especially in our interactions with those nearest and dearest to us, how often do we fail miserably to make any effort to do this?  How often do we act as if we already knew what the person meant when they said what they said, and as if the only options open to us were to accept it, ignore it, or attempt to counter it?  And how often do we truly make the effort—and it often does take a good deal of effort—to get genuinely curious about what the other person is trying to tell us?  

Could anything be more important in human interaction? And not least if the other person is important to us, and if what they are trying to tell us seems to mean a great deal to them, or to us, or to have been reiterated by them time and again.

This kind of empathic, probing curiosity is especially vital if what they are saying seems at first to be self-contradictory, or to contradict something else they have said on another occasion, or to fly in the face of the objective facts as we understand them, or appears to be baseless or meaningless or a crazy idea put forward by an otherwise sensible and intelligent individual for whom we have the greatest respect.

In such instances, most often the fault lies not with the speaker, who may be speaking clearly and sensibly enough, but with the listener who may either have a blindspot of their own or may otherwise be failing utterly to truly comprehend, clearly and empathically, where the speaker was coming from.  

In fact, Collingwood, continuing his reflections on what he learned from Scott’s monument, argued that no two propositions “can contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question. It is therefore impossible to say of a man, ‘I do not know what the question is which he is trying to answer, but I can see that he is contradicting himself’.”

Indeed, he went further, arguing that 

a proposition which in fact is significant can always be thought meaningless by any one who convinces himself that it was intended as an answer to a question which, if it had really been intended to answer it, it would not have answered at all, either rightly or wrongly. Whether a given proposition is true or false, significant or meaningless, depends on what question it was meant to answer; and any one who wishes to know whether a given proposition is true or false, significant or meaningless, must find out what question it was meant to answer.²²

A little further on in his Autobiography where he again refers back to his twice-daily encounter with the sphinx of Kensington Gardens, Collingwood remarked:

I was never at all convinced either by Marx’s metaphysics or by his economics; but the man was a fighter, and a grand one; and no mere fighter, but a fighting philosopher. His philosophy might be unconvincing; but to whom was it unconvincing? Any philosophy, I knew, would be not only unconvincing but nonsensical to a person who misunderstood the problem it was meant to solve. Marx’s was meant to solve a ‘practical’ problem; its business, as he said himself, was to ‘make the world better’. Marx’s philosophy would necessarily, therefore, appear nonsensical except to a person who, I will not say shared his desire to make the world better by means of a philosophy, but at least regarded that desire as a reasonable one.²³

Failing to get Curious about the Question Can Have Terrible Consequences

Recall for a moment the unthinkable chaos and unspeakable carnage of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), one of Europe’s longest and most devastating wars in history, in which whole armies of Catholic mercenaries hired by the Protestants (why shed good Protestant blood, they reasoned, when you can pay Catholics to do your dirty work for you?) were slaughtering Catholics wholesale in the name of Protestantism, their employer’s religion, while, in just the same way, whole armies of Protestant mercenaries hired by the Catholics were simultaneously, for a good fee, slaughtering fellow Protestants in the name of Roman Catholicism. 

In all, it is generally estimated that as many as 8,000,000 people were killed in that war of senseless, wholesale slaughter, of which around 6,500,000 were civilians, while the highest estimates by historians put the true number of total casualties nearer 12,000,000.  The Thirty Years War was just one of the many European Wars of Religion fought between Catholics and Protestants during the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th Centuries, claiming perhaps as many 18 million lives in all and destroying countless times that many other lives, at a time in history when the entire population of Europe numbered only around 75 to 100 million. 

It was only as recently as 1999, in The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, that theologians of the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church sat down together and established that all the bloody long wars of religion they’d fought for over 400 years—the 18,000,000 lives lost, not to mention all the destruction of cultural treasures and the devastating economic fallout, was just a misguided quarrel over semantics—indeed, was rooted in a simple misunderstanding of the meaning of one or two theological terms of art, specifically with regard to the doctrine of justification, rather arcane in its details but of the highest importance in theology.

In fact, as I understand it, according to the 1999 Joint Declaration, it all came down to Catholic and Protestant theologians having been talking at cross-purposes for centuries about a phrase consisting of just two words: sola fide.  

‘Justificatio sola fide’, Luther’s original offending phrase meaning “justification by faith alone,” had long been the ultimate bone of contention. It seems no one had bothered to ask, in a serious, truly Collingwoodian spirit, “what do you mean by sola fide?”  And it dawned on them only at the turn of our present millennium that, in fact, the Catholic and Protestant faiths had been in agreement all along on this critical point, but for the past four hundred years had simply failed to recognize it.  

Being a philosopher and not a theologian, I cannot help but wonder, as Collingwood would have wondered, whether the problem was that the two sides, all those centuries ago, were actually making their assertions in rather different contexts, putting forward answers which, far from being mutually contradictory, were actually answers to quite different questions.

So the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, in The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by both sides on October 31st, 1999, were saying, in effect, after four centuries of bloodthirsty enmity, “Oh oops, sorry old chap for all the slaughter, it seems we were in agreement all along after all; let’s shake hands on it like gentlemen,” and the Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Reformed and almost all the rest of the denominations were quick to sign up too.²⁴   What is wrong with this picture?

So whenever you hear that the pen is mightier than the sword, and here it seems the misguided clash of pens soon led to a tragic clash of swords, bear in mind that the sword is always sure as heck quicker and easier to wield than the pen, takes no great talent, and saves one the trouble of ever having to actually think, or to inquire, or properly to listen.  Somehow it always seemed easier to spill blood than to quill ink.

Talk to Each Other

When Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (b. 1925), a survivor of both Auschwitz and Belsen long active in Holocaust education, was interviewed earlier this year, she was asked by a member of the audience what advice she would give the world to prevent such genocidal horrors from being repeated anywhere ever again.  Without hesitation she replied, simply, “Talk to each other.  Talk to each other and celebrate your differences—they are fascinating.  But don’t kill each other. Talk to each other.” 

Taking the trouble to try and understand another person, in the very first instance by inquiring what they mean by the words they are using, and trying especially to learn the very, very specific question to which their assertions were intended as answers, is never a luxury, almost always the favoured option, and often a necessity.  

Talk to each other. Look before you leap to conclusions—look for the question behind the answer. For every assertion is that person’s answer to a question all their own.  And don’t even dream of arguing with their answer until you have truly understood their question.

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© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

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1. He had a lot more to say on the topic in that slim volume than we cover here. He wrote a complete book on the topic, Truth and Contradiction, early on in his career, but it was rejected by the publisher and he eventually destroyed it; to my knowledge, only a single chapter of that unpublished book survives, and An Autobiography remains the locus classicus for his views on the topic.

2. Later a Fellow of the British Academy, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in the University of Oxford (one of only five endowed professorships in Philosophy at Oxford), and an eminent archaeologist and accomplished historian of Roman Britain as well as being one of the most important and original British philosophers of the 20th Century, Collingwood influenced a number of leading British philosophers of the next generation, including Michael Oakeshott and Stephen Toulmin.

3. the well-known passage below Collingwood cited from Wordsworth’s “The Leech Gatherer.”

4. An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 29

5. ibid. pp. 29-30

6. ibid. p. 30

7. ibid. p. 30

8. ibid. p. 31

9. ibid. p. 33

10. ibid. pp. 31-32, my italics

11. ibid. p. 32

12. ibid. p. 33

13. ibid. p. 33

14. ibid. p. 36—the theories Collingwood rejected out of hand are still very widely held even today.

15. ibid. pp. 60-61

16. ibid. p. 74

17. ibid. pp. 69-70

18. Bishop of Cloyne in the Anglican Church of Ireland, in Principle No. 3 of his 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in a much-misquoted phrase combining Latin and English.

19. op. cit. p. 71

20. ibid. p. 72

21. ibid.

22. ibid. pp. 38-39

23. ibid. p. 152

24. Not all theologians and not all of the Christian churches agreed, including the Confessional Lutherans among the dissenters.