Abstract

A good deal of work has already been done on the topic of questions, most of it in recent years, and most of it on the "logic" of questions. Yet in spite of all the attention paid to the topic, what has not received sufficient treatment is the phenomenology of question and answer, in the Husserlian sense of that word, "phenomenology". The present work has two aims: to fill in this gap in the phenomenological literature and to examine the intentionality of a question, and this in order to elucidate the "question-structure" of intentionality. The argument is basically this: Intentionality or conscious "aboutness" is a rivetting. The act does not "stare" at its referent, courtesy of its "sense". As an act, it rivets on it, and it does so to the extent that either the object is interesting or the act is being informed. What's "interesting" holds out different possibilities ; what's informative is the reduction of those possibilities . What is "interesting" elicits that response called "questioning". In the answering--in the actualization of the question--the act itself becomes "informative". Thus, the act rivets on its object--the act is an act--in so far as it is structurally that of either a questioning or an answering, or somewhere in between. Thus, the "question-notions" of interestedness and informativeness must figure centrally in a theory of intentionality. This being so, there are some other key notions that will have to be revised, or introduced, accordingly. Not least of them are the notions of "emptiness" and fulfilment, of truth and evidence, and the problem of how reality is disclosed to us.