Abstract

Certain information-seeking yes/no (yn)-questions –e.g. Did Jorge really bring a present? and Doesn’t John drink?– convey an epistemic bias of the speaker. Two main approaches to biased yn-questions are compared: the VERUM approach and the Decision Theory approach. It is argued that, while Decision Theory can formally characterize the notion of “intent” of a question, VERUM is needed to derive the data.