Three strategies for Socratic inquisitiveness in reflective questions

Overview & Synopsis

We identify a new phenomenon of reflective questions as expressing aporia : a state of Socratic inquisitiveness that presumes that there is no authoritative answer a question. By formulating an aporetic question, the speaker has an awareness that inquisitiveness will persist and that there may be no epistemic authority that can give a complete and a definitive answer; for this reason, reflective questions are typically self-addressed and appear monological in nature. We discuss a variety of linguistic manifestations of reflection in Greek, Italian, English, and Korean, and identify three grammatical strategies: questioning possibilities, enlarging the set of initial options considered by the speaker, or restricting the set of possibilities while keeping intact the state of uncertainty. In our approach, reflection is a notional category that blurs the boundary between assertions and questions – whereby questions lose their information-seeking discourse function to rather convey modal meaning of enhanced, i.e., Socratic inquisitiveness.