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This is the third book in the series of “What Does It Mean to ___?”, following my previous works: “What Does It Mean to Think? – A Guide to Philosophy for the People from Age 0 to 100” (Gentosha, 2018) and “What Does It Mean to Write? – A Writing Workshop to Change Your Life” (Asuka Shinsha, 2022). The sequence of these books is not coincidental.
 
“Thinking” is based on “questioning.” In order to think, one must first question. “Writing,” on the other hand, is the act of putting into words what one has thought. Thus, to write, one must think, and to think, one must question. It’s a very simple relationship. Therefore, how we write is a question of how we think, and how we think is a question of how we question. In school (even in university), we are not taught how to write because we are not taught how to think, and we are not taught how to think because we are not taught how to question. What an obvious “fact” this is! (and that is why the books were released in this order)
 
The reason why students struggle with reports and theses, why they are lost when told to “think carefully,” why society is full of superficial reactions, and why they are at a loss as to how to tackle a problem for which there is no answer – all these problems stem from the same cause: a lack of understanding of “what it means to question.”
 
Then we ask, what should we do about questioning? When the theme shifted from “thinking” to “writing,” I realized that writing is not merely about putting words on paper but about constructing thoughts. And that, in turn, is about clarifying how to connect questions.
 
This task, however, proved to be unexpectedly difficult. It is generally said that there are two types of reasoning: “induction” and “deduction,” but there must be more than just these. If the types of thinking depend on the types of questioning, then we need to capture the type of thinking that has not been named so far, in terms of the way the questions are connected. In this book therefore, I explained the characteristics of various types of questions – such as the “5W1H” (concrete situations), “What does ___ mean?” (definition), “Why ___?” (reason), “For example?” (example), and “How are A and B related?” (relation) – and then I argued how to connect questions from the perspective of the directions of “up and down” and “back and forth,” multi-directional, large to small, and small to large. I then introduced “Questioning Exercises” and wrote about how to structure questions to deal with real-life issues.
 
One more thing that I felt compelled to write in the last chapter of this book is “When to Stop Questioning.” We often fail to question when we should, and we question when we don't need to. This struggle, though sometimes foolish, is nevertheless a valuable one, because that is what it means to live humanly. Above all, through questioning, we learn to think more deeply, to understand more profoundly, and to free ourselves from biases, common sense, and our own prejudice. To learn how to live, we must learn how to question.
 

(Written by KAJITANI Shinji, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2024)