What is the problem with why-questions and how to deal with them?

Question

A lot of questions ask why (German) language has some certain features. I have seen some discussions in the comments about this — usually claiming that this type of question can not be answered or does not make sense.^[1] So, I think, we should clarify:

1. Is there a problem with questions asking for causal reasoning in languages per se?
2. Can we differentiate cases, where these alleged problem does not exist, i.e. where it actually does make sense to ask why?-questions?
3. In the problematic cases, what exactly is the problem? (How can it be described in the most simple way?)
4. If there is a problem, how can we deal with this kind of questions?
   1. How can we address the problem without alienating the questioner?
   2. Is there a way theses questions can be "rescued", i.e. interpreted in a way that the problem goes away, and we still meet the (supposed) intention and interest of the questioner?

For me, all these questions are of interest. But I am especially concerned about 4. Why? seems to be a very nearby thing to ask when approaching any phenomenon of interest. People who ask these questions come here with some interest in German language. Maybe they do not have the means to pour this interest into a form which would be valid in academic discourse. I think, the aim of this site should be to find out how to help them, including reformulation of their question, if this is required and helpful.

I fear, if we do not reflect on this, we easily risk to miss our goal of helping people and spreading knowledge about the German language and to unnecessarily create a rather repellent experience for these users.

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^{[1] Just off the top of my head, some recent examples: Why is Dative Used for Location, Sentence structure in subjunctive passive with modal verb in a subordinate clause}

Answer 1

I think the problem here is that the askers have not enough metalinguistic competence: they have never reflected on the fact that different languages use different forms in different ways, and are thus stuck with "why would anyone do things differently than we do it?" (so this is not at all a German problem, but more prominent here due to the relative numbers of learners).

I have a hard time getting out of my linguistic background and putting myself into that perspective, so I don't entirely see what it actually is that an OP would like to hear as an answer in such a case. That's not to put them at fault, but I see the situation as a sort of X/Y-problem: we'd really have to educate them about comparative or historical linguistics instead, but that may not be what the asker is looking for. And it is not our duty to come up with all that.

But maybe this is also the way to an answer: one thing we could do is to just "misinterpret" (and perhaps accordingly edit) "why"-questions so that they make sense as legitimate requests for diacronic or functional explanations. For example, for the classic "why das Mädchen but die Wand?", there could be given a fine answer that mentions historical development of sexus and genus from PIE and Germanic, or explains the functionality of noun classes for co-reference disambiguation, redundancy increase, etc., cross-linguistically.

The hard part is how to communicate the forced reinterpreation nicely.

Answer 2

Analysis

Any answer to the question of "Why is A?", i.e. any causal explanation of the phenomenon A, is logically insufficient: if B is the cause of A, and C is the cause of B, then C can also be considered a cause of A. And of course, also C has a cause. The point is: Every cause in this line has a cause again, which leaves us with a regressus ad infinitum.^[1]

This problem is perfectly analogue to Aristotle's problem of the unmoved mover, or, more general to Münchhausen trilemma. There are different strategies to deal with the problem that there is no such thing as an ultimate causal explanation. The strategy I have seen on german.SE most often is to, facing the logical impossibility to give a full causal explanation, refuse to give any causal explanation and to state: Well, it is just as it is.

What we should do: A Problem based Pragmatic Approach

Although this answer is perfect in a logical sense (it is the tautological option in the Münchhausen trilemma), in fact it does not satisfy anything the questioner wants to know, it does not provide them any useful information. It also does not appear to make an effort to do so. This is why I think, answers following this strategey have a high risk to come across rude, repellent, ignorant, distanced, unempathic, ivory-towerish or at least unhelpful.^[2]

This social dimension lights the way to the approach we should take in my opinion. I think, we should not take a logical but a pragmatic approach here. We should interpret those why-questions not as an (insolvable) logical challenge, but we should interpret them as a high-level expression of a deeper lying problem the questioner has. The questioner might not be able to express their problem in a perfect logic form yet. But that does not mean that there would be no good answer to the problem. In order to answer the question properly we should try to help them find the question that both is answerable and addresses the problem the questioner has.

I think, it is also important to realize that this problem of not being able to formulate the question is not a problem which is rooted in the person of the questioner, but that this is the course of how learning and progress in realization goes with humans. The history of science, philosophy and mathematics can very well described as a struggle for asking the right questions.

How we should do it

I think, the problems being uttered in why-questions can often be described quite well with the following model:

1. The questioner has some implicit premises.
2. The questioner encounters a phenomenon which contradicts their premises.
3. They wonder how this is possible.

Other words to formulate the same model would be:

1. The questioner are equipped with a set of rules which define the state of "normal", i.e. the state which does not raise any questions (for them).
2. They encounter a "deviant" phenomenon, i.e. a phenomenon which does not stick to the rules.
3. They wonder how this can be explained.

Very often, a satisfying answer to this is to demonstrate, where their model of "normal" is mislead, i.e. which of the implicit premises is wrong. That requires to find out the implicit premises before. I actually believe that the communicative problem with why-questions is the implicitness of the premises. I think, making them explicit will very often solve the communicative problem. And I think this is the point what we can get better at. Instead of giving a non-answer in the way I mentioned above, I think we should try to find this out, by:

1. Asking clarifying questions in comments to the question.
2. Trying to guess the actual problem of the questioner and answer this.

Examples

Finally, to make the approach a little clearer, let me make some examples:

Question: Why does German capitalize the nouns?

Clarifying questions:

1. Do you want to know why German capitalizes the nouns in opposition to all the other words?
2. Do you want to know why German capitalizes the nouns while other languages (such as English) do not?
3. Would a historical overview over the development of capitalization in German answer your question?

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Question: Why does the German language have three genders?

Clarifying questions:

1. Do you want to know why German has three genders in opposition to other languages (such as French, Spanish, Italian) which have only two?

2. Would a linguistic theory of how gender evolves in language and where in this evolution the German language is to be situated answer your question?

3. Would a general theory over gender in languages answer your question?

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[1] Usually, causal relations are not linear, but tree-shaped, which makes it only more complicated, but does not change anything of my argument.

[2] It can be argued that this way to giving this social signal is fine. One could argue that the site cannot or should not make the effort, but should leave the duty of asking proper questions to the questioner. I disagree with this argument, but I do not want to focus my post on this question.

Answer 3

A whole lot of "why?" questions are just stated sloppily. The problem with "why" is that it is highly ambiguous (your assumption of "why always asks for causal reasoning" is just wrong IMHO):

1. Language learners tend to ask "why" because they are asking for a rule -those questions could simply be re-worded to "according to what rule is ...". It would be overly picky to ask every poster to re-word their question. In most of the cases, the OP is in a real need of an answer because they want to learn. The "why?" might just have been chosen because the OP is fluent in neither German nor English.

2. Random passers-by folk might ask "why" because they stumbled over something in German that is different to their language (most famous: "why Donaudampfschiff..."). This might not really be a question, but rather a "look, I found something funny" chatty statement. The OP doesn't really ask for an answer. We could simply close those, or at least, ask for re-wording.

3. Native speakers tend to ask "why" (if not for reason (2) because they are just in a chatty mood) because they might want to know linguistic development history - Especially those should know how to ask better and more precise.

... and there is definitely a lot more than just those three "why?"-reasons.

We definitely (I hope) don't want to scare off questions of class (1). Those should simply be answered in the sense of "according to that rule...". (2) questions are sometimes fun to answer, and for (3), we should definitely ask for re-wording.

So, a general mechanism on how to handle why-questions simply doesn't exist -they need to be handled case-by-case.

Answer 4

There are many different kinds of why in philosophical logic. We distinguish at least deductive, inductive and reductive reasoning. Epistemic logic might differentiate more, I don't know.

It should be notable that how and why are reasonably interchangable, as well as in translation wieso, weshalb, warum, but perhaps more commonly wie. Why would you say that, Wie kannst du sowas nur sagen (wie... so, was), how dare you, wie kannst du nur, why would you do that, what did you do that for, Oh Romeo wherefore are you, ... As we can see, the language offers a delicate selection of question words, and many more ways to paraphrase.

TL;DR: If people are asking imprecise questions, how (or why) should anyone know what they mean.

Simple answer: The most trivial questions occure repeatedly. I consider it a matter of didactic and pedagogy to deal with them appropriately, which might be impossible on such an impersonal level. Less frequent questions will be tendentionally even more complicated.

Long answer: If people use the site as extended web search and ask for "Dative, huh?", it should be closed for showing no own research, if a google search would in fact solve their problems. It might be necessary to be defensive here, erring on the side of caution. Less is more.

If a level of understanding is shown that warrants such a question, it might need motivation. Depends on the case. Constructing an example, or analysis of an example should be encouraged. This is so in particular because even seasoned editors might appreciate clever examples, too, but more so because asking the right question is half the way to an answer.

In the second case, the why-question isn't the target either. It merely sets the focus on word order. It does so only indirectly because, I reckon, they are not certain if the example is correct at all. I would not want to restrict the question on that point, if they already trust that it is probably correct. Again one might argue that it lacks research, relative to the difficulty of the construction.

Overall, in both cases I pressume those are duplicates inasmuch as they require thorough introductions to these textbook exame topics.

It should by the way not be a problem that these topics can be tackled with different approaches. That's not a fault of the askee, although it might be helpful if they offer a particular framework to work in. If this is missing, it should not be overinterpreted to go beyond the common curriculum.

So the basic problem is that a why-question is not self-explanatory about the askee's aims, and they can be open ended like why is the sky blue, why do I exist, or not? Open-ended questions are bad. However, lack of specifity also grants the opportunity to interpret the question appropriately. This is especially true when the askee is unaware of the actual problem. The question should ideally display some understanding and respective gaps in the understanding to come to an arbitrary point of interest.

Thus, to answer your questions:

1. There is no problem with Y-Questions. Yes/no questions might be more direct, and still require elaborate proof on occasion, but people might more efficiently ask multiple choice questions, or how/why when they are not sure what their options are.

2. If they know what the options are, the problem lies elsewhere .

3. If you'll excuse the pun, they might want to know how (in)correct their chosen option is, but they'll do the accounting themselves, you will only need to explain the why. That's when the stern schol-masters insistince is needed that that's just so and they will have to learn it, whereby it will be appreciated if authority is proved and not just blankly asserted.

4. There is unfortunately no general solution.

   1. There is in principle nothing wrong with closing a question, if the close reason is well justified, but the preset options, and the usual comments are often not justified. Arguably, you are interpreting the questuion at the moment that you deem it out of scope for the site. In case of why-questions this often implies that the existential questions would be basically theological or mystical in nature.

   2. The general rules about good answers apply. Even if you would consider an answer speculatively, it is usually permissable if adequately sourced. It is appropriate to addopt a question and edit it appropriately, if you are going to answer it yourself. Closure or deletion are in essence answeres as well.

However, the way you set up the questions with number 4.1. as the default case does not bode well for your general additude to these problems.

Corrolary: There should be no grounds to default to point 1 if only you don't know a suitable source, if you disagree with a particular line of research. Because, a maximally broad scope does not impede on a more narrow scope as you might have it in mind.