Answering Unanswerable Questions

Reframing and Moving Beyond Implications

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Introduction

There are a number of questions designed specifically to not have answers or statements designed to be imponderable. Some of them actually do have answers, it seems, when you peel away what the question or statement actually says versus what is implied. Over the years, I've found alternate ways of looking at three of these - one came to me this week - so I thought I'd share these pearls of wisdom. Sometimes all it takes is to reframe the question.

Example 1: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This is an age-old question, designed to be imponderable - if the chicken is first, then didn't it hatch out of an egg? If the egg came first, what animal laid that egg? The answer to the question can be seen by reframing the question with a slight rewording:

Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?

That question might be imponderable, when the original one is not. Dinosaurs, as one example, laid eggs and predated chickens by millions of years. Thus, the egg came first.

Example 2: That is six of one, half-a-dozen of another.

This statement is clearly designed to mean something that doesn't make any difference - both alternatives are the same. However, a little reframing shows that they are not the same. Imagine I get my six or half dozen through a process of ordering food, especially at a bakery. In that context I might get 13 (a baker's dozen) and thus a "half-a-dozen" might yield 6.5 rather than just 6. It doesn't have to happen all the time for there still to be a difference - there is a small probability that half-a-dozen is a bit more than six.

Example 3: When I was a kid, I walked to school in the snow, up hill both ways.

My final example is a common phrase uttered by parents to humorously exaggerate the efforts they had to make as kids. The imponderable, of course, is how can you walk to a place and back going up hill both ways. We can see that this is indeed a possibility, if we reframe the statement a bit.

I walked to school in the snow, up hill the entire way both ways.

Now we can obviously see that the way to be able to go up hill both ways is if the trip involves a downhill and an uphill - you will be going up hill both ways, at some point.

Now, you may find some of these a little stretched, and making much ado about nothing, but I think the lesson here is larger. Sometimes people try to frame a problem with an "obvious" interpretation to get you to think in a certain way. However, with an eye for the difference between stated and implied, we can come to reasonable alternatives.