Announcement by The GovLab: “Questions shape what becomes visible, what is investigated, what is funded, and ultimately what societies come to know. They are fundamental not only to scientific inquiry but to a wide range of sectors and practices—from education and journalism to policymaking, medicine, law, and business, among others. Despite this foundational role, questions are seldom treated as objects of systematic study. Established fields examine intelligence, knowledge production, and decision-making, yet few, if any, take questions themselves as their subject.
Today, questions are most often discussed in narrow, instrumental terms: as prompts to feed an AI system or as items on a survey. Beyond these framings, we tend to assume that we are all naturally competent questioners, drawing on the innate urge to ask that emerges in early childhood and drives how we learn. Yet the capacity to ask does not guarantee the capacity to ask well.
How should we define a good question? Which questions are most likely to serve as stepping stones toward breakthrough insights? What kinds of questions inform different types of decisions? Who determines which questions matter most? How do we architect a line of inquiry: that is, how does one question productively lead to the next? How are curiosity and questioning related? Which questions endure across generations, and which quietly fade?
What, in short, do we actually know about questions?
At present, we lack a science of questions: a field dedicated to understanding how questions emerge, how they evolve, which questions make the greatest impact, and how they shape the trajectory of knowledge across disciplines and generations…(More)”.
