Laura asked:

What do you call a question that has no answer?

Or perhaps: a question that cannot be answered?

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Perhaps you are thinking of the term "pseudo-question." A pseudo-question is one which has the
form of a question, but may suppose something that is false or makes no sense.

An example would be the famous lawyer's question of the accused: "Have you stopped beating your
wife?" when the accused does not have a wife, or perhaps does have a wife, but has never beaten
her. Either the answer "yes" or "no" would be obviously inappropriate. This kind of question is said to
commit "the fallacy of many questions."

Another type of pseudo-question would be the child's question, "How high is up?" The problem with
that "question" is that it supposes that "up" is the name of a place which it is not, rather than a
direction, which it is.

Another example of a pseudo-question (which is adapted from Wittgenstein) is: "What time is it now
on the Sun?" This "question" has no answer because there is no way (at least at present) of
calculating the time on the Sun.

Pseudo-questions, as I have said before, all have the defect of supposing something true which is not
true.

Of course, there are (and always have been) questions which may have answers we do not know
and, perhaps cannot discover. "Is there a God?" may be one of those. Or the question, "Is the
number of stars in the Universe odd or even?" is a question which, since there is some number of
stars in the Universe, there must be a correct answer, but it may be that no one will ever know the
answer. Certainly, no one now knows the answer.

Ken Stern

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