A Question Will Never Walk Alone

Abstract

In Knowing What Things Are, Abath shifts the focus of epistemology from propositional knowledge to the capacity to answer questions, emphasizing knowledge as an outcome of human activity. He highlights the role of interrogatives in epistemic evaluation. However, his emphasis on Socratic questions ("What is X?") overlooks the interconnectedness of different types of questions within an inquiry. This paper examines two Socratic questions: "What is a gene?" and "What is a marriage?" In the case of "What is a gene?" advances in molecular biology challenge the classical molecular gene concept, leading to a pluralistic or emergent definition. Inquiry into genes involves meta-level questions concerning the concept’s definition and the role of related terms such as "heritable." Similarly, "What is a marriage?" encompasses both descriptive and normative dimensions, requiring an understanding of legal, social, and cultural definitions. Abath’s erotetic framework, which aims to refine answers to Socratic questions, must account for these meta-level inquiries and the various ways an inquiry can be directed to provide a more comprehensive depiction of knowledge as an activity.

Keywords:
Epistemology; Metalevel; Questions

1. Introduction

The project of Knowing What Things Are is an extremely valuable one: it seeks to shift the focus of epistemology from propositional knowledge to our capacity to answer questions. The book recommends us to think of “epistemic agents as engaged in inquiries, that is, in activities that aim to find things out, or, more precisely, that aim to find things out by answering certain questions.” (Abath 2022, p. 3) André Abath follows the lead of some authors such as Christopher Hookway. Hookway identifies “four different ways in which our ability to use and understand interrogatives has an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation” (Hookway 2008, p.1): the identification of our cognitive goals, the capacity to elicit information, the regulative control of our inquiries, and their role in knowledge attribution.

This shift of emphasis highlights the fact that knowledge is the result of our activities. In effect, Hookway’s first three points characterize a course of actions: the definition of a goal, the way we seek to attain this goal, and the control of what we are doing. The fourth item (the role of interrogatives in knowledge attributions), as Hookway himself says, is a bit of an outlier in the list. I take it that one of the important results in Abath’s argument is to explain how propositional knowledge is a relevant form of knowledge when it settles a question, and that is Hookway’s first point: the definition of the goal of an inquiry. The focus on the first point of this shift in epistemology is already a hint of what is missing in Abath’s own inquiry: an account of how we seek to reach a certain goal and of different sorts of metacognitive controls embedded in inquiries.

It may be said that these concerns are beyond the scope of this book, that aims at a specific kind of question, of the form ‘What is X?’ - let us call it the Socratic question. Fair enough. However, we can rephrase this concern: different kinds of questions are so intertwined that, quite often, we do not engage in answering a Socratic question without addressing other sorts of questions as part of the same inquiry, we are engaged in a Quinean web of questions.¹

The book identifies different sorts of answers to questions of the form ‘what is X?’. There are two crucial dimensions along which these answers vary: the depth of the answer and the nature of the entity that is the object of the inquiry. Regarding the first point, we expect different things, for instance, from a child and from a physicist in answering the question ‘What is a star?’. While both may be said to know the answer, they operate at very different levels. Maybe this can be explained by the different goals of an inquiry, a point that aligns with what contextualist epistemologists have been arguing for some time about the role of context in ascribing knowledge. The second dimension is that different kinds of things and events ask for different kinds of answers - from natural kinds, such as stars and tigers, to social kinds, such as marriages and contracts, with intermediate cases along the way, such as gender and race - well, if they are, or if there are in-between cases.

I will consider two Socratic questions, ‘What is a gene?’ and ‘What is a marriage?’ While Abath examines the second question in his book, he does not address the first. I will try to show what is missing in Abath’s account: that an inquiry consists of a series of interconnected questions that can only be kept apart in very artificial contexts. My focus will be on the multi-layered nature of an inquiry, that is, the fact that quite often, when trying to answer a Socratic question, we are led to meta-level questions. This is precisely what happens in queries around the questions ‘What is a gene?’ and ‘What is a marriage?’ While I think that the focus on Socratic questions, or indeed, in any isolated question, is ultimately untenable, the erotetic framework is quite apt to give a better view of our epistemic activities and how they unfold at the different levels. In other words, Abath’s own project could be significantly enhanced by shifting away from the narrow focus on Socratic questions.

2. What is a gene?

What is a gene? Let us take as a starting point the “classical molecular gene concept, according to which a gene is a stretch of DNA that encodes a functional product, a single polypeptide chain or RNA molecule.” (El-Hani 2007, p. 298). This definition is the result of the association of a view of the gene as whatever unit is responsible for what is transmitted from parents to offspring - the Mendelian view - with the discovery the DNA, by James Watson and Francis Crick, showing that what is encoded by such molecules is the template for the production of proteins.² Let us call such components of the definition of the gene, respectively, the functional and the structural elements. This definition cannot be sustained - there is no way to keep together the functional and the structural components. As Charbel El- Hani puts it,

the problems with the gene concept can be explained as a consequence of three features, established by molecular biology/genetics: (i) one- to-many correspondences between DNA segments and RNAs/polypeptides (e.g., alternative splicing); (ii) many-to-one correspondences between DNA segments and RNAs/polypeptides (e.g., genomic rearrangements); and (iii) lack of correspondence between DNA segments and RNAs/polypeptides (e.g., mRNA editing). (El-Hani 2007, p. 299)³

Moreover, much of the genetic code is redundant,

<…> so that many changes will have no effect at all on the functioning of the gene, and there are very likely to be changes that do make a difference to the transcription of the gene, but do not prevent is proper functioning. (Dupré 2012, p. 80)

On top of that, a large part of the genome is constituted of non-coding sequences, that have nevertheless a role in the structure of the DNA molecule, and regulate the expression of protein coding sequences. That’s what El-Hani (2007) calls “the crisis of the gene concept.”

In trying to answer the question ‘What is a gene?’, authors often grapple with a related question: is there a single concept of gene? Or, in Carnap’s formal mode, is there a single definition of ‘gene’? Evelyn Fox Keller is not very optimistic about finding an answer to the question ‘What is a gene?’:

<…> the causal interaction between DNA, proteins, and trait development are so entangled, so dynamic, and so dependent on context that the very question of what genes do no longer makes much sense. Indeed, biologists are no longer confident that it is possible to provide an unambiguous answer to the question of what a gene is. The particulate gene is a concept that has become increasingly ambiguous and unstable, and some scientists have begun to argue that the concept has outlived its productive prime. (Keller 2010, p. 50)⁴

Given this complexity, one may take a pluralistic stance towards the concept of gene, as John Dupré does:

The diversity of kinds of entity and the desirability of taxonomic stability seem exactly to mirror the issues that arise for the case of species. So my proposal is for an atheoretical pluralism similar to that which I advocate for species: a gene is any bit of DNA that anyone has reason to name and keep track of. Genes may be proper parts of other genes; they may overlap; they may have non-contiguous parts, perhaps on two or more chromosomes. And, as illustrated for the case of developmental defect genes, ‘gene’ may even refer to a functionally connected class of DNA segments. My conclusion is that there are genes-an important point given how much people talk about them- but that the price of this is conceding that it doesn’t take much to be a gene. Not much, but not nothing either. (Dupré 2012, p.112)

Notice that the difficulty of a unifying definition is not a privilege of the concept of gene, but also of the concept of species - indeed, my argument here could be deployed for the concept of species, to similar effects. Notice also the semantic ascent (“… ‘gene’ may even refer to…”) - a theoretical move to which we will come back. Such a vague concept allows “some degree of communication between people with varying interests in the workings of, for example, the genome.” (Dupré 2012, p. 112) Indeed, this may even be a feature of some central scientific concepts:

Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (2000) has suggested that central scientific concepts, like the gene, function precisely by remaining sufficiently vague to allow communication between all the various groups that have an interest in talking about such things, but very diverse accounts of what it is they are talking about. (Dupré 2012, p. 111)

If this is right, the very project of seeking a definition of the gene is misleading.

Of course, one could adopt a more optimistic stance towards the concept of gene. However, given the difficulties arising from the mismatch between the identification of a stretch of DNA and the coding for a protein, one still has to go to a metalevel to justify the viability of the concept. This is the case of Francesca Bellazzi. She defines genes as weakly emergent entities:

<…> a gene emerges from a precise stretch of DNA when it is expressed, thanks to the interactions that make it novel and robust. (Bellazzi 2022, p. 3)

As she suggests a new definition of gene taking account of the very complex contexts of its expression, Bellazzi also takes a metatheoretical stance concerning the definition of emergent entities:

A consequence will be that genes emerge during gene expression, that is in the moment in which transcription is happening, and they are constituted by some nucleic acids. However, this proposal remains weak and coherent with non-eliminativist ontological reductionism. When I write of genes as emergent entities, I do not mean they are concrete separated individual objects, but simply that they exist as something qualitatively distinct from the mere DNA bases. The components of the gene are identified with specific tokens of chemical molecules involved at the time considered, but they are not any molecules but the ones with the property Ft <i.e., the property of being transcribable or actively involved in transcription>. (Bellazzi 2022, p. 18)

We are, of course, far removed from the identification of structural and functional properties that originally defined the molecular gene concept. It is this departure that requires an account of the nature of the entity aimed at by the concept of gene - not a sequence of DNA outside any context of expression, but stretches of DNA involved in the process of expression.

The first result is that there is no inquiry seeking an answer to the question ‘What is a gene?’ without addressing the metatheoretical questions: is there a single concept of gene? And if so, what sort of definition are we looking for? But that’s not all. Keller argues that the difficulties around the answer to the question ‘What is a gene’, or rather ‘What does ‘gene’ mean?’ have their origin in some other questions of the same metalinguistic kind:

The culprit here is not the word ‘gene,’ but in the closely related words ‘heritable’ and ‘heritability’ (Keller 2010, p. 55)

Not only the question ‘What is a gene?’ cannot be addressed without the metalevel question concerning its answerability, but we cannot even understand what is stake without addressing other similar questions of the form ‘What is X?’, but also ‘what does ‘X’ mean?’, or so argues Keller. In effect, she says, language misleads us here, by associating the statistic concept of heritability with the ordinary meaning of ‘heritable’, that designates what is “naturally transmissible or transmitted from parent to offspring” (Oxford English Dictionary apud Keller 2010, p. 56) The importance of this semantic ascent lies in the fact that

<…> we are plagued by a linguistic practice that elides the distinction between the causal dynamics of individual development and statistical patterns of correlation. (Keller 2010, p. 63)

As she explains, even scientists may be led astray by this confusion, “carried by the language the authors conventionally employ.” (Keller 2010, p. 63) There is a web of concepts and words that requires that metatheoretical and metalinguistic inquiries are run in parallel with the object- level question ‘What is a gene?’ To state this point more explicitly, as we seek an answer to the question ‘What is a gene?’, we also have to address many other questions:

1. Is there a concept of gene, that is, is it worth trying to find a definition for this concept?

2. Are we dealing with a vague concept, so that trying to find a precise definition of gene is hopeless?

3. If there is a precise definition of gene, what sort of entity are we defining, given that the classical molecular gene concept is no longer available?

4. Can we answer this question without addressing other questions of the same sort (what is heritable? What is heritability?)?

5. What is definition of the word ‘gene’, and of related words?

Questions (i)-(iii) are metatheoretical queries, question (iv) calls our attention to the dense conceptual web of which the concept of gene is part, and the metalinguistic question (v) reminds us that there are different sorts of reasons to pay attention to the words we use - from the communication across theoretical divides to the awareness of how language may lead us astray. We cannot answer ‘What is a gene?’ without answer many other questions, some of which are deployed at a metalevel, and some are part of a Quinean web of concepts.

3. What is a marriage?

What is a marriage? Marriage is a strongly social kind, says Abath, and answering the Socratic question about this sort of event⁵ brings an extra layer of complexity. In effect, as we try to define strongly social kinds, we are engaged in a project that is both descriptive and normative:

So, an improved answer to the question of what a strongly social kind is should satisfy three conditions: (i) the answer should be supported by an appropriate description of the practice in a given institutional setting; (ii) the answer should be supported by an appropriate evaluation of the practice, one whose outcome is that previous answers to the question are found to be unjust, unreasonable etc.; (iii) the new answer proposed to the question should be one that remedies the failures of the previous answers; that is, it should promote social justice, be reasonable etc (Abath 2022, p. 86)

Abath is right in engaging in this more complex project: in attempting to answer the question ‘What is a marriage?’, he also reflects on the kind of definition he seeks. However, at least as far as I can see, he doesn’t see the metatheoretical investigation concerning the sort of event being defined as part of his inquiry. To say it otherwise, closer to his erotetic framework, he doesn’t ask metalevel questions, neither the metatheoretical question ‘Is there a single concept of marriage?’, nor the metalinguistic question ‘what is the definition of ‘marriage’?’.

How so? Isn’t the quote above about clearly at metatheorical level, particularly when contrasted with natural kind definitions? Yes, this is a metatheorical answer, without a metatheorical question. Abath doesn’t seem to consider that there may be different kinds of answers to the question ‘What is a marriage?’. The complexity of this point is quite explicit at the beginning of Elizabeth Brake’s entry on marriage in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

‘Marriage’ can refer to a legal contract and civil status, a religious rite, and a social practice, all of which vary by legal jurisdiction, religious doctrine, and culture. (Brake 2021)

It is so complicated to give a single answer that the title of the entry is ‘Marriage and Domestic Partnership’. The very first thing that should be done here is either to accept a pluralistic view of what a marriage is or to explain how, on the face of a prima facie diversity of the concept, there is nevertheless a single definition of marriage, more or less along the lines, respectively, of Dupré and Bellazzi for the concept of gene. Unlike the concept of gene, however, we are not facing a change in a theoretical framework, but a mixture of descriptive and normative considerations, and a changing conceptual landscape that is both normative and descriptive.

To be fair, Abath engages in a discussion about strongly social kinds that addresses at least some of the concerns that are reflected in Brake’s list. Let us start with his definition of strongly social kinds:

Now, for ease of exposition, let us a call a social kind k which is such that what k is largely determined by the attitudes of subjects toward k a strongly social kind. (Abath 2022, p. 81)

This object-level answer may also be a metalevel answer: Abath seems to tackle marriage as a social practice. However, it is not entirely clear that an institutional fact k is determined solely by the attitudes of subjects toward k-or at least not without significant qualifications. A marriage is, among other things, a legal status. While a legal status may, in complex ways, emerge from the attitudes of individuals regarding certain social facts, it possesses a normative force that cannot be entirely reduced to the attitudes that contributed to its creation.

According to John Searle, a marriage is a “general-purpose structural institution”, along with money and government. (Searle 2010, p.91) If the existence of institutions depends on their being recognized by subjects, which is compatible with Abath’s definition, deontic statuses go beyond the current attitudes of subjects. Or rather, in Searle’s terms,

once recognized, [deontic powers] provide us with reasons for acting that are independent of our inclinations and desires. (Searle 2010, p. 9)

There are, at least, two kinds of attitudes, our inclinations and desires, on the one hand, and our commitments to deontic statuses that follow the very existence of institutional facts, on the other.

We may, of course, refuse Searle’s analysis of institutions. However, going back to the concept of marriage, it seems to me clear that the question ‘What is a marriage?’ has (at least) two very different meanings, or two different targets, that parallel the distinction between inclinations and desires, on the one hand, and deontic status, on the other. From a legal point of view, a marriage is whatever the law of a given polity recognizes as a marriage. There are a host of consequences that follows from the answer to this legal question, that are, precisely, deontic statuses. But we may also ask what people in a given society recognize as a marriage, that is, their inclinations and desires.

These two answers may not be aligned in different dimensions. Synchronically, there may be different attitudes in a society towards marriage, even when there is a single legal definition. Diachronically, institutions may well result from attitudes, but they are much more stable. Even supposing a large homogeneity of attitudes in a group about a given institutional fact, there may still be a mismatch due to the mere stability of institutions: attitudes change faster than laws. Maybe more importantly and, to a certain extent, as a result of the misalignment of institutions and current attitudes, we may have a normative stance towards a given institution - what it should be - and a descriptive view of attitudes towards it - what people think about it - that do not converge.

Abath recognizes this duality in the concept of marriage, but in a way that is not, to my mind, entirely satisfactory. I will start by quoting a footnote that encapsulates what seems puzzling to me.

It is important to note that what marriage is may be largely determined by law-and thus by the attitudes of subjects toward the kind-and thus to count as a strongly social kind in our sense, without being completely determined by law. After all, as put by Epstein, “marriage is larger than just the legal regulations. Marriage is a long-standing and widespread institution across the world and remains anchored, in part, by historical and ongoing practices. These practices can lag changes in legal regulation, or the law can lag changes in practice. This means that definitions in the law can get it wrong about marriage. The law has enormous bearing on marriage, but the category is a hybrid of law and sociology”. Epstein’s point according to which definitions offered by law can be wrong in respect to what marriage is will be especially relevant for the discussion that follows. (Abath 2022, p. 81)

The first point is that even if the law is determined by the attitudes of subjects, it does not co-vary with those attitudes, as Epstein explicitly recognizes. Even if the origin of the law is a set of attitudes towards a certain object, once it is promulgated, it no longer tracks those attitudes. A marriage as a legal status is entirely determined by law.

Things may not be that straightforward. Consider Amie Thomasson’s useful ontological framework for artifacts: laws depend generically historically on mental states - that is, they are brought into existence by intentional acts, such as writing or voting -, and also generically constantly on mental states - that is, their continuing existence depends

<…> on the presence of a community in which they are directly accepted as laws (through people believing that this is a law) or indirectly (e.g., through people believing that that anything passed by the legislature and remaining on the books is a law, even if no one happens to recall this law). (Thomasson 1999, p.130)

The creation of a law and its continuing existence do not depend on the same mental states. Once there is a law in a given polity, the acceptance that it is a law does not depend on subjects thinking it is a good law, with the set of legal commitments and entitlements that follows from it being a law. It depends on the acceptance of the legal system. Indeed, that’s the reason why one may try the change the law. A consequence of this distinction is that there not one single definition of marriage. Let us accept there is, say, a cultural definition of marriage, as suggested by Epstein, and a legal definition. That already makes two answers for the Socratic question ‘What is a marriage?’. Since Abath’s definition of marriage is tied to the attitudes of the subjects, and a law is connected with attitudes at one remove, so to speak, he seems to define marriage as a social practice. Let us suppose that Abath is looking for a definition that tracks the attitudes of subjects towards marriage - mind you, not the legal definition. But it is not that clear that this is what he

is trying to do.

Abath asks how we should give a definition for strongly social kind, of which a marriage is an example:

I would like to defend a view according to which a central task of social theory <…> is to provide us with improved, better views on what strongly social kinds are. To put the point in erotetic terms, I will suggest that a central task of social theory is to provide us with better answers to questions of the form “What is x?”, where x stands for a strongly social kind. I will call projects of improving answers to questions of this form erotetic amelioration. (Abath 2022, p. 82)

What is erotetic amelioration? Here is the answer:

So, an improved answer to the question of what a strongly social kind is should satisfy three conditions: (i) the answer should be supported by an appropriate description of the practice in a given institutional setting; (ii) the answer should be supported by an appropriate evaluation of the practice, one whose outcome is that previous answers to the question are found to be unjust, unreasonable etc.; (iii) the new answer proposed to the question should be one that remedies the failures of the previous answers; that is, it should promote social justice, be reasonable etc. (Abath 2022, p. 86)

Here, we are no longer talking about attitudes, but about an institutional setting, that is, a legal definition. Indeed, if this sort of enterprise - giving a new definition of marriage - has any prospect of promoting social justice, it aims at the legal status.

While it is reasonable to think that theoretical considerations can have a bearing on legal matters - indeed, this was the case in Canada⁶ -, it can change the attitude of persons in a community only marginally (maybe this is part of my skepticism concerning the prospects of engineering concepts for the general use of a population beyond the philosophical community, but that is another matter).

The main problem is that I do not see how we can have an answer that is, at the same time, a description of a certain state of affairs and a normative judgement about that same state of affairs. We cannot answer, at same time, the questions ‘What is a marriage?’ and ‘What a marriage should be?’. Of course, we may expect that a proper description of a certain state of affairs prompts a normative reaction in people, and may even expect that every rational being, given a certain description of a practice, will land at the same normative point (well, I don’t think it is a reasonable expectation, but let us grant that).⁷ It still doesn’t make ‘What is a marriage?’ and ‘What a marriage should be?’ the same question.

We can read what I take to be a confusion of kinds of questions in Abath’s own definition (in legal terms, mind you):

(2) Marriage is the legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship.

This is an answer, after all, that makes for more just, inclusive, reasonable practices when it comes to marriages. (Abath 2022, p. 87)

As a legal answer, it depends on indexing it to a legal system. But if we imagine it to be about a polity that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage in its legal system - which is presumably the situation in which (2) would promote social justice -, it is a false answer. We can, however, consider that it states what should be recognized as a marriage by law, as suggested by the sentence that follows the definition. In this case, (2) does not state what is a marriage, but what it should be, or, in erotetic terms, he is not answering the question ‘What is a marriage?’, but ‘What should a marriage be?’

We can contrast this answer with Adèle Mercier’s affidavit to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. In his argument against same-sex marriage, Rob Stainton claimed that extending the definition of ‘marriage’ to same-sex couples “is in conflict with the normal use and development of language.” (Stainton apudMercier 2001, p. 3). Mercier responds that

even if it were true that the word ‘marriage’ had referred in the past only to pairs of men and women <a claim that Mercier finds doubtful>, that would in no way constitute an argument about the word’s meaning, nor an argument that the word ‘marriage’ cannot refer to pairs other than men and women. (Mercier 2001, p. 5)

This is a general feature of language, continues Mercier:

The meanings of all words in all languages, with the exception of proper names <…> always stretch beyond their current reference. (Mercier 2001, p. 6)

Stainton’s argument, says Mercier,

<…> is a depressingly popular argument, depressing because it displays a profound misunderstanding of the workings of language. (Mercier 2008, p. 407)

Mercier is not arguing how words should behave, she is saying how they do behave. Of course, we may disagree with her claims about the relation between meaning and reference, or about the application of this distinction to this specific case. What is crucial, however, is that even if she has a normative goal, she does not confuse normative and descriptive languages.

IV

We can glean three lessons from these two examples. The first one is that metalinguistic questions are never afar from Socratic questions. It is not only a matter of keeping communication channels open across conceptual divides, or through vaguely defined conceptual borders, but also of understanding how language may lead us astray. And, in many cases, it is not so easy to keep apart inquiries about concepts and about language. Both Tyler Burge and Charles Travis, quoted in the appendices, talk about concepts as much as about language use.

The second lesson is that which question should be asked and at what point of the inquiry is part of a strategy. Mercier answers Stainton’s linguistic thesis, and that may very well explain why she has taken a metalinguistic point of view.⁸ This is always the case, questions are part of a strategy, and not only as a result of a dialectical choice, as Jaakko Hintikka has argued.⁹ Deciding to focus on one specific question, say, a Socratic question, is a decision about how to conduct an inquiry, quite often by bracketing other questions. But as we have seen in both of our examples, in many cases - and mainly in disputed cases -, we simply cannot bracket other questions in order to properly address the Socratic question in view.

The third lesson is that quite often, and mainly in disputed questions, the inquiry is multi-layered. I have suggested how it plays out for the questions ‘What is a gene?’ and ‘What is a marriage?’, but this sort of move is really quite common. Let me give another example, quite briefly. In order to answer the question ‘What is Indo-European?’, one has to know what sort of evidence can be adduced to answer it, and a change in evidential basis has led to new answer, or rather to reassessing a previously dismissed answer.¹⁰

However, it seems to me that Abath’s erotetic framework is apt to deal with evolving, multi-layered inquiries, and inquiries, or at least interesting inquiries, tend to evolve at different levels, that is, they tend to ask different questions. Isolating one sort of question is not only artificial, but mainly it does not give a proper framework, neither descriptive and nor normative, about knowledge as an activity. If he drops the focus on Socratic questions, Abath will be able to give a much better picture of what an inquiry is.

References

• Bellazzi, Francesca (2022) The Emergence of the Postgenomic Gene. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12, 17
• Brake, Elizabeth (2021) Marriage and Domestic Partnership. In Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall 2021/entries/marriage/>.
  » https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall 2021/entries/marriage/
• Dupré, John (2012) Processes of Life - Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. Oxford University Press.
• El-Hani, Charbel Niño (2007) Between the cross and the sword: The crisis of the gene concept. Genetics and Molecular Biology 30(2), 297-307.
• Graber, David; Wengrow, David (2021) The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Everything. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Hintikka, Jaakko (2007) Socratic Epistemology - Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning. Cambridge University Press.
• Hookway, Christopher (2008) Questions, Epistemology, and Inquiries. Grazer Philosophische Studien 77, 1-21.
• Keller, Evelyn Fox (2010) The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Duke University Press.
• Medeiros, Eduardo V. (2003) Críticas Filosóficas do Casamento - Uma Coletânea de Ensaios. UFPel.
• Mercier, Adèle (2001) Halpern v. Canada (Attorney General) Affidavit of Dr. Adèle Mercier, Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Available at https://www.samesexmarriage.ca/docs/adele_merci er.pdf
  » https://www.samesexmarriage.ca/docs/adele_merci er.pdf
• Mercier, Adèle (2008) On the Nature of Marriage: Somerville on Same-Sex Marriage. The Monist 91(3/4), 408-421.
• Quine, Willard v. O.; Ullian, Joseph U. (1978) The Web of Belief 2 ed.. McGraw Hill.
• Searle, John (2010) Making the Social World - The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press.
• Thomasson, Amie (1999) Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press.

• 1
  See Quine and Ullian (1978), particularly chap. IX.
• 2
  “One gene might be correlated with a wide variety of phenotypic traits and, on the other hand, most traits required a variety of genes for their manifestation. However, as the mode of action of DNA became clear, namely as providing a template for the production of protein sequences, it seemed possible that genes could be unequivocally identified in terms of the protein sequence the production of which they directed.” Dupré (2012, p. 50).
• 3
  “As David Hull observed over thirty years ago (Hull 1974), the relations between Mendelian genes and molecular genes are many/many. So Mendelian genetics, a scientific project still very much alive in medicine and agronomy, employs concepts that are incommensurable with those that pertain to the molecular entities that, in some sense, underlie the Mendelian phenomena. And subsequent developments in molecular genetics have suggested that the problems are more severe even than Hull could have known.” Dupré (2012, p. 130).
• 4
  Keller also shifts the question from a definitional query to an explanatory view (what genes do), but let us assume that this is part of the question ‘what is a gene?’.
• 5
  I will take a marriage to be a kind of event, and not a kind of entity, but not much depends on this choice.
• 6
  See Mercier (2001).
• 7
  There are at least three different normative questions here: (i) should female-male couples and same-sex couples have the same legal status?, (ii) is it a proper normative answer, if a legal system grants the same rights to same-sex couples that are granted to married heterosexual couples, without calling this legal status ‘marriage’?, and (iii) if a legal system grants the same rights, by the same name, both to heterosexual and homosexual couples, should this status be called ‘marriage’? Even if we give a positive answer to (i), we still need to address the other two questions. Questions really tend to come in flocks. For a nice collection of papers discussing the concept of marriage, see Medeiros (2023).
• 8
  She is much more focused on the concept of marriage, as opposed to a discussion about the uses of the word ‘marriage’, in Mercier (2008).
• 9
  See papers in Hintikka (2007).
• 10
  See Graeber and Wengrow (2021, p. 216-220) - this is just one of the joys of this wonderful book, that asks so many questions, at different many different levels.

• Article info
  CDD: 120
• Funding:
  Funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. Grant Number: 302659/2018-8.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Mar 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  15 Nov 2024
• Accepted
  03 Feb 2025