# How formal semantics models questions, answers, and presupposition **Artwork**: **Artist**: Arnaud Quercy **Asset**: IDS-RNI0133 **Serial**: NAN-RDG000077 This is a technical Stanford Encyclopedia entry surveying formal semantics and philosophy-of-language theories of questions, answers, presupposition, and embedded interrogatives (Hamblin, Karttunen, partition semantics, inquisitive semantics, Bromberger, van Fraassen, knowledge-wh) — a logical/linguistic taxonomy with no emitter, receiver, wave, codex, or creative act for the ideamorphism framework to grip; any mapping of 'answer-types' onto 'diffraction' or 'receivers' would be manufactured rather than found. ## Context ### Declined — `no-purchase` [@source] ### Propositional grid [@p31] > **Read this grid.** “Not evaluated” does **not** mean the source has nothing to say about that proposition. It means **the reading did not instruct it**. That is not a result, and it counts in no denominator. A silence, by contrast, is a finding: the reading touched the proposition without concluding, or noted its absence itself. **Not evaluated (37)** — P1, P2, P3, P3a, P4, P5, P6, P7, P8, P9, P10, P11, P12, P13, P14, P14a, P14b, P15, P16, P16a, P17, P18, P18a, P19, P19a, P20, P21, P22, P23, P24, P25, P26, P27, P28, P29, P30, P31 --- *Overall verdict: **DECLINED:no-purchase** — taxonomy of the August 2026 pass, predating the move to relational verdicts. Kept as metadata: the gap between the two forms is data, not residue. This reading’s judgement is in the grid above.* Reading of 2026-05-27 · model `claude-sonnet-5` · source 100,023 chars · 1 attempt(s) --- ### First pass — kept as written *Reading produced by the T50 RSS pass, before the boundary lens. It is reproduced UNCORRECTED. Keeping it is the point: without it, a changed title is just a changed title — with it, what the second pass refused becomes legible.* > The philosophy of questions illuminates the RICOCHET EFFECT and the structure of engineered diffraction. A question is not a completed emission — it is a deliberately incomplete wave, a gap that demands receiver contribution. Cross and Roelofsen's emphasis on interrogative sentences (not just declarative ones) describes the asymmetry ideamorphism requires: the emitter structures incompleteness; the receiver completes through their ouverture. A scientific investigation begins with a question precisely because questions are diffractive instruments — they force the receiver (the investigator) to activate their own codex, their own embodied knowledge. The question is the game designer's move; the answer is the player's score. This is why philosophy of language has underestimated questions: they don't transmit propositions, they engineer diffraction. T50 RSS assessment · 2026-05-27 · remplacée par `boundary-lens-2026-08`