Sentence examples for why-questions from high-quality English sources.

• You can understand why questions are being asked."

• Open-ended questions are good; “why” questions are bad.

• Second, historians often want to answer “why” questions: “Why did this event occur?

• Whereas many mainstream economists tend to ask “how” questions, evolutionary economists tend to ask “why” questions.

• In response to the What, How and Why questions many theories of consciousness have been proposed in recent years.

• A second major development in the theory of why-questions is the account of van Fraassen (1980, ch. 5).

• At the risk of oversimplifying, the relevant questions can be gathered under three crude rubrics as the What, How, and Why questions:

• The main proponent of this approach is Bromberger (1966), whose account is also the first influential account of why-questions.

Use why-questions in a sentence.

• Bromberger’s theory was aimed at saving certain intuitions about what should and should not count as correct answers to why-questions.

• Van Fraassen’s theory of why-questions is intended as a theory of explanation, but why-explanation seems not to be the only kind of explanation there is.

• It is possible to accept Cross’s theory as a theory of how-questions only and to resist the final move of unifying how- and why-questions into a single species of question.

• Having found examples in which how-questions have contrast value 1, Cross argues that why-questions, too, can presuppose that the other members of their contrast classes are true.

• She argues that we do not and that it is not surprising that we do not, given that we do not know the answer to hardly any of the how and why questions about the things that we encounter in nature.

• Rather than being mechanism-sketches, awaiting further mechanistic details to be turned into full-blown how-actually mechanisms, CNCs are invoked in a different explanatory context, namely, ones posing Batterman’s second type of why-questions.

• Teller proposes other counterexamples by devising a method for turning examples showing that Hempel’s deductive-nomological theory of explanation is too permissive into examples showing that Bromberger’s theory of why-questions is also too permissive.

• If we follow Hempel in regarding an explanation as an answer to a why-question, Bromberger’s theory of why-questions can be seen also as a theory of explanation, indeed, one that incorporates Hempel’s deductive-nomological model while aiming to improve on it.

why-questions sentence examples

• Indeed, in Hempel (1965c), he would distinguish between reason-seeking why-questions and explanation-seeking why-questions, where the former seek reasons that justify believing that something is the case, as opposed to the latter, which are usually motivated by knowledge that a specific event has occurred.

• Indeed, in the process of drawing the distinction between explanation-seeking and reason-seeking why-questions, Hempel (1965c) proposed a different kind of symmetry thesis, where adequate answers to explanation-seeking why-questions also provide adequate answers to reason-seeking why-questions, but not conversely.

• Avicenna explores various relations and concludes that what- and if-questions, in some of their declensions, are more fundamental in character, as why-questions ultimately reduce to questions about the essence of something, and if-questions express crucial necessary conditions for any science, namely the existence of basic entities in its domain and the assumption of certain fundamental predicative claims about them.

• After going over some preliminaries we will focus on three lines of work on questions: one located at the intersection of philosophy of language and formal semantics, focusing on the semantics of what Belnap and Steel (1976) call elementary questions; a second located at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of science, focusing on why-questions and the notion of explanation; and a third located at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology, focusing on embedded or indirect questions.