---
layout: post
title: "On two modes of question `why`"
date: 2018-09-12 15:45:05
categories: language
---

Natural languages are ambiguous in many ways, including lexical. We're all used
to one word having different meanings (or multiple different words having the
same spelling and pronunciation, depending on meaning of word "word"). But some
of these differences are more elusive than other.

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For example, if you know enough english (and, preferably, another language with
different kind of why-words), you might've noticed that word "why" may mean "for
what reason" or "for what purpose". But the point of this post is a more subtle
difference. Even the for-what-reason meaning is still ambiguous.

Consider question like "why Earth is spherical?". Aside from ironical or
pedantic responses, we may legitimately answer "because gravity shaped it so" or
"because if you travel, it loops with spherical topology and it also looks
mostly spherical from space...".

Both of this responses are about causality (rather than purpose). But first one
gives cause of predicate's referent, while second one explains why did we
conclude that predicate is true. Depending on question, either of this meanings
may make little sense. For example, question "why is this apple green?" about
concrete observable apple is most likely about apple's story and not our
perception. On the contrary, "why 2+2 = 4?" is a question about our cognition
because mathematical objects do not live in time and can't have any causal story
(though something like "concepts of math objects in people's minds" may very
well have a whole history).

By the way, remember i ranted about *natural* languages at the beginning? Well,
constructed languages can be much less ambiguous and for example lojban does
distinguish between different types of reasons. I don't remember precise words,
though. [Look it up](https://lojban.github.io/cll/9/7/).

...

If you still have little idea of what this is all about, or disagree on some
points, you may wonder "why is this post so bad?". And to that i can name any
amount of reasons ranging from lack of author's sleep to imperfect
perfectionism, or i can just say "because you've read it and concluded that it
is *so bad*".
