The intentionality of questions and answer: a phenomenological analysis of the questioning act

The present work has two aims: to fill in this gap in the phenomenological literature and to examine the intentionality of a question, and this in order to elucidate the 'question-structure' of intentionality. The argument is basically this: Intentionality or conscious 'aboutness' is a riveting. The act does not 'stare' at its referent, courtesy of its 'sense'. As an act, it rivets on it, and it does so to the extent that either the object is interesting or the act is being informed. What's "interesting" holds out different possibilities (maybe A, or B, or C); what's informative is the reduction of those possibilities (A--not B or C). What is 'interesting' elicits that response called 'questioning'. In the answering-in the actualization of the question--the act itself becomes 'informative'. Thus, the act rivets on its object-the act is an act-in so far as it is structurally that of either a questioning or an answering, or somewhere in between. Thus, the 'question-notions' of interestedness and informativeness must figure centrally in a theory of intentionality. This being so, there are some other key notions that will have to be revised. or introduced accordingly. Not least of them are the notions of "emptiness" and fulfilment, of truth and evidence, and the problem of how reality is disclosed to us.