Asking Questions Aloud: A Case for Interrogative Transmission

I argue that questions can be transmitted through asking just as beliefs are transmitted through testimony. Just as we rely on testifiers to assert only when their epistemic position is good enough, so (I argue) we rely on queriers to ask questions only if they are in a position to know that the question is sound, which guarantees that the asked question has an answer. Along the way, I argue against the view that we can only ask questions of people who (we know) know the answer to our questions. A recurring theme of the paper is that we learn about the norms for asking not just in those cases in which we straightforwardly comply with or violate them, but also by the ways we creatively deviate from the norms to accomplish our conversational goals.