Subquestion

What is subquestion? How should it be defined?

Questions can have subquestions. For instance, the question "Was Peter the Great an emperor of Russia?" is a subquestion of "Who were the emperors of Russia?", which is itself a subquestion of a broader question "Who were the rulers of Russia?". But what makes some question a subquestion of another question?

In the scientonomic context, this term was first used by Paul Patton and Cyrus Al-Zayadi in 2021. The term is currently accepted by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is:

• A question Q is a subquestion of another question Q’, iff any direct answer to Q is also a partial answer to Q’.

Scientonomic History

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 August 2021	This is when Patton and Al-Zayadi's Disciplines in the Scientonomic Ontology hat offered a definition of the term was published. This is a good indication that the question of how the term is to be defined is considered legitimate by the community.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
Subquestion (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021)	A question Q is a subquestion of another question Q’, iff any direct answer to Q is also a partial answer to Q’.	2021

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	Subquestion (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021)	21 February 2024

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2021-0006	Scientonomy	1 August 2021	Accept new definitions of subquestion, core question, core theory, discipline, delineating theory, subdiscipline, and discipline acceptance.	Accepted	Prior to the 2024 workshop, Hakob Barseghyan commented on the encyclopedia indicating his support for accepting this modification and noted its potential to underpin further work on discipline dynamics. In fact, a significant amount of observational scientonomy work has been carried out in the past few years (including the paper on the rejection of alchemy by Friesen and Patton (2023),1 as well as some more recent papers) that presupposes the acceptance of these definitions, despite the fact that the modification containing them formally remains open. There was very little discussion about the modification, beyond raising points for the community to look forward to in the future, like a brief discussion between Jamie Shaw and Paul Patton about the need for more research on the difference between disciplines and disciplinary communities. The modification was accepted unanimously with 18 votes.	21 February 2024

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted definition of the term is Subquestion (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021).

Subquestion (Patton-Al-Zayadi-2021) states: "A question Q is a subquestion of another question Q’, iff any direct answer to Q is also a partial answer to Q’."

A question is a topic of inquiry.2 Questions can constitute hierarchies where more specific questions are subquestions of broader questions. For example, 'Was Peter the Great an emperor of Russia?' is a subquestion of 'Who were the emperors of Russia?' since by answering the former, we are also providing a partial answer to the latter. The latter is, in turn, a subquestion of the broader question 'Who were the rulers of European countries?'.3 A partial answer to a question is a complete, or direct, answer to one of its subquestions.456