Prompts Are Not Questions

The grammatical form of a question has almost nothing to do with what Gadamer meant by a genuine question. A sentence can take interrogative form and be a command: 'Could you close the door?' is a request for compliance, not an inquiry. Much of what passes for questioning in the AI conversation is of this kind — interrogative in syntax, imperative in substance. 'Can you write a Python function that sorts a list by the second element of each tuple?' is a prompt. The human who types it does not wonder whether the task can be accomplished. They know, within reasonable parameters, what the output should look like. The 'question' is simply the most convenient way of requesting it. Gadamer would not object to prompts as such — the productive capacity of tools is legitimate — but he would insist that prompting and questioning belong to different orders of engagement, and that confusing them constitutes the defining category error of the AI age.