Complex and Leading Questions

By

Many of my friends practice law at District Court Bemina. They often share with me court-room stories consisting of strange, amusing and terrifying happenings. One thing I want to talk about a little is cross-examination of a witness, more specifically the tools with which it's carried out. Cross-examination by definition is always carried out by the opponent counsel to the witness called by the adversary party. One of my lawyer friends recounted a story wherein Mushtaq Dar, a famous criminal lawyer here in Srinagar, cross-examined a female witness. My friend recalled that no sooner had he started cross-examining her than the lady started perspiring profusely. He plied her with so many questions and in such a way that she literally started crying. It wasn't because she was guilty or complicit in or a accomplice to a crime. No, far from it. It was the very vibe which the lawyer created that frightened her. The situation worsened so much so that the judge had to intervene. Owing to the judge's intercession, the counsel relaxed his enquiry a bit. The proceedings had to be adjourned. 

The reason I brought this up is to put before you the tools which such lawyers wield, and whose effectiveness is all the more compounded by their years' of experience and practice. Complex Question and Leading Question are two such tools which also find their place in the category of logical fallacies. Some logicians and philosophers debate their placement among such categories, but they've been included anyway since Aristotle. Complex Question and Leading question are not just what their names indicate: questions. They're more than that. Their interrogative guise is a deception. They're fallacious argument because of their structural and constituent nature. As a sidenote, arguments are fallacious either materially or formally, which is to say either their premises are false or their structure is defective. Back to the two tools, whenever they're asked, they come with a whole hidden package of suppositions, presuppositions and assumptions. If you happen to answer them in the affirmative or in the negative, you're trapped. Here, mere yes or no amounts to suicide. These kinds of questions carry with them a full-fledged argument consisting of explicit or implicit premises and a conclusion. After either of them is thrown at you, you end up in a position where it's not only your answer, but how you've understood the question that will decide what might proceed further.  There's a little difference between Complex Question and Leading question. The former comes with a baggage containing a conclusion, along with the premises (which are presuppositions). The latter is already pregnant with the answer. 

‌Looking at it from a broader perspective, we find it's not just the court room setting where these things are played out. We ourselves might end up in such situations where we've to face these things. Most of often than not, it happens in our social interactions. So in order to keep guard against yielding to our opponent's bogus claims, we must be fitted out with such equipments  as to keep us alert to where to find the trap, how to unpack Complex and Leading Questions and lay bare all those presuppositions, assumptions and false claims which they entail. 

I wouldn't like to provide you with examples here. It would be more beneficial if you yourself look them up on the internet. Finding them now will help you find them then. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Her

By
Oft they say, Tell us more of her. Again do I narrate the stories bristled with miracles. How faith healers seek her to be healed. How autumn searches for her the whole year To be bidden come with autumnal beauty. How the glimpse of her countenance Humiliates the hubris of the Sun. How the Earth is blessed as she treads over. (23-May-2016)
Read more

On the Trinity

By
One of the twelve principles of intellectual conduct that T. Edward Damer, a contemporary philosopher, has espoused is called the principle of charity. He discusses it in his brilliantly written textbook called Attacking Faulty Reasoning published by Wadsworth Cengage Learning. The principle of charity teaches us that we should comprehend and reformulate the opponent’s argument as honestly as they would like us to, and we should allow them to amend it in case they impugn its reformulation. Taking the principle of charity as our guiding principle, I intend to very briefly talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, the Christian conception of God. So, let's begin. The first and most important thing to be cleared in this regard is that Christianity is, or at least claims to be, a monotheistic religion. They don't believe in three gods. Just like Jews and Muslims, they believe in only One God. However, the nature of Christian God is diametrically different from their cousins. It...
Read more

Seeking Refuge

By
When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in 1950 in the wake of death and destruction wreaked by World War Two, it was expected to operate for three years and then be dissolved. Enter 2022, it’s still at work, with its need felt more than ever. Its role has over the years expanded and its Convention has been growing in its formulations, definitions and clauses. As the refugee crisis has risen dramatically over the past few decades, it’s essential that we have a clear understanding of different aspects and terms involved in the discourse surrounding it, including the number of people who are affected by this crisis, and what’s at stake. There are around 90 million people the world over who have been displaced from their own homeland. Among these 90 million people, 27.1 million are officially recorded as refugees and almost half of them are children. The detailed statistics regarding the refugee crisis can be had on the UNHCR website. We must be invariab...
Read more