Sure, but note that I said (in different words) that articulate doubt trusts/obeys sociolinguistic conventions that make it intelligible, even for the questioner. — Yellow Horse

So therefore, doubt here simply means 'uncertainty' -- questions are uncertainties -- the asking of a question involves trust in the certainties of linguistics?

Personally I'm wary of calling expressions senseless. In context, 'what is nothing' might be in pursuit of a clarification of what we even mean by 'nothing.' Clarification in general would be a kind of reduction --- and not the elimination --- of fuzziness, often connected to action. — Yellow Horse

I kind of agree. 'Senseless' (lacking in agreed upon axioms, but still following linguistic convention) needn't mean pointless, though, don't you think? Pointlessness more relates to nonsense utterances that are linguistically inane.

Perhaps clearly defining the border between senseless and nonsense questions is where the solution rests.

Haven't finished the On Certainty pdf Banno shared yet, but seems it couples well with the Tractatus in that regard?

Is this not equivalent to a philosophical revolution that installs itself securely against all further revolutions?

If you will pardon the poetry: to dream the nonsense detector is to dream the death of philosophy as its completion. — Yellow Horse

Nicely put. What if we look at it with a scientific mindset: rules and principles of language are open to change, if and when a better theory comes along. Simply they're helpful as scaffolds of logic that ensure meaningfulness.

Distinguishing sense and senseless from nonsense might be achieved through knowing where that logical scaffold ends; distinguishing sense from senseless, through knowing where knowledge ends.

Seems like this stuff is Wittgenstein's meat and gravy. Thanks for the excerpt -- will read the pdf in the next week or two.

the asking of a question involves trust in the certainties of linguistics? — dex

What I have in mind is a radical interpretation of this famous Neurath quote.

***
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
***

If I ask some question about what a word means or how things stand in the world, this asking depends on a 'fixed' background or unquestioned meaning/world to make it intelligible (in our case here, 'knowing English,' which also means sharing a world in and for which English makes or has sense. Here's a quote from W from On Certainty.

***
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.
***

Pointlessness more relates to nonsense utterances that are linguistically inane. — dex

Right, and I think that's context dependent. If somehow a time machine could send back out-of-context quotes from 23rd century philosophy, we might call them pointless nonsense.

They would not make sense to us against the background of our current way of living and thinking. 'If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.'

It's also possible that today we could feed all of Wittgenstein's works to AI and get surprisingly insightful output that did not (as far as we know) originate from some consciousness.

Distinguishing sense and senseless from nonsense might be achieved through knowing where that logical scaffold ends; distinguishing sense from senseless, through knowing where knowledge ends. — dex

Right, and this is like conquering the future from the present. If we can discover the 'eternal' structure of all possible experience or all possible scientific thought, then the future is essentially already here --and we are essentially in eternity with all of the other metaphysicians that came before (who we also reject as having not got it quite right, unlike ourselves of course.)

Seems like this stuff is Wittgenstein's meat and gravy. — dex

I agree. Let me also add that I'm aware that my take on W is just my take. To me his work has radical implications, especially through his behaviorist streak on the issue of meaning.

The best question to ask would be one that does not assume anything about existence. Perhaps the best question is the one that does not assume the need to question in the first place? — Benj96

Usually, if someone doesn't assume the need to question, the person is informed by facts.

If i'm assuming the need, then there is no question, no subjective perception but generalized castles. If on the other hand, i assume the need to question, then an answer is two steps away.

The latter paragraph implies the reputation of philosophy. A philosopher on the outset of his journey, doesn't know what a question is. If this concept is learned, the very first questions are targeted at specific perceptions, which brings us back to specifics, not to basics,

That's the irony, we can't understand the fundamentals but on the "other side" we can.

A question is framed in a 7 dimensional coordinate system where each axis represents a particular type of information requested by who? what? when? where? how? which? and why?

If a question assumes anything, it's the combination of axes that we're interested in. A given line of inquiry maybe focused on where? (loci) , and when? (time) e.g. physics of motion, other fields of inquiry may want to know who? (people), when? (time) and why? (reasons) e.g. history, and so on.

That said, there's a particular type of question that appears as a fallacy in logic viz. the complex question, an example is the well-known "have you stopped cheating on your tests?"