Agreed, though I think this depends a lot on who you’re talking to and what they already know. Typically if someone I know asks me something like “What is red?” they’re trying to start some kind of philosophical conversation, and in that case “It’s a color” is the proper response (because it lets them move on to their next Socratic question, and eventually to the point they’re making).
On the other hand, if we were talking to color-blind aliens, answering “It’s what is in common between light reflected by the stop sign there and the fire truck yonder, but not the light reflected by this mailbox here” is a lot more useful starting response than “it’s a color”. If I answered “It’s a color”, and the alien is fairly smart and thinks like a human, the conversation would probably then go:
Alien: So what’s a color then?
Me: Well a color is a particular kind of light...
Alien: Wait, hold on. Light, like the stuff that bounces off objects and that I use to see with?
Me: Yep, that’s it.
Alien: What distinguishes light of one color from that of another?
Me: The wavelength of the light wave.
Alien: What wavelength is red light?
Me: Off the top of my head, I don’t know. If you have a way to measure the wavelength of light, though, then that stop sign there and the fire truck younder are both red to my eyes, so the light they’re reflecting is in that wavelength.
Alien: Gotcha.
… If I went straight to the examples, I’d have ended up at pretty much the same point, but a lot quicker.
Assuming the person who asks the question wants to learn something and not hold a socratic argument, what they need is context. They need context to anchor the new information (there’s a word “red”, in this case) to what they already know. You can give this context in the abstract and specific (the “one step up, one step down” method that jimrandomh descibes above achieves this), but it doesn’t really matter. The more different ways you can find, the better the other person will understand, and the richer a concept they will take away from your conversation. (I’m obviously bad at doing this.)
An example is language learning: a toddler doesn’t learn language by getting words explained, they learn language by hearing sounds used in certain contexts and recalling the association where appropriate.
I suspect that the habit of answering questions badly is being taught in school, where an answer is often not meant to transfer knowledge, but to display it. If asked “What is a car?”, answering that is has wheels and an engine will get you a better grade than to state that your mom drives a Ford, even though talking about your experience with your mom’s car would have helped a car-less friend to better understand what it means to have one.
So what we need to learn (and what good teachers have learned) is to take questions and, in a subconscious reaction, translate them to a realisation what the asking person needs to know: what knowledge they are missing that made them ask the question, and to provide it. And that depends on context as well: the question “what is red” could be properly answered by explaining when the DHS used to issue red alerts (they don’t color code any more), it could be explaining the relation of a traffic light to traffic, it could be explaining what red means in Lüscher’s color psychology or in Chinese chromotherapy. If I see a person nicknamed Red enter at the far side of the room wearing a red sweater, and I shudder and remark “I don’t like red”, then someone asks me “what do you mean, red” I ought to simply say that I meant the color—any talk of stop signs or fire engines would be very strange. To be specific, I would answer “that sweater”.
To wrap this overlong post up, I don’t think there’s an innate superiority of the specific over the abstract. What I’ll employ depends on what the person I’m explaining stuff to already understands. A 5-second “exercise” designed to emphasise the specific over the abstract can help me overcome a mental bias of not considering specifics in my explanations (possibly instilled by the education system). It widens the pool that I can draw my answers from, and that makes me a potentially better answerer.
Agreed, though I think this depends a lot on who you’re talking to and what they already know. Typically if someone I know asks me something like “What is red?” they’re trying to start some kind of philosophical conversation, and in that case “It’s a color” is the proper response (because it lets them move on to their next Socratic question, and eventually to the point they’re making).
On the other hand, if we were talking to color-blind aliens, answering “It’s what is in common between light reflected by the stop sign there and the fire truck yonder, but not the light reflected by this mailbox here” is a lot more useful starting response than “it’s a color”. If I answered “It’s a color”, and the alien is fairly smart and thinks like a human, the conversation would probably then go:
Alien: So what’s a color then?
Me: Well a color is a particular kind of light...
Alien: Wait, hold on. Light, like the stuff that bounces off objects and that I use to see with?
Me: Yep, that’s it.
Alien: What distinguishes light of one color from that of another?
Me: The wavelength of the light wave.
Alien: What wavelength is red light?
Me: Off the top of my head, I don’t know. If you have a way to measure the wavelength of light, though, then that stop sign there and the fire truck younder are both red to my eyes, so the light they’re reflecting is in that wavelength.
Alien: Gotcha.
… If I went straight to the examples, I’d have ended up at pretty much the same point, but a lot quicker.
Assuming the person who asks the question wants to learn something and not hold a socratic argument, what they need is context. They need context to anchor the new information (there’s a word “red”, in this case) to what they already know. You can give this context in the abstract and specific (the “one step up, one step down” method that jimrandomh descibes above achieves this), but it doesn’t really matter. The more different ways you can find, the better the other person will understand, and the richer a concept they will take away from your conversation. (I’m obviously bad at doing this.)
An example is language learning: a toddler doesn’t learn language by getting words explained, they learn language by hearing sounds used in certain contexts and recalling the association where appropriate.
I suspect that the habit of answering questions badly is being taught in school, where an answer is often not meant to transfer knowledge, but to display it. If asked “What is a car?”, answering that is has wheels and an engine will get you a better grade than to state that your mom drives a Ford, even though talking about your experience with your mom’s car would have helped a car-less friend to better understand what it means to have one.
So what we need to learn (and what good teachers have learned) is to take questions and, in a subconscious reaction, translate them to a realisation what the asking person needs to know: what knowledge they are missing that made them ask the question, and to provide it. And that depends on context as well: the question “what is red” could be properly answered by explaining when the DHS used to issue red alerts (they don’t color code any more), it could be explaining the relation of a traffic light to traffic, it could be explaining what red means in Lüscher’s color psychology or in Chinese chromotherapy. If I see a person nicknamed Red enter at the far side of the room wearing a red sweater, and I shudder and remark “I don’t like red”, then someone asks me “what do you mean, red” I ought to simply say that I meant the color—any talk of stop signs or fire engines would be very strange. To be specific, I would answer “that sweater”.
To wrap this overlong post up, I don’t think there’s an innate superiority of the specific over the abstract. What I’ll employ depends on what the person I’m explaining stuff to already understands. A 5-second “exercise” designed to emphasise the specific over the abstract can help me overcome a mental bias of not considering specifics in my explanations (possibly instilled by the education system). It widens the pool that I can draw my answers from, and that makes me a potentially better answerer.