Three Questions

How do we know things, and how do we know that we know? That's what epistemology is all about, and in the process of figuring it out, we all come up with theories of knowledge.

I think there are three main questions.

1. What led up to this?
2. Where does this lead to?
3. Is it good?

I suspect that no matter how humans think, it all boils down to these three things because I haven't found any paradigm that needs any other questions. In itself, this isn't proof that there aren't any other key questions, of course. I'm just saying that you need three for human inquiry.

Why these three? The first one establishes cause. The second one establishes effect. And the third requires value judgement, whether relative ("Is this good compared to... ?") or absolute ("Is this good in itself?").

It is certainly possible to use fewer questions in some disciplines. However, it doesn't seem profitable to use more except as elaborations or refinements of these three, for a specific purpose within a specific kind of inquiry.

Oddly enough, the 'Rule of Three' is one of the rules of human stories; things always come in threes. Maybe the Rule of Three is like Finagle's Law, one of the great meta rules of human existence.