Can a question have a truth value to it?

I've done a few google searches but have arrived at no good answers, just wondering if any of you knew. My best guess is that if there is such a thing, then true questions are questions for which at least one true answer exists, but false questions are questions for which no true answer exists.
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I'm trying to figure out what you mean but I don't get it so far.

It depends on which logic you're using. More to the point, as far as I know (and I don't know much logic at all), "question" isn't used as a technical term in any logic, so it's up to you to formalize the notion of a question, and the answer to the question "Can a question have a truth value?" will be wholly determined by your choice of formalization.

If you asked me to make these decisions, I'd say: going with first-order logic, a question should be just a predicate, and in first-order logic, every predicate in a formula must be fully applied (i.e., it must have an argument for each of its parameters), so there is no way to evaluate a predicate itself, and thus, questions can't have truth values.

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"…the USA is like Microsoft—whatever they decide to use, no matter how brain-dead it is, everyone else copies it from them, willingly or otherwise."

Then again, a predicate is more like an adjective than it's like a question. Well, the most obvious way to represent the question "Is Socrates mortal?" in first-order logic is the sentence "Mortal(Socrates)", where "Mortal" is a predicate and "Socrates" is a term. But then "questions" are indistinguishable from statements. Maybe the right way to think about this is just that the distinction between statements and questions, however important in communication, has no place in logic. Think about how in SQL, a query (i.e. a SELECT statement) in parentheses is semantically equivalent to the results of the query, which is just like how "2 + 2" means the same thing as "4". Indeed, if you took a calculus test and "Question 14" was "d (x^3) / dx", you wouldn't complain to your teacher "That's not a question", would you?

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"…the USA is like Microsoft—whatever they decide to use, no matter how brain-dead it is, everyone else copies it from them, willingly or otherwise."

Well, if I were to ask, "How many children does your desk have?" there's something obviously wrong with that question, but if I ask, "How many children does your mother have?" that's a perfectly sensible question. My first reaction was to call the former false and the latter true, assigning truth values to them. But assigning truth values to questions seemed a bit odd, so I started to wonder if questions could have truth values or not, and if not, if there was some sort of distinction between such questions.
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A question can have intrinsic assumptions which can be true or false, but we don't really talk about a question as being true or false. I think I learned that in a class once.
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Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Hmm. Well, there is a valid answer to the question, which is 0. My desk has 0 children. It's as obvious as that, right?

If you asked, "What's the name of your desk's firstborn son?" then you've made a (false) assumption that my desk has a child (and furthermore that it has a male child (and further furthermore that desks can have genders)). Despite all this, I can still answer by saying, "My desk has no children." Right? So I guess a question can have sensibility (in that it's worth asking because the answer isn't obvious) or it can be nonsensical (it's not worth asking whether my desk has children; we all know it doesn't)... but it can't have truthiness.

HeyDude posted...

Despite all this, I can still answer by saying, "My desk has no children."

You could say that, and it would make sense, but would it really be an answer to that question?
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I guess you'd have to define "answer", but by my standard, yes. It not only gives you the information you seek (that there's no name) but also tells you why (because there's no child to have a name).