How vs Why: Do You Know the Difference?

HOW and WHY are two basic questions we all ask. We can't screw up answers to those questions; otherwise, our intervention in the system to make it better will fail or go wrong. We can learn from failure, but even for that, we have to ask HOW and WHY questions. No disagreement on that I hope.

But if we ask someone a WHY question but gets a HOW answer and fail to detect that wrongness , we are in serious soup. That's the soup that this world keeps on getting into and it's bigger soup than people think its is because they are in soup without being aware.

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE?

Why is the sky blue ? question is standard question everyone of us must have both asked and also answered. The answer you must have gotten or given is is micro particles, refraction, light Raleigh Scattering, wave length etc.. Great. Most will agree that is a correct answer. So where is the problem? Don't see a problem ? Think hard!. Your question was a WHY question but the answer was a HOW answer? Shocked ! you better be. It's indeed a HOW answer.

DO WE ALWAYS TAKE HOW FOR WHY QUESTIONS
Not really, and that makes a problem not smaller but much bigger. If we always took HOW for a WHY question, fixing that problem would have been easy. The issues is sometimes we are really good in detecting HOW answer for a WHY question and sometimes we are not and we don't the know the difference between then so problem becomes much harder.

WHAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE IN TWO QUESTIONS

If you look closely the difference was that in first question "Why is the Sky Blue?" was missing a subject or an observer or actor. Whereas "Why did you sign that contract?" had a subject which was an actor. We have a general tendency of answering a WHY question with HOW answer when when subject, object or observer is missing.

HOW AND WHY MAKE UP SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE

So if you think deeply, HOW and WHY makes the System of Knowledge. The loop of HOW and WHY makes up the learning loop. WHY forces us to take responsibility for either lack of HOW knowlege, or holding wrong knowledge of HOW, acting or not acting on a knowlege we were holding, thereby drives responsibility for outcome we get, which then drives us to seek better behavior or seeking a better HOW knowledge.

The root of the issue is that physical and analytical science ignores the role of observer in study of system so physical chemistry and engineering are study of mostly non-living system which we also call analytical sciences. So we have developed habit of using HOW and WHY interchangeably and perfectly conditioned to accept HOW for WHY question.