Is there a word for a question that leads to more questions?
I'm looking specifically for a word (noun or adjective) that means "A question that leads to more questions". Something that is difficult to answer because it would involve answering yet more questions that arise in answering the original question and so forth. Preferably of a higher "domain" or "scope". For example:
What is the specific emotion 'love'? → What are emotions? → What is thought? → so forth.
Maieutic is very close but to my understanding refers more to a constructive method of reasoning. I'm looking for something between that and 'baseless' or 'unfounded'.
Solution 1:
I'd say that the question is a Pandora's box. See definition at Merriam Webster,
Something that will lead to many problems.
Also, the question is a can of worms.
Solution 2:
There is a sense of pregnant that might fit.
pregnant filled with meaning or importance that has not yet been expressed or understood
A somewhat fuller expression of the senses of pregnant
...2. a. Weighty or significant; full of meaning: a conversation occasionally punctuated by pregnant pauses. b. Of great or potentially great import, implication, or moment: "It was a politically pregnant time in Poland" (New York). 3. Filled or fraught; replete: "This was, from the Party's point of view, both deplorable in itself and pregnant with danger for the future" (Robert Conquest). 4. Having a profusion of ideas; creative or inventive. 5. Producing results; fruitful: a pregnant decision.
The Metaverse Pioneers and the Collonisation [sic] of Open Simulator
Virtual worlds have many of the characteristics of Foucault's heterotopias, they are perfect and meticulous but above all they are colonies where individuals have embarked on the challenge to establish a new social space in hyperspace. Currently these are emergent spaces and while there are many models of social, personal, civic and military virtual worlds quite how over the coming decade theses virtual spaces will develop is an open question pregnant with possibility.
Solution 3:
The complex question sounds close. It's context sensitive; such context would be provided by the answers to those following questions.
Solution 4:
Setting up a chain reaction — TFD
A series of events in which each influences or gives rise to the next event, as in If one person collects substantial damages by suing a company, you can expect a chain reaction of such lawsuits.
The term originated in the physical sciences, first (1920s) chemistry and later (1940) physics; in the latter it denotes a process of nuclear fission. By the 1940s it had been transferred to more general use.
Solution 5:
That type of question could be called a hydra in reference to a mythological serpent with 9 heads from which cutting off a single head would cause two new ones to grow in its place.