We need a way to ask Maybe/No questions
There is a large gap in common vernacular English around things that look like yes/no questions but where the asker already knows that one of the two answers can't be certain in the current context. We have no way to concisely communicate that this is what we're asking, and so the person being asked is usually operating under the expectation of more certain yes or no outcomes.
This is especially true of licensed professionals who take on significant responsibility and risk when they answer questions in their field. Lawyers answering legal questions, Engineers asking safety questions, Doctors answering medical questions, etc. In typical conversation, these professionals will always expect that whatever answer they give you needs to hold up to professional scrutiny from all angles. We need a concise way to effectively convey the following sentiment:
“I know that this sounds like a yes/no question, because the ultimate answer will be yes or no. However, I am not asking you to distinguish between those two answers. I am asking you to instead distinguish between the easier of the two answers and the alternative that includes both the more difficult to determine answer and all of the uncertainty or lack of specificity in between.”
By way of a generalized example, consider the question “Is this course of action safe?”. This looks like a yes or no question, and the ultimate answer is going to be yes or no, for some specific version of the course of action and definition of “safe”, both of which might require further elaboration as part of the answer. This is often a rather difficult question for which to reach a “yes, it is safe” answer. That answer might require many additional details, research, calculations, etc, and those things might not be available easily or at all in a particular context. However, it is often a very easy question for which to reach a “no, it is not safe” answer. For those questions, it could be very useful for the asker to learn the distinction between “no” and “I don't know” / “It depends” / “Maybe”. They might be able to get a dozen answers of that variety with less effort on the other person's part than a single confident “yes” answer, and that could be a useful result.
It should be quick and easy to preface a yes/no question and indicate that you're looking for the easy answer or a maybe or depends, not the easy answer or the hard answer. Of course, the person answering can always decide to answer that way, but that's not the same as the person asking making it clear that they know up front that this is the type of answer they are expecting. We need a better way to ask this category of question. How would you approach trying to make this work more smoothly?