Hypophora poses a question and then answers it, both in the speaker's own voice. It differs from a rhetorical question in exactly one respect, and the respect matters: the rhetorical question leaves the answer to the audience, while hypophora takes it back.
The question is therefore not really a question. It is a way of controlling what the audience is thinking about at the moment the answer arrives.
Falstaff, interrogating the idea of honour before a battle he would rather avoid: “What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air.” He asks, and he answers, and the audience is given no room to supply anything of their own.
Hypophora is also the standard structure of an FAQ, a rebuttal section, and most explanatory writing — which is why it reads as neutral where a rhetorical question reads as pointed.
Hypophora is the most honest of the question-shaped figures, because the speaker takes responsibility for the answer. A rhetorical question implies that the conclusion is too obvious to state; hypophora states it, and can therefore be disagreed with.
Its real function is agenda-setting. By choosing the question, a writer determines which objection is being addressed — and, more quietly, which objections are not. A rebuttal section built from hypophora answers the questions its author selected, and a reader who follows it attentively may finish feeling that the matter has been thoroughly examined while the hardest question was never posed.
That is the thing to watch. The device is not deceptive in itself, but it creates an impression of completeness that depends entirely on the quality of the questions chosen. When you meet a passage of hypophora, the useful move is to ask what question you would have put, and whether it appears.
