The phrase "begging the question" has a curious sort of origin. Many of us
simply use this phrase to mean "raising the question," so you read something and
you kind of find the argument fascinating, but you you have some
questions about it ... then you say this raises, this begs, the question
for me. But that's a very loose use of this particular phrase, and some people
would say it's even incorrect, although of course if enough people use it
incorrectly then in some ways other people might say well it is correct
because the majority rules. So let's see where this phrase then actually comes
from and what the proper use of it is according to the sticklers. The
proper use goes back to Latin and it goes also back to philosophy. In
philosophy we have this particular fallacy -- a fallacy is a mistake in
reasoning, and we'll talk about what kind of fallacy this is in a moment. But the
fallacy in Latin is called petitio principii. Petitio -- this comes
from the verb "peto," which used to mean "to seek" or "to request."
In later Latin it had also to do with assuming something ...
And the second part you can probably kind of tell what it relates to. It
relates to the word "principle" or you might say "premise" or your "starting
arguments." Let's just translate it as your starting principles in this case.
Now this last little bit here -- this is the genitive case, so it means "of." In
Latin they can kind of indicate from the ending of the noun how it functions.
And so what we're really saying here is that we are assuming our
starting principles. You might say "an assumption of starting principles." What
does that mean? Well it has to do with a kind of circular argument. So you kind of
go in circles and you argue that something is the case but you have based
your argument on your starting assumptions. And that's really what
begging the question means. Begging the question refers to an
argument that has already assumed one of its premises to be true and then it
simply repeats that premise as part of its conclusion. Let's look at an
example to see what this actually means. In this example we read, "He said that
drinking more wine will raise your spirits (good pun) because wine makes
people happy. His argument simply begs the question." So this would be a correct
use of the phrase. Now what you see here is that we've actually used a couple of
synonyms in our argument. So raising your spirits ... that is a kind of
happiness, and then at the end it says wine makes people happy. In a
sense our premise is over here. Wine will make you happy and then we've
simply assumed that our starting principles are true and we repeat it in
a sense in our conclusion. So we say because wine makes you happy, wine makes
you happy, and you can see the kind of circular reasoning here. That's the basic
principle of petitio principii, or begging the question, and there are lots
of variations of [this] circular reasoning. I'll give you one
more example in a second, but as long as you kind of understand what it's
referring to then you can use the phrase begging the question correctly. Now we
call this an informal fallacy, so not a formal fallacy. In logic a formal
fallacy actually implies a mistake. it implies that the statement is probably
not true. But an informal fallacy is a fallacy where the argument might make
sense ultimately -- it's just the way we got to the conclusion [that] is kind of
problematic, and it assumes a little bit too much here. So the last example then:
"They (I guess we should insert something here) -- they want less
bureaucracy and political involvement in the economy. After all, they say, big
government is bad for business. However, this question begging argument
only proves what it assumes." So we've just rephrased it [begging the question] a little bit here to
put it in a different kind of phrase. [It's] a
little bit awkward perhaps but you can see how you can incorporate this [phrase].
Again we have this kind of circular argument and what I really want to
emphasize is the way often we create these arguments by simply using synonyms
or different language for the same thing. If we say they want less bureaucracy
... and political involvement in the economy then this
concept of less involvement is simply repeated in the actual argument, "After
all" -- there's our "because" kind of statement. So watch out for that. "Because
they say big government" -- well that's basically bureaucracy. Political
involvement is bad for "business," but "business" is simply restating "economy."
You can see then that this kind of argument (this begging the question) is very
very common. So you should actually have lots of opportunity for using this
phrase. But then we get back to our initial question, which is which use are
you going to employ? Are you going to simply say "begging the question" as in,
"well, it raises a question," and some people might frown at that because it's
simply a popular kind of misuse of the original phrase. Or are you going to be a
stickler and insist that we should only use "begging the question" for these
logical fallacies and that's all it's meant for. I'll leave it up to
you, but at least now you know what your choices are.