Begging The Question

In the last two days, I have heard on BBC Radio 4 (motto: Intel­li­gent Speech) no less than four instances of the term ‘begging the question’ being used incorrectly.

One - although I was half asleep at the time and can’t be com­pletely sure - seemed to come from the mouth of John Humphrys who, as a noted cham­pion of Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the pop­u­lar paean to lin­guis­tic pedantry, should bloody well know better.

Much as I would love to give in to the temp­ta­tion to run amok with an axe in Broad­cast­ing House, it is prob­a­bly better to explain why this drives me into a froth­ing homi­ci­dal rage.

Beg­ging the ques­tion - oth­er­wise known as Peti­tio Prin­cipii, or the deduc­tive fal­lacy of cir­cu­lar­ity, or the fal­lacy of pre­sump­tion - is not a hard con­cept to grasp, but a slightly tricky one to explain: in short, one begs the ques­tion when one cites as a premise that which assumes the con­clu­sion to be true. For example:

A is true because B is true, and B is true because A is true.

Or, with a dash of complexity:

X is true because Y is true, and Y is true because Z is true, and Z is true because X is true.

So, if some­one responds to a ques­tion you have asked with an answer that prompts a fur­ther ques­tion, it is absolutely not fuck­ing cor­rect to gibber, “Well, that rather begs the question…” as a means of intro­duc­ing your sec­ondary inquiry. What you ought really to say is, “Well, that rather raises the question…”

Okay?

Good.

Any errors of style, gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion or spelling you may find in the above are, of course, wholly deliberate.

Posted at 6pm on 03/03/04 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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Tags: language, rants