Begging the Question
John & Belle Have A Blog: Begging the Question
but here’s a language nit: “The denser linking pattern of conservatives begged the question of whether the conservative bloggers had a more uniform voice than the liberal ones did.” Philosophers are always bothered by this usage. We prefer to reserve ‘beg the question’ for venerable ‘presuppose your conclusion’.
From there follows an interesting discussion of the relatively recent (apparently, I haven’t researched this myself) trend in using “begging the question” to mean x demands that we ask y, as in the example Holbo cited.
“Please, sir, might I have some more gruel?” is a begging question.
“The Bible is the word of God, because it says it is and we know that God wouldn’t lie,” is begging the question.
Personally, I favor the philosopher’s version. Linguistically, there’s no doubt that the new version is entrenched and good descriptivists will just have to deal with it. Anthropologically, though, I don’t see any reason not to try to encourage or discourage particular usage. Or, to put it another way, there are other reasons than whether something is correct in English to favor certain phrases and avoid others, and in particular to object to the hijacking of technical terms, particularly when the reason for doing so seems to be to borrow the cachet of the original context. (Or maybe I’m being uncharitable, and nobody who does this really intends to sound like they’re making an erudite point about logic.) Since it seems to me that “raises the question” could be used wherever “begs the question” is used in the x demands we ask y sense, I say let the philosophers hang on to it…or else they might have to revert to calling it petitio principii And we can’t have that, can we?
Friday, March 18th, 2005