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?
March 20th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Personally, I see no reason why they can’t use petitio principii (which is no more opaque than the allegedly English version), and whenever the issue comes up I always recommend that as the solution. Frankly, it’s sheer snobbery to insist on popular use of a technical term you have to be a philosopher to feel comfortable with; it’s like classicists insisting that you can’t say “the hoi polloi” because hoi means ‘the’ in Greek. I always respond: “So I take it you also avoid saying ‘the Alhambra’?”
March 20th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
Well, for one thing, because there are several centuries of philosophical writing out there where “begging the question” is used in the petitio principii sense, and if we give up on it that makes it that much harder to understand. I don’t think including or excluding the definite article with hoi polloi or quibbling about the plural of octopus make the same kind of semantic difference. My beef about begging the question is that it takes a useful term of art and turns it into, well pretentious mush. It doesn’t seem to me that people who say “begging the question” in the non-technical sense really mean anything by it, and it doesn’t really seem to me to crop up in casual writing but only when people are trying to sound deep and thoughtful. Maybe it is just snobbery on my part, and I shouldn’t read it as someone pompously parroting half-understood technical phrases.