Topic: Instructor or Pedant
I promised an entry on “beg the question.” Here it is.
When you hear the phrase “beg the question” in modern
conversation, it is almost invariably used incorrectly. Newscasters are extremely fond of using it,
but they are mis-using it to be a synonym for “raise
the question.”
For example, Corey Lidle’s plane
crashes into a Manhattan
skyscraper. The news people are shocked,
and think maybe there is something the government could have done, but didn’t
do, so they state “This accident begs the question, ‘Are officials doing enough
to protect New York City?’” Well, the
accident might well raise that question, but it doesn’t beg it. The questioner might want to beg for an
answer, if he wants to be dramatic, but the situation did not beg a question.
Why not?
“Begging the question” is a term used in logic, debate and
discourse for millennia. It means,
essentially, to argue that something is true because it is true. It is a form of circular logic. When you are trying to prove a point in logic,
you start with a base set of assumptions.
If you then logically arrive at the point from those assumptions, you
can have been said to have proven it.
However, if you end up assuming your point in order to attempt to prove
it, you have proven nothing; you are begging your question (the “question” is
the point you intended to prove.)
An example would help.
Let’s suppose I set out to prove that “X should be illegal.” I can start by arguing that if something is
wrong, it should be illegal. (We might
not agree that’s true, but for the sake of argument, let’s.) Then, perhaps I assert that breaking the law
is wrong – which most of us can agree to.
But then, if I point out that “X is illegal, hence X is against the law,
hence X is wrong, hence X should be illegal” I am
using circular logic. I have argued that
something is true because it is true. I
am guilty of begging the question.
Here’s one of the entries I found when I looked up “beg the
question” at Dictionary.com:
beg the question
Take for granted or assume the truth of the very thing being questioned. For
example, Shopping now for a dress to wear to the ceremony is really begging
the question - she
hasn't been invited yet. This phrase, whose roots are in Aristotle's
writings on logic, came into English in the late 1500s. In the
1990s, however, people sometimes used the phrase as a synonym of "ask the
question" (as in The article
begs the question: "What are we afraid of?").
Now, I think the example the citation uses is not quite what
Aristotle was thinking about, but you can see that the misuse of the phrase
began recently.
To me, this is an example of how our language is losing its
effectiveness. We have a perfectly good,
meaningful phrase being distorted to mean something else – and we have plenty
of good phrases which could be used instead.
My personal opinion on why this misuse occurs is this: people want to sound intelligent, so they use
a phrase they have heard other intelligent people use – but they use it
incorrectly.
Citations and references.
As is often the case, Wikipedia
has a great explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question
beg the question. (n.d.). The
American Heritage? Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Retrieved October 15, 2006,
from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=beg
the question