Monday, November 14, 2005

 

Kevin I'm on my knees rasing please please stop using "begs" for raises as "question. it merely begs it" for "question. it merely raises it." I know you feel strongly about this and insist that language evolves, but you make me feel old.

Way back when you and I were young, it was agreed that to beg a question is to make an invalid argument which is vulnerable to that question. Just setting the stage for the question was called raising the question back when I learned English.

So "The Bush administration turned out to be wrong about many things and this proves beyond doubt that the Bush administration misled the country during the runup to the Iraq war." Begs the question, the simple fact that they were wrong about many things is not a false argument and can not beg a question.

posted by Robert permalink and comments10:29 PM

Comments:

"Way back when you and I were young, it was agreed that to beg a question is to make an invalid argument which is vulnerable to that question."

I'm not sure how old you are, but since 350 B.C., when Aristotle classified it as a material logical fallacy in his book Prior Analytics, begging the question has been a fallacy in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.

I suppose that a correct explanation would be too much to expect from a writer whose thoughts are stochastic, i.e., "of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture."

# posted by  Anonymous : 11:11 AM

 

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