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21 pointsatuladhar17 comments

Just because an obscure idiomatic usage exists doesn't make it incorrect to use the words literally.

If cats and dogs were falling out of the sky, I could correctly say that it's raining cats and dogs.

Some situations beg for a certain question to be asked.

This is a little pedantic, but "begs the question" doesn't really mean "raises the question" even literally. It sounds weird to say that someone "begs a rebuke" when they really deserve a rebuke. Even more literally, you don't say that someone on the street "begs a dollar" -- they beg for a dollar. Just as you said, some situations beg for those questions to be asked (or perhaps they beg that they be asked); they don't simply beg them.

Not quite true. "I beg your pardon" and "I begged her forgiveness" are standard English.

One of the meanings of the word "beg" has disappeared over time, and the meaning of "question" has evolved as well; as a result, the meaning of the phrase "beg the question" is evolving to more closely fit the currently understood definitions of those two words. It's amusing that none of the prescriptivists criticizing people for misusing this phrase seem to argue that we should be actively start using the second meaning of beg again, nor do they ever use it themselves.

For a much more comprehensive and interesting analysis of this topic, I'd recommend languagelog's article: (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290). I agree with his conclusion; it's futile to force people to understand the traditional meaning of this phrase, and it would be preferable for the phrase itself to evolve to use words that are currently in use and unambiguous ("assuming the conclusion" and "raising the question," for example)

A noble effort, but "begging the question" is destined to go the way of split infinitives....

I agree with what you meant to say, but in truth, split infinitives are historically good and proper English. It was a prescriptive desire to make English more like Latin that led to the taboo against split infinitives (and ending sentences with prepositions), which is about as counter-idiomatic as formating Lisp parens according to K&R.

[1] http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14636

Then I suppose the complaint against split infinitives is really just an attempt to prescribe against awkward phrasing. Those crazy Victorians.

You may be right that it will become accepted. I saw this thread on HN, then minutes later while browsing Internet stories came across an article today about anti-Kremlin rallies:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67U4YJ20100831

Excerpt:

"There are hundreds of police and to us it looks disproportionate," Thijs Berman, a Dutch member of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee, said at Triumph Square just before the rally. "It begs the question: what is such a big country as Russia afraid of?"

Now this is change I can believe in.

And once we've sorted the 'Begs the Question' usage, let's tackle the media with an 'Enormity does not mean Enormous' campaign (Enormity = Great Evil, not Large) and then train sports journalists to pronounce conjure the way it's meant to be pronounced (kun not kon).

It's a losing battle in a language as beautifully fluid as English, but if I stand for nothing I will fall 4 N-E-Ting.

I'm not sure this phrase is actually worth using in any guise, especially given that the people using the "correct" meaning are often not using the even more pedantic correct meaning. Many logic books today use "beg the question" as synonymous with "circular reasoning" (some equate them explicitly), but there traditionally were subtle differences. Aristotle and medieval logicians considered circular reasoning to be a formal fallacy, presenting what appears to be a syllogism but is actually not a valid one. But they considered begging the question to be more of an informal fallacy, where an arguer has relied on assumptions that would be unreasonably large to grant, or are too similar to the conclusions, for the argument as a whole to be considered a legitimate or interesting demonstration of the point.

In medieval debating, it was sort of an out-of-bounds request more than a fallacy. The difference between on the one hand, putting forth a chain of reasoning that is explicitly circular (and thus fallacious), and on the other hand, asking your opponent to concede a point that, perhaps non-obviously, turns out to be equivalent to what you were arguing for, or at least, more subjectively, concedes too much of the way to your goal. That's not fallacious, because if they concede the point directly, or concede something that amounts to 80% of your point, your conclusion might correctly follow from it, and you have a proper syllogism, where you start with assumptions that all sides agreed on, and through valid reasoning arrive at your result. But it's in some sense cheating at debate, because you've tricked them into conceding the point, rather than having demonstrated the point.

(One reason it's subjective and informal is that you're effectively saying that demonstrating B from A is unreasonable, because A already contains too much of B, such that anyone who granted assumption A would in effect have already granted conclusion B, making the argument pointless. But in a strict sense, that's always true with any argument: anyone who grants any set of assumptions is always implicitly granting all conclusions that follow from those assumptions. So what counts as an unreasonable assumption that gives away too much of the conclusion is an outside-of-logic issue.)

For any of these meanings, I personally avoid the phrase. If you want the formal circular-reasoning fallacy, you can just say "circular reasoning", and if you want "raises the question", you can say that, or something similar. If you want the meaning I've described above, it's a bit trickier, but you probably will have to explain it anyway using more words, since it's the least common of the three meanings today (but maybe "circular reasoning" will work for that meaning too, in an informal sense of not being strictly circular, but maybe morally equivalent to a circular argument).

It's still used this way by contemporary philosophers, though oddly I've mostly seen it used in an adjectival form--"this argument is question-begging".

It's good practice in philosophy, because philosophers are trying to start from one (preferably obvious and uncontroversial) set of assumptions and derive their way to a (preferably astonishing and counterintuitive) conclusion. Starting from a cleverly worded re-statement of something your conclusion trivially follows from and ending up at your conclusion isn't very useful to philosophers.

Unfortunately, regardless of whether you are right or wrong, the English language is the rule of the masses.

That is why you are crushed.

If thou hast concern; shall be perplexed withe the change of lang-uage, read thise and acknolege.

(olde English for illustrative purposes only, god knows if it is accurate. )

It does not beg but it does demand the question, Why should I care that much?

I've essentially given up on "problematic" and "actionable"...

This error has always bothered me and I don't really know why. I was reminded of the site when I noticed it on Nathan Marz's latest blog post (discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1650051).

I'm very disinterested in this topic.

one of my pet peeves . . .

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603891
   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603799

This is why we fight.

I love it.

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