"Assuming the conclusion" is a very good name. Use that.
If you are in the business of linguistic prescriptivism, do not try to prescribe something that's a mistake built on a mistake.
There are many high-quality sources on the Internet and in books. No need to rely upon one source (wikipedia) that has a dubious reputation.
Nevertheless, @3pt14159, you do make a good point. So, please lead us lowly forum posters/readers to the best way to push human development forward and actually do as you are authoritatively telling others to do. Verify the veracity of the misinformation on wikipedia and submit an update(s). Glad you thought of this! Let us know when you finish this initial task.
In terms of my own contributions, I've been doing so for years. I've even started major pages going back as far as 2004 when they were missing. I didn't know anything about this specific topic so I didn't feel comfortable proffering an edit.
Assuming the conclusion sounds equivalent to "non-sequitur" or just not making any argument at all.
No, begging the question (the fallacy) is about assuming the conclusion you are attempting to support.
> Assuming the conclusion sounds equivalent to "non-sequitur" or just not making any argument at all.
It is very different from non-sequitur, but since it means making an argument that reduces to "P, because P", describing it as "not making an argument at all" is not wholly wrong.
I actually like the common (so-called "incorrect") use a lot because:
* It is distinct from the fallacy use because the fallacy is always intransitive and the common use is invariably transitive, naming the question so "begged" as the direct object; thus, it is impossible to confuse one use for the other.
* The fallacy use, as noted elsewhere, is the result of a series of mistranslations and, standing on its own, is bizarre in English.
* the "incorrect" use is a much more natural use of the English words which also makes the fallacy use more natural, since it is exactly equivalent to the "incorrect" use with the unstated, implicit direct object of "the question the debate was attempting to resolve".
So, accepting the "incorrect" use has no conflict with the use to denote a particular fallacy and, indeed, makes that use more natural.
In colloquial speech, the phrase "begging the question" is often not used to refer to the logical fallacy but rather the more literal translation of "makes you ask."
If we are arguing about Windows or Linux and I say that Linux is better designed because it has a clearly superior architecture, I'm begging the question because I'm just asking you to accept it instead of supporting my argument.
Also, I wonder if the misunderstanding of the term has prompted many people to start looking into formal logic. In our linked world, I could imagine people looking something like that up after they hear it's misused and finding information about a lot of related issues around logic.
"Non-sequitur" evaluates a statement's relationship to a previous statement.
"Assuming the conclusion" evaluates a statement on its own.
Since the speaker is attempting to provide evidence for a "statement or claim", we could say that, if the argument were correct, then that "statement or claim" would be the conclusion. Therefore, we can substitute "conclusion" for "statement or claim", and get: "[phrase] is a form of logical fallacy in which a conclusion is assumed to be true without evidence other than the conclusion itself." Therefore, "assuming the conclusion" is a very appropriate name for the thing they're talking about.
The "assuming the truth of one or more premises" you talk about, where those premises are different from the conclusion, seems like a different type of fallacy than what this website is talking about.
And while we often hold that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it is not a formal fallacy to state an extraordinary premise without adequate justification. Whether you can get anyone to accept it is another matter. It is generally easier if you can find someone who likes your conclusion, which is how most political debate works.