权威解释beg the question

imongUID: 140258

今天改作文的时候意外发现beg the question这个词条，一看觉得这个解释还真够劲儿，干脆，原文给copy上来。

从Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage上面抄过来的（ft，我一个一个单词打上来的~~）

BEG THE QUESTION

Suppose you are a member of a debating team faced with the task of upholding the positive side of a stirring proposition such as "Resolved, that the seventeen-year locust is a harmful creature." Now after listening to an opponent talk about the charm and rarity of the critters, you electrify your audience with a series of proposals for counteracting the damage done by the locusts. The audience cheers, but the judges give you a bad mark. What you have done is assume that the locust is a harmful creature and go on from there instead of proving that it is a harmful creature. You have used a fallacious argument know as petitio principii ----- a Latin term borrowed into English.

Petitio principii has been translated into English as begging the question, a translation that as Bernstein 1971 notes, offers no clue to the logical fault it is supposed to represent.

To return to our hypothetical case. What people will have noticed about your presentation is the result of your argument ---- you sidestepped the whole problem of proving the locust harmful and went on to further concerns. They may not recognize the logical fallacy by which you accomplished this, but they will note the practical result.

It is not surprising, then, that many people, untrained in the finer points of logical argument, apply the phrase “beg the question” to the obvious result ---- dodging the issue --- without worrying about the manner in which the dodging was accomplished. And the result of these people’s use of the phrase is a new meaning of beg that the lexicographers must account for: ”to evade, sidestep.” As the examples that follow show, this sense of beg is used not only with question but also with plural questions and other words as well. It is fully established as standard.

     However I hope we shall do better as we go on and as long as there’s no dodging or begging the question on our side. I’m not afraid. ---- Henry Adams, letter, 6 May 1980

后面是词条的解释，精彩的在前面几段。我们有时候issue里面容易出现这个问题，而且这好像也是argument挑错的一种关键点吧。大家参考。

imongUID: 140258

倒~刚刚想上床睡觉的时候想起来有一句很重要的话忘了说了：

大家不妨再想想一些逻辑论证方面的关键词（例如beg the question），然后我可以查查那本usage的砖头，也许还有类似的精彩解释也说不定 :rolleyes: