| 词组 | beg the question |
| 释义 | 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 known 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 1860 • On the contrary, the conditions of profit, of control, demand that the real question be side-stepped. The formula of entertainment is the means of begging the question —James T. Farrell, Literature and Morality, 1947 • I may well be accused of begging the question of dictatorship by saying that the American system simply would not permit it —Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, 1956 • Maynard begs the difficulties set by the Utopia for a medievalist by designating its principles as "simply Christian" —Charles T. Harrison, Sewanee Rev., 1949 • To shake a fist at a swollen federal bureaucracy may be satisfying, but it begs the point —Elizabeth Drew, Atlantic, April 1971 • Pentagon and State Department officials beg the point when they suggest that sturdier barriers might have forced the terrorists to resort to aerial bombardment —Time, 8 Oct. 1984 |
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