Difficulty: What the hell
So it’s been around 18 years since my first girlfriend dumped me, but while I have long gotten over it, I have not come to terms with the stupidity of her argumentative strategy. Consider the first part of her argument:
“What your father does is wrong. Why? Because I feel really strongly about it.”
I asked her why she feels “really strong about it.” She responded:
“Because it’s wrong.”
This circular reasoning—this is what philosophers call begging the question—went on for a good fifteen or thirty minutes.
Today, we’re looking at the informal fallacy of begging the question. You just read an obvious example. Now, we’re going to look at some subtler instances.
Christopher W. Tindale has us consider, in his Fallacies and Argument Appraisal, the following arguments:
Example 1:
A heavier-than-air craft could never fly because in order to lift up and travel over distance a machine would have to be lighter than the environs surrounding it.
Example 2:
God is the only perfect being and perfection includes all the virtues. So, we know that God is benevolent.
He then asks two critical questions to identify instances of begging the question:
Critical question 1:
Has the arguer avoided the obligation to provide independent support for a claim by restating it in similar terms?
Critical question 2:
Has an arguer avoided the obligation to provide independent support by assuming somewhere in the premises the very thing that has to be shown?
I’m going to add one more question to the list:
Critical question 3:
Do the premise(s) and conclusion depend on each other for justification?
These questions will help us articulate how Example 1, Example 2, and the ex-girlfriend example beg the question.
First, there is no real question when someone begs the question
Let’s disabuse ourselves of a potential source of misunderstanding. Nobody’s really asking a question when they commit the “begging the question” fallacy. Here, the word “question” is better understood as the “issue at hand.” If, for instance, a Bible thumper tells you,
“God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the word of God”
it’s not that anyone is asking a question. It’s that the arguer presumes the issue at hand—namely, whether God exists—to be true, when that is exactly what she needs, but fails, to independently support.
In other words, the premise “the Bible is the word of God” hides the assumption that God exists. So duh, if she cheats like that, of course she can (fallaciously) reach the conclusion that God exists. She’s basically saying:
God exists because God exists.
Restating a claim in similar terms
Here’s critical question 1 again:
Has the arguer avoided the obligation to provide independent support for a claim by restating it in similar terms?
Now revisit Example 1:
A heavier-than-air craft could never fly because in order to lift up and travel over distance a machine would have to be lighter than the environs surrounding it.
This one’s sneaky. But yes—the arguer has avoided the obligation to provide independent support by restating the claim in different terms.
Briefly:
“Heavier-than-air craft” ≈ “machine” that is not “lighter than the surrounding air”
“Fly” ≈ “lift up and travel over distance”
These expressions are not strictly identical, but they function the same way in the argument.
So the arguer hasn’t explained anything. She’s just saying:
A heavier-than-air craft cannot fly because a heavier-than-air craft cannot fly.
Sneaking the conclusion into the premises
Reconsider this argument:
God is the only perfect being and perfection includes all the virtues. So, we know that God is benevolent.
Sounds good, right? Good my ass.
Rephrased, the argument goes like this:
Premise 1: God is the only perfect being.
Premise 2: A perfect being has all the virtues (including benevolence).
Conclusion: God is benevolent.
This looks like an argument, but it isn’t doing any real work. The conclusion is already built into the premises.
So while it doesn’t look like “G, therefore G,” that’s basically what’s going on under the hood.
Mutually dependent premise and conclusion
Now back to the ex-girlfriend argument:
I feel really strongly about what your father does. Therefore, what your father does is wrong.
What your father does is wrong. Therefore, I feel really strongly about it.
If this were an Escher drawing, it’d be a masterpiece.
Recall critical question 3:
Do the premise(s) and conclusion depend on each other for justification?
Here, the answer is yes.
Each claim is being used to justify the other. That’s classic circular reasoning.
You might be tempted to ask whether circular reasoning and begging the question are really the same thing. Fair question—but we don’t need to settle that here. For now, it’s enough to see how these arguments go wrong.
A psychological note on begging the question
In A System of Logic, John Stuart Mill observes that people are unlikely to commit this fallacy in their own private reasoning, but they do commit it in dialogue.
My guess is this: people know their reasons are weak, but instead of admitting it, they just restate their conclusion in slightly different words and hope no one notices.
Don’t do that.
Philosophy without Bullshit 