'Begging the Question'

A clipping from April 6, 1997, fell out of a book today. It was a column by James J. Kilpatrick dealing with misuse of the term "begging the question." "Kilpo" notes that the term means simply "to assume the proof of a proposition not yet proved." It does not mean "evading, ducking, sidestepping, or hook-sliding around a question!"

Wilson Follett, in Modern American Usage, is a little more informative. "Begging the question," he says, is "using as an argument a disguised form of the proposition to be proved." If the proposition to be proved is that cannibals are immoral, it's begging the question to say, "How can such savages be moral when they kill people in order to eat them?"

As with some other things, "begging the question" is best left to the debaters and logicians.