Begging the Question

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to make it clear how and why begging the question should be seen as a pragmatic fallacy which can only be properly evaluated in a context of dialogue. Included in the paper is a review of the contemporary literature on begging the question that shows the gradual emergence over the past twenty years or so of the dialectical conception of this fallacy. A second aim of the paper is to investigate a number of general problems raised by the pragmatic framework. In this paper, it is shown that the methods required to analyze and evaluate criticisms of begging the question are practical, and come under the heading of logical pragmatics, which is concerned with the use of propositions by an arguer to convince, persuade, or refute an-other arguer in a context of dialogue. However, certain parts of these methods also have to do with logical semantics, which is concerned with relationships between the truth and falsehood of propositions, and with logical reasoning, which is concerned with diagramming the structure of sequences of arguments. To begin with, it is clear that begging the question is not a fallacy that can, at least straightforwardly, be modelled in a deductive logic of propositions. For the circular argument form, `A, therefore A', is deductively valid. The recent literature on begging the question, out-lined in Section 1 below, has concentrated on examining syllogisms and other familiar forms of deductively valid argument, in an attempt to get a grasp of just what is wrong with question-begging arguments. These articles are shown in the account below to have posed the prob-lem: What is the context of argument in which begging the question makes sense as a fallacy? Subsequently, one stream of the literature followed the lead of Ham-blin (1970, 1971), who advocated the formal game of dialogue as the right sort of context to model begging the question as a fallacy. But this literature became problematic when it was discovered that circular sequences of argumentation could be constructed in formal games o