A Study of the Fallacy of Begging the Question and Its Argumentative Structure

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

Assistant professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

In The Organon, the fallacy of begging the question first appears in the fifth chapter of “the sophisticated refutations,” where Aristotle believes that this fallacy is deceptive only when similar things cannot be distinguished from different things. On this definition, begging the question is a circular arguments, in which the conclusion is identically one of the premises. The same interpretation appears in the works of Muslim logicians as well, where most examples are those in which the conclusion and premises differ only in their appearance. In the classical logic, however, reiteration of premises in the conclusion does not amount to the invalidity of the argument. In the present research, which is done with the analytical-analogical method, we propose a structure of the fallacy of begging the question: it does not involve a simple circle where the conclusion appears in the premises; rather, it involves the claim that the circular relation between the premise and the conclusion is a criterion for the truth of a certain proposition. In fact, the formal structure of this fallacy is as follows: (P→P)├ P. Given the truth or falsity of a proposition for an audience, this proposal can explain why certain circles are epistemically misleading to the audience, and others are not. Moreover, the argument “if P, then P” will not be rendered invalid in this way neither syntactically nor semantically.

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References

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