Totally Useless Information About ENworld

Ulrick · Sep 11, 2002

Oh...I get it.

From now on, when we roll a natural 20 you want us to shout "Natural 20 Press!!!"

Man, that's a really sleazy way to get free advertising...

Ulrick

barsoomcore · Sep 11, 2002

RangerWickett said:
That doesn't sound right. That's just circular logic. You're sure that's begging the question? Because it has nothing to do with begging.

Actually, he's right. But we use the phrase (or we should) "begging the question" to indicate that someone is using circular logic.

Here's a prime example: The City of God, by St. Augustine. In it (and bear with me, scholars -- that actuality of what S.A. said is less important than the demonstrated principle) Augustine is arguing against the worship of the classical divinities. To drastically reduce a long and complicated argument, he says, "The divinities the Greeks describe must be less than the the divinity the Christians describe, so you must worship the Christian god."

One could say that he is begging the question of the need to worship any god whatsoever. That is, he is assuming we answer the question "Should we worship a god?" in the affirmative, and proceeding with his argument from there.

That example was going to be clearer when I started. It got muddy. Must have been thinking about Jenifer Lopez' butt again.

Cheiromancer · Sep 11, 2002

Yes and Yes.

Check here (it's where I took the examples from)

There are better examples here.

Piratecat · Sep 11, 2002

This bad boy is about EN World, so it's meta - and off to the Meta forum it goes! Wheeeeeee!

Drawmack · Sep 11, 2002

A better example of begging the question.

In DesCartes early writtings he attempted to disprove the existence of god and in so doing proved the existence of god. Which raises the question of, How did DesCarte prove the antithesis of his point?

In his writtings DesCarte constantly referred to man being deceived because of differences in perception. In order to be deceived there must be a deceiver. However someone powerful enough to deceive all of humanity begs the question of, Isn't said deceiver a god themselves?