Critical Concepts

"Begging the Question"

[Featured here: examples of question-begging causal explanation]

Consider this situation:

We're at a party, and suddenly notice that we're getting a bit dizzy -- and some of us are positively woozy. 

1. Pam:  "What's going on here?"

2. Ron:  "Could it be the punch?" 

3. Sam:  "How could that be?"

4. Ron: "Maybe it's got rum in it." 

5. Tommy [Sam's 8-year old] pipes up:  "What's that got to do with it?" 

6. Ron:  "Well, son, rum's got alcohol in it."

7. Vicky:  "I've always wondered:  why does alcohol make us drunk?"

8. Willy:  "Come on, stupid,  it's an intoxicating liquid."

9. Yunis:  "Wait a minute.  That won't work."

10. Willy:  "OK, let me rephrase that:  it's a property of alcohol that it makes mammals drunk, and we're all mammals."

The even-numbered remarks offer explanations.  All is well in 2, 4, and 6; but in 8 and 10 something has gone wrong.  An explanation is offered, but doesn't come off.  (We wonder:  Willy may be intelligent, but perhaps the rum is putting him in a stupor tonight.)

• Note that the first 3 hypotheses all have to do with "containment":  we've got punch in us (we drank it); punch contains rum (someone mixed the rum with whatever else is in it [ginger ale, kiwi juice, daiquiri mix]); rum contains alcohol (we can distill alcohol out of the rum).  8 and 9 also propose a "containment" relationship as the explanation.  We can point to some operations we can undertake (ingesting, pouring together, distilling) that give some meaning to the idea of one thing's "containing" another.

• But the problem is that we can't give any account of how to get this proposed "inner essence" ("the property of making us drunk") out of alcohol, or how to mix it into whatever else makes up the mixture that we're supposing alcohol itself is.  (Indeed, has anyone ever had his hands on such a thing so as even to be able to add it to something else?)  The question was:  what causes alcohol to make us drunk.  And the answer was given that this is something in alcohol that no one can't find any way of finding, after trying and trying and trying, but it's still there. We (if we go along with Willy) are just asking (please!) our listener to grant us (out of politeness or grace, in the end) that, even though we can't give any concrete account of what we mean by what we're saying, that our way of answering the question is sound.  (We're "begging" the question.)  The person who's posed the question in the first place, then, has a right to be impatient.  Since we can't distill any such thing out of alcohol (nor make alcohol by just mixing two things together), let's turn around ("reflect") and distill the argument itself.  After its appearance of cogency evaporates (because we can't point to any operations like the ones that work with hypotheses 2, 4, and 6), the argument boils down to this:  alcohol is something that makes us drunk because it's something that makes us drunk.  That explanation is "not getting anywhere" because it's "going in circles."

• It seems that the answer to 7 is going to require some entirely different kind of explanation than one in terms of containment.  And, as it turns out, that explanation is to be sought in biochemistry.  Here's a start, in terms of current knowledge:

  Alcohol increases the effect of the body's naturally occurring neurotransmitter GABA (gamma amino butyric acid). Neurotransmitters are substances that chemically connect the signals from one nerve to the next allowing a signal to flow along a neural pathway. An inhibitory neurotransmitter (alcohol) reduces this signal flow in the brain. This explains how alcohol depresses both a person's mental and physical activities. By way of comparison, cocaine does the opposite by producing a general excitatory effect on the nervous system.  (Medicine Consumer Health page on Alcohol Intoxication)

• That is of course a highly condensed summary of the experiments and attendant theory that actual biochemists have worked up.  (To get further, we'd have to introduce the concept of "docking sites" and "docking agents."  More:  we'd have to get into the quantitative nitty-gritty that leads researchers to postulate such behaviors on this sub-microscopic level.)  And we know that chemistry itself (of which biochemistry is a quite recent offshoot) has been around only since the early 19th Century, with the work of John Dalton.  So perhaps Willy is not being stupid (by way of drunken impairment) after all.  Perhaps he's just misinformed:  after all, it took the human race a good while to realize that looking for something inside alcohol as the cause of its intoxicating effect as the cause of that effect, instead of looking for some way in which the invisible structure of uniform alcohol components (we call them "molecules" today) interacted with the structure of elements (neural molecules) of organisms in ways that affect the behavior of those organisms in ways that we call "drunken."

Now consider this:

You and I meet in the pediatrician's office, where we've brought our children for a checkup.  Your Billy is listless, has a fever, and complains of a headache.  My Jenny is hyper-jittery, and queasy of stomach (in fact, she's having trouble holding down her food), but shows a normal temperature.  We're conducted to different examination rooms, and after our respective consultations with Dr. Quicksilver, and we've been processed at the accountant's desk, we meet as we're walking down the hall on the way to the parking lot.  We compare notes.  It turns out that the diagnosis your doctor gave you of Billy's problem is that "he's sick," and that what I've learned from the same fellow is that "Jenny is ill."  Do you think we get our money's worth? 

Didn't we already know that?  Isn't that why we showed up in the first place?  We brought in our kids to show their symptoms, in order to get a diagnosis, and what we were given as a diagnosis (actually, instead of one) was a handing back of the symptoms.

In this case, even worse:  what we each got back was something even more general, indeterminate, vague -- in a word, less informative -- than what we brought in as a basis on which the doctor might figure out what was going on "underneath"!   Our kids are not sick in the same way, and so we've ended up paying extra (the doctor's fee)  for getting less (in solving our kid's problems) than we brought in in the first place.

Of course, we shouldn't have needed our conversation in the hall to arrive at that conclusion.  We should never have signed a check for learning that "someone who has a headache, is listless, and running a fever is not well."  Still more were we drowsing if we thought that "being sick" could be the cause of someone's exhibiting the particular combination of abnormal properties that Billy did -- to say nothing of being the cause of someone's exhibiting the different particular abnormal properties that Jenny did.

Going in that direction is really to "short-circuit" the inquiry that we need to carry to a satisfactory conclusion.  Somebody slipped us a "switcheroo" (in a move not unlike the one in "straw-man refutation").  And if we are inclined to feel "satisfied" with such a non-explanation, we need to cultivate a sensitivity that will enable us to register such moves as dissatisfying because they are objectively unsatisfactory -- i.e., because they don't do what we wanted done.  They don't answer the question we wanted asking, but asked us to accept a pseudo-answer instead.  That's like ordering a bowl of chili and getting a bowl of sawdust. 

A parallel case: 

Jane is convinced that invisible spiders underneath her bed are lurking to inject her with poison because they have decided to make her daughter (who stepped on one the other day) grow up as an orphan.  She is so distressed at this prospect that she can't get any sleep, and is on the verge of losing her job driving a school bus for falling asleep on the road.

Kim is afflicted with fits of rage against her children, and is starting to hear the voice of God telling her that the world is cruel, that He yearns to take Kim's children out of it and unto His bosom, and that, if she sill facilitate this project by inviting them into the kitchen and flooding it with gas from the stove, they all will meet in blissful reconciliation in heaven.  Kim has been telling her husband how he should joint her in accomplishing God's will.

Jane's husband and Kim's manage to convince them to consult with the psychiatrist Dr. Merc.  Dr. Merc (rhymes with "murk") confidently consoles each husband with the profound diagnosis that the cause of his wife's affliction is that she is insane.

What would have been helpful instead is a pair of distinct guesses as to how these two different women got into these two different delusions, and what the different underlying factors might be that sustain them in their differently unsettling behavioral trajectories.  That might have afforded some clue as to what different treatments might be effective in reversing the course of their lives.

Notice that such diagnoses might still be false, and even disastrously so.  But they would at least be explanations, whereas the idea that both women's conditions are caused by insanity is no explanation at all, and so long as we persist in believing it is, we'll not do anything to acquire a genuine insight into what's going on.

Further reading

• A useful starting point is the Wikipedia article on Begging the Question.

• There's also Austin Cline's page on Begging the Question (Petitio Principii):  Fallacies of Presumption.

There are quite a number of thought-provoking discussions on the web of various kinds of "begging the question" in different domains of "logical activity" (arguing explaining, defining).  While you're at it, you'll get acquainted with the larger projects within which the pages below are situated.  You might decide they are worth book-marking for future reference.

Circular argument

• San José University's Mission Critical (an "interactive tutorial for critical thinking") offers some useful explanations and test at its page on Circular Argument.

• [It should be obvious, but perhaps it's worth reminding ourselves that avoiding circularity is only one criterion of good argument.  Joe Lau and Jonathan Chan have provided a concise summary of the set of conditions that would need to be met before an argument deserves to be regarded as convincing.]

Circular explanation

• Bruce Thompson's Fallacy Page points to a suite of pages students will find illuminating about some varieties of Circular Explanation.

• Since questions of motivation are so central to talk about literature, and since this concept seems to invite people to fall into circular explanation, you might find it tonic to visit the psychologist Gordon M. Burghardt's discussion of "Defining Motivation -- The Many Faces of Why".

Circular definition.

• A short article on Circular Definition, with a couple of incisive examples, is at Wikipedia.

• At first glance, definition seems like something far more obvious and simple than argument or explanation.  Yet reflecting carefully on the nature and uses of definition -- and the various ways definition can go wrong  -- can bring us to unexpectedly useful insights into language and thinking.  See, for example, Garth Kemmerling's article "Definition and Meaning" at Philosophy.com.

• Finally, here's a witty one-liner that's too choice to pass up.

  Return to the Index to the Glossary of Critical Concepts.

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2005 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

  This page last updated 25 January 2005.