• futatorius@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    It’s an obsolete usage of “beg”

    It’s a misuse of the cliche “begs the question” (which goes back to medieval Latin petitio principii) which is used to call out a form of fallacious reasoning where the desired answer is smuggled into the assumptions. And yeah, that use of “beg” is obsolete, but even worse, the whole phrase is now misused to mean “prompts the question.”