torturing BTQ

James Wynn · 23 Jul 2009, 14:32 · from 2009-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:32:38 -0500
Subject: (urth) torturing BTQ
In-Reply-To: <4A67B477.6020406 at io.com>
References: <c04.6495caeb.3796536e at aol.com><2C6039EAF3814649A6DB724C936B9E18@eMachinePC>
	<4A67B477.6020406 at io.com>
Message-ID: <05345EED82A744A8A4386A16532A453D@eMachinePC>

>>Also, while Severian *says* he has perfect memory, it begs the question 
>>"How does he know that?"
>
> BTQ abuse makes the Baby Theoanthropos cry.
> http://begthequestion.info/
> You can make a difference.

Thanks for not reporting my BTQ abuse to Logic Protective Services. ;-)

Still, while I can see how the term "begs the question" might be misused 
("Which begs the question, who made James a logician?") , it has never been 
clear to me why "begs the question" is bad form to introduce a question that 
*properly* illustrates an unsupported premise in a statement.

For example, I could have said: "This is begging the question. How does he 
know that?" That would have protected me from allegations of BTQA, but the 
two phrases convey the same  meaning and the modified form does not distort 
the etymological intent of the term (as I understand it). Granted, the 
modified form is not "easier", but I think reflexive outrage at the mere use 
of the term "begs the question" is oversensitivity on the part of some 
logicians...which is reason enough to use it.

"[Irony is] like rain on a wedding day" is not true. The statement is an 
outrage to "irony". But the problem is not the syntactical form.

James

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