The aim of this paper is to make it clear how and why begging the question should be seen as a pragmatic fallacy which can only be properly evaluated in a context of dialogue. Included in the paper is a review of the contemporary literature on begging the question that shows the gradual emergence over the past twenty years or so of the dialectical conception of this fallacy. A second aim of the paper is to investigate a number of general (...) problems raised by the pragmatic framework. (shrink)

No topic in informal logic is more important than begging the question. Also, none is more subtle or complex. We cannot even begin to understand the fallacy of begging the question without getting clear about arguments, their purposes, and circularity. So I will discuss these preliminary topics first. This will clear the path to my own account of begging the question. Then I will anticipate some objections. Finally, I will apply my account to a well-known and popular response to scepticism (...) by G. E. Moore. (shrink)

I argue in a non-reductive sense for a plausible epistemic principle, which can (1) theoretically and instrumentally unify or systematize all fallacies, and (2) provide a justification for using such a principle for characterizing an erroneous argument as a fallacy. This plausible epistemic principle involves the idea of an error in the method of justification, which results in a failure to provide relevant evidence to satisfy certain standards of adequate proof. Thus, all fallacies are systematically disguised failures to provide substantive (...) proof: a failure in the attempt to persuade rationally, as opposed to emotionally or rhetorically. I argue that the epistemic idea of begging the question is essential to this idea of a fallacy as an inadequate proof. (shrink)

Woods' paper “Ideals of Rationality in Dialogue” raises six problems for dialogue theory. Woods is right about the seriousness of the problems, but one school of dialogue, that stemming from the work of Charles Hamblin, avoids each of Woods' problems by using commitment instead of belief and by using only immediate logical relations. This paper summarises the reasons Hamblin's school took this course, and explains how Woods' problems are thereby avoided.

The paper describes four dialogue systems, developed in the tradition of Charles Hamblin. The first system provides an answer for Achilles in Lewis Carroll's parable, the second an analysis of the fallacy of begging the question, the third a non-psychologistic account of conversational implicature, and the fourth an analysis of equivocation and of objections to it. Each avoids combinatorial explosions, and is intended for real-time operation.

In this paper a dialogical account of begging the question is applied to various contexts which are not obviously dialogues: - reading prose, working through a deductive system, presenting a legal case, and thinking to oneself. The account is then compared with that in chapter eight of D. Walton'sBegging the Question (New York; Greenwood, 1991).

This paper objects to treating begging the question as circular reasoning. It argues that what is at issue in the argument is not to be confused with the claim or position that the arguer is adopting, and that logicians from Aristotle on give the wrong definition and have difficulty making sense of the fallacy because they try to define it in terms of how an argument is defined by logical theory - as a sequence consisting of premises followed by a (...) conclusion. That the problematic about begging the question depends on treating an argument as a context-less sequence of statements seems to be anticipated by the pragma-dialectical approach. The paper offers a critique of this dialogical approach, as exemplified by Douglas Walton in his recent book on begging the question, on the grounds that it raises more problems than it solves. It concludes with the suggestion that what is really at issue in discussions of begging the question is the need for a theory of fallacy. (shrink)

Jan Łukasiewicz’s analysis of Aristotle’s syllogism drew attention to the nature of syllogisms as conditionals rather than premise-conclusion arguments. His further idea that syllogisms should be understood as theorems of an axiom system seems a step too far for many logicians. But there is evidence to suggest that Aristotle’s syllogism was to regularise some of the steps made in ‘dialogue games.’ This way of seeing the syllogism is explored in the framework of modern formal dialogue systems. A modern formal syllogistic (...) game, DLSyll, is set out and analysed in use. (shrink)