United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These definitions must commend themselves as true, either by their own self-evidencing light, or by their manifest conformity with experience, before they can be assumed and founded on in any process of reasoning; and we are very sure that those which have been specified cannot be candidly examined without appearing to be, as they really are, the grossest instances of a petitio principii that have ever been offered to the world.
Here have I been staring for years unless that, too, is a dream, which it very probably is at every mountebank "ism" which ever tumbled and capered on the philosophic tight-rope; and they are every one of them dead dolls, wooden, worked with wires, which are petitiones principii.... Each philosopher begs the question in hand, and then marches forward, as brave as a triumph, and prides himself on proving it all afterwards.
Thus it is manifest that the title, Palæozoic, as applied to the earliest known fossiliferous strata, involves a petitio principii; and that, for aught we know to the contrary, only the last few chapters of the Earth's biological history may have come down to us. On neither side, therefore, is the evidence conclusive.
The question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of petitio principii, and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must needs do that from the doing of which it has its name.
They do not care to know. THE question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of petitio principii. and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must needs do that from the doing of which it has its name.
So naked and unashamed an example of petitio principii would disgrace a debater in a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the incredible effrontery to babble of "logic"! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a lonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard as ever he could hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such intellectual cloudings.
Whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition, it must involve a petitio principii. We have a right, however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or hesitation.
It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal;
But in the argument of the Secretary, as in that of the President, there is a manifest confusion of logic, and something very like a petitio principii. We might answer Mr. Seward's question with, "As many fixed stars as you please, but no more shooting stars with any consent of ours." But really this matter is of more interest to heralds of arms than to practical men.
This mode of reasoning, by which a bad generalization is made to overrule all facts which contradict it, is Petitio Principii in one of its most palpable forms. None of the modes of assuming what should be proved are in more frequent use than what are termed by Bentham “question-begging appellatives;” names which beg the question under the disguise of stating it.
Word Of The Day