Lineage · old names

The moves have had names for a long time

This site’s vocabulary is new. The moves are not. The central devices answer to fallacies that already had names — some for centuries, some for decades — and the oldest of those names has, in English, quietly changed its meaning.

The oldest name

Aristotle lists it in the Prior Analytics (II.16, 64b28–65a37): τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι, assuming the original point — using as a premise the very thing you set out to prove. The Topics (VIII.13) works through five ways of doing it. The medieval schools rendered the phrase as petitio principii, “a request for the starting point,” and English got its version from the disputations of the 1580s: the earliest recorded use is William Charke’s, disputing with the Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1581 — “I say this is still to begge the question.”

Aristotle, Prior Analytics II.16; Topics VIII.13 · Oxford English Dictionary, “beg, v.,” sense 6 (1581, Charke; printed 1584) · glossary entry

One catalog against another

The site’s definition — a claim is closed when an adverse check produces not revision but the reclassification of the checker — is No true Scotsman aimed at the referees instead of the counterexamples. The rest of the catalog lines up the same way.

Newman gave poisoning the well its name in 1864, describing what Charles Kingsley had done to him in print: “to poison by anticipation the public mind against me,” so that whatever he answered would be read as the answer of a man already convicted. Flew gave No true Scotsman its name a century later, for the move by which a generalization survives its counterexample by redefining the category — the claim is, in his phrase, “transformed while you wait into an impotent tautology.” Popper’s account of what made the theories he distrusted feel strongest fits the fifth device without alteration: “that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed — which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories … this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.” And the expandable mechanism of the 2020 case — mail ballots, then machines, then noncitizens — has the shape of Freud’s borrowed kettle: returned undamaged, already damaged when borrowed, never borrowed at all.

Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Part I · Flew, God and Philosophy (1966) · Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963), ch. 1 · Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. II; the label “kettle logic” is Derrida’s · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), IV.xvii.21

What became of the English name

For most of the period between Aristotle and now, the fallacies were part of an education. Whately’s Elements of Logic (1826) gives them Book III; Mill’s System of Logic (1843) gives them Book V, “On Fallacies,” with petitio principii treated at length. A reader of either would have met “begging the question” as a thing to catch an opponent doing.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) has an entry for begging the question that simply refers the reader to his article on technical terms, where it is “the English version of petitio principii” and the example is a fox-hunter’s: that fox-hunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun. Fowler records no other sense of the phrase. Gowers’ 1965 revision does: under “Misapprehensions” — “of which many writers need to disabuse themselves” — it lists the belief “that to beg a question is to avoid giving a straight answer to one.” The American Heritage Dictionary dates lay use of the phrase to mean “raise the question” to “at least the early 1900s”; when it put the senses to its Usage Panel, 79 percent accepted the traditional one and between 55 and 58 percent the newer ones. Garner’s usage dictionary places the newer sense at Stage 4 of its Language-Change Index — “virtually universal.” Merriam-Webster’s entry now gives to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response first; its usage note calls the logical sense “lesser used and more formal,” and adds that the sixteenth-century translator’s rendering of Aristotle was a poor one — “a better translation would have been ‘assume the conclusion.’”

Ask what the fallacy is called today and the answer is a Latin phrase.

Whately, Elements of Logic (1826), Book III · Mill, A System of Logic (1843), Book V · Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), “beg the question,” “Technical terms” · Gowers (ed.), 2nd ed. (1965), “Misapprehensions” · American Heritage Dictionary, usage note at “beg” ↗ · Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed. (2009), 93–94 · Merriam-Webster, “beg the question” ↗ · Merriam-Webster usage note ↗

Names as defense

The names were never decoration. In 1961 William McGuire showed that a belief exposed in advance to a weakened form of an attack, with the attack named and answered, resisted the full-strength version better than a belief that had merely been supported — the finding that gave “inoculation” its meaning in persuasion research. The recent work is more direct. Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019) had players produce misinformation using six named techniques and found them afterwards better at spotting those techniques in the wild. Roozenbeek, van der Linden, Goldberg, Rathje and Lewandowsky (2022) made five short videos, each naming one manipulation technique — emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, ad hominem attacks — and ran seven preregistered studies on them. Watching one video improved recognition of the technique it named, with effect sizes between 0.28 and 0.68; shown as an advertisement on YouTube to about a million people, the videos improved recognition by roughly five percent in the following item.

One of the five, the ad hominem, has a row in the table above; another, the false dichotomy, is the shape of the two-option close. The rest of the site is the same exercise, run on a larger specimen: the devices are the names, the trainer is the weakened attack, and the four questions are what remains when the name has been forgotten.

McGuire, W. J. (1961). “The effectiveness of supportive and refutational defenses in immunizing and restoring beliefs against persuasion.” Sociometry 24, 184–197 · Roozenbeek, J. & van der Linden, S. (2019). “Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation.” Palgrave Communications 5, 65 · Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., Goldberg, B., Rathje, S. & Lewandowsky, S. (2022). “Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media.” Science Advances 8(34), eabo6254 · source ↗

What to say when the name has been forgotten → Or see the small version taught by name