Begging to Differ

At the Pajama Guy blog, LA Guy (a longtime friend of mine) takes me to task on a matter of phrasing.  In the recent discussion here about religion and constitutional history, I wrote:

To me, though, this begs a further question: why was [Justice] Black able to draw so much on history about religion?

LA Guy comments:

So Tom has gone over to the other side. "Beg the question" originally meant assuming what's needed to be proved (a usage he's certainly aware of), but he thinks it's okay to use it as "leading to the question."

I admit that I vaguely assumed that "leading to the question" was the original meaning for the phrase (and proper as well) because it fits the words more literally than does the meaning "assuming what's needed to be proved" (although the latter is almost always the way I use it).  I assumed that the latter meaning was a subsequent development that kind of took over.  But LA Guy is right about the chronology, as this site explains:

The fallacy ["assuming what needs to be proved"] was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as petitio principii and then into English in 1581 as beg the question. Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as “laying claim to the principle”.

Because I'm a big believer in linguistic distinctions to avoid ambiguity and preserve nuance, I'll concede that we should all stick to the original meaning, "assuming the thing that needs to be proved."  But let me point out that I wrote "begs a further question," an alteration which made, and was intended to make, my meaning clear: you wouldn't refer to "the thing to be proved" as "a further" question.

This lesson on usage is another of the many ways in which we edify you at MOJ.  It plainly invites the question "What does this have to do with Catholic legal theory?"  In response I claim the reference to Aristotle.

Tom