Wyatt Earp begs the question

POP1

Someone once observed that Wyatt Earp's most vivid recollections of his days as a frontier lawman involved people who were entering, occupying, or leaving saloons.

Earp responded "We had no Y.M.C.A's."

He doesn't expand on his career choices, or his choice of amusements.  His answer tells us nothing.  It is as if a man's life is spent in one form or another of social club, with Y.M.C.A's simply being a gentler form of the saloon.

He avoids answering.  What he does here is 'beg the question'.  Like the joke, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" - the response, "To get to the other side" says nothing and leaves us no wiser.

TV journalists and interviewers constantly 'beg the question' but......

POP2

........ they simply don't understand the concept.  They say to the person they're interviewing, "That begs the question", and proceed to ask their next question.  What they mean is "That raises the question".

Even Charlie Rose, who should know better, doesn't get it right.

So what does 'begging the question' really mean?

POP3

It means to take something for granted in a discussion, although that 'something' is precisely what is being discussed.  In a more technical sense, it's a logical fallacy in which a proposition uses its own premise as proof of the proposition - a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion.  For example:

"God exists because the Bible says so, and what the Bible says is true because the Bible was written by God".

In the movie 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' the manager of the hotel announces "Everything will be alright in the end, and if it's not alright it means it's not yet the end" - perfect circular reasoning.

A riddle - What since the beginning of time has never seen the sun?  Answer - a shadow.