Begging The Question

Begging the question (Latin petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of informal fallacy in which a proposition relies on an implicit premise within itself to establish the truth of that same proposition. In other words, it is a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion. Such arguments are essentially of the form "A is true because A is true" though rarely is such an argument stated as such. Often the premise 'A' is only one of many premises that go into proving that 'A' is true as a conclusion.

The first known definition in the West is by Aristotle around 350 BC, in his book Prior Analytics, where he classified it as a material fallacy (i.e., not formal). Aristotle did not consider begging the question to be a species of circular argument, circulus in probando (Latin, "circle in proving") or circular reasoning, as do some modern authors.