word choice - "Begs the question" or "Raises the question"?


From Super User:



I just installed Win7 on my non-PC (ahem) and was struck by how many times the Windows installer reboots during installation. It even tells you on the screen during installation that the computer will reboot multiple times.


I know MS must have a good reason for this, but I'm completely baffled why this is necessary? Installation simply writes to the disk, and because the system has booted off the DVD, it already has full write access to the target hard drive partition. Is Windows in fact installing a preliminary disk image and then booting off of that instead of the DVD in order to speed up installation? (Though that then begs the question, why 2 reboots?)


Edit: Changed "3+ reboots" to "2 reboots". It probably seemed like more than that because I had to do an extra reboot initially (back to my host OS) to fix the format of my partition, and then there were the subsequent reboots for windows updates.



(Emphasis added by me)


It seems to me like "raises the question" would fit better than "begs the question" in this case. What is correct?



Answer



"To beg the question" means "to raise the question," or "to invite an obvious question."
From the context of that sentence, I would think that "beg the question" is used with the second meaning I reported.


The NOAD reports the following notes about the meaning of "beg the question":



The original meaning of the phrase beg the question belongs to the field of logic and is a translation of the Latin term petitio principii, literally meaning "laying claim to a principle" (that is, assuming something that ought to be proved first), as in the following sentence: "by devoting such a large part of the anti-drug budget to education, we are begging the question of its significance in the battle against drugs." To some traditionalists, this is still the only correct meaning. However, over the last 100 years or so, another, more general use has arisen: "invite an obvious question," as in "some definitions of mental illness beg the question of what constitutes normal behavior." This is by far the more common use today in modern standard English.



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