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Re: Begging the Question

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• To: "'xml-dev@l...'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 18:47:54 -0500

At 03:28 PM 12/29/00 -0800, Andrew Layman wrote:
>Petitio Principii or Begging the Question: 'assumption of the basis'.  The
>fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved
>as the conclusion itself.  Arguing in a circle (see above) is a common form
>of p.p.  That foxhunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun & that
>one must keep servants because all respectable people do so, are other
>examples of begging the question or p.p., in which the argument is not
>circular.

I would humbly suggest that it might be reasonable at this point to put
"namespaces mean X because the namespaces spec says so" into the same
category as "one must keep servants because all respectable people do so."

That would suggest that because the namespaces spec has been the subject of
so much (unfulfilling) argument, it may be considered to have virtually no
traction whatsoever on any but the most limited points - an attribute-based
syntax for associating identifiers with prefixes which uses element
structures to define its scope.

That might help to explain why we've gone through all of these circles so
many times to so little consensus, unlike pretty much anything else in the
entire XML universe.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

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    • From: Andrew Layman <andrewl@m...>

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