A loaded question is a form of
complex question that contains a controversial
assumption (e.g., a
presumption of guilt
A presumption of guilt is any presumption within the criminal justice system that a person is guilty of a crime, for example a presumption that a suspect is guilty unless or until proven to be innocent.
Such a presumption may legitimately aris ...
).
Such questions may be used as a
rhetoric
Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate par ...
al tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda.
[ The traditional example is the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Whether the respondent answers yes or no, they will admit to having a wife and having beaten her at some time in the past. Thus, these facts are '' presupposed'' by the question, and in this case an entrapment, because it narrows the respondent to a single answer, and the fallacy of many questions has been committed.][ The fallacy relies upon context for its effect: the fact that a question presupposes something does not in itself make the question fallacious. Only when some of these presuppositions are not necessarily agreed to by the person who is asked the question does the argument containing them become fallacious.][ Hence, the same question may be loaded in one context, but not in the other. For example, the previous question would not be loaded if it were asked during a trial in which the defendant had already admitted to beating his wife.][Douglas N. Walton, ''Informal logic: a handbook for critical argumentation'', Cambridge University Press, 1989, ]
pp. 36–37
/ref>
This informal fallacy should be distinguished from that of begging the question
In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion (Latin: ') is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it.
For example:
* "Green is ...
,premise
A premise or premiss is a true or false statement that helps form the body of an argument, which logically leads to a true or false conclusion. A premise makes a declarative statement about its subject matter which enables a reader to either agre ...
whose plausibility depends on the truth of the proposition
In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, "meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
asked about, and which is often an implicit restatement of the proposition.
Defense
A common way out of this argument is not to answer the question (e.g. with a simple 'yes' or 'no'), but to challenge the assumption behind the question. To use an earlier example, a good response to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" would be "I have ''never'' beaten my wife".
Historical examples
Diogenes Laërtius
Diogenes Laërtius ( ; grc-gre, Διογένης Λαέρτιος, ; ) was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving ''Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers'' is a principal sour ...
wrote a brief biography of the philosopher Menedemus in which he relates that:
For another example, the 2009 referendum on corporal punishment in New Zealand asked: "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?" Murray Edridge, of Barnardos New Zealand, criticized the question as "loaded and ambiguous" and claimed "the question presupposes that smacking is a part of good parental correction".
See also
* Barber paradox
* Complex question
* Entailment (pragmatics)
Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence ''A'' entails a sentence ''B'', sentence ''A'' cannot be true without ''B'' being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails ...
* False dilemma
* Gotcha journalism
* Implicature
In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly say ...
* Leading question
* Mu (negative)
The Japanese and Korean term ' () or Chinese (), meaning "not have; without", is a key word in Buddhism, especially Zen traditions.
Etymology
The Old Chinese * () is cognate with the Proto-Tibeto-Burman *''ma'', meaning "not". This reconstr ...
* Presupposition
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions includ ...
* Suggestive question
* List of fallacies
A fallacy is reasoning that is logically invalid, or that undermines the logical validity of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies.
Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classi ...
References
External links
Fallacy: Loaded Questions and Complex Claims
Critical Thinking exercises. San Jose State University.
The Fallacy Files
What Is The Loaded Question Fallacy? Definition and Examples
Fallacy in Logic
{{DEFAULTSORT:Loaded Question
Informal fallacies