Petitio Principii
Petitio principii is latin for "begging the question". This is a fallacy of argumentation that involves sneaking the conclusion of your argument into one or more of the premises.
An example of petitio principii can be found in an often-used solution to the veil-of-perception problem that confronts certain representative theories of perception. Representative theories of perception are characterized by the notion that the objects of the mind are merely representations of their source (i.e. objects in an external world). This immediately gives rise to the following problem: if all of our perceptions are mere representations “in” the mind then how do we ever discover any information about the “objects themselves” as they are outside of the mind? A common solution is to merely assert that mental representations are veridical to some external world. But this begs the question that we’re trying to answer: namely, how do we know of an external world in the first place if all we have access to as perceivers is the “appearance” that we get in the representations? How do we know that the representations tell us anything accurate about the “source” of our perceptions if we never directly perceive that source.
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