Circularity is not Fallacious
Probably the most annoying thing in philosophical conversation I have encountered on internet philosophy over the years. Whenever someone makes an assertion as to a matter of fact, a very common reaction is to complain that they are "begging the question," or doing "circular reasoning," as if these are fallacious or somehow illegitimate. This has a tendency to stop conversation and cause people to get in moronic loops where nothing gets accomplished and no progress is made and everyone just doubles down in their own ideological corners.
For one, circularity is not even a fallacy. I.e., a question begging argument is not formally invalid. It's completely valid (and potentially even sound) for an argument if that argument is circular. It's at best (but not even always) a rhetorical deficiency in an argument, since circularity is often unpersuasive or could even be part of a pivot away from a more relevant issue in a discussion**.** But unpersuasive or missing the point =/= formally invalid, like it is tacitly assumed most of the time.
Second, all argumentation eventually becomes circular at some level in some way shape or form. There is no way to escape it, especially in metaphysics which alleges to deal with the most fundamental aspects of knowledge and reality.
Example:
Debates over the hard problem of conscious are the absolute worst. The physicalist sits there and accuses the idealist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is reducible to physical phenomena. The idealist sits there and accuses the physicalist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is irreducible.
So who is right? I think the hard problem of consciousness has a solution, but you're just going to get accused of begging the question no matter what metaphysical paradigm you choose, idealist or physicalist or otherwise. You can't appeal to empirical phenomena to break the symmetry of circularities either, because then you would need a theory of empirical evidentiary warrant, which would itself be circular.
Example:
Consider the cogito, a classic self-evident truth often considered a starting point for epistemology and an instance of irrefutably certain knowledge. But completely contingent on one's alleged ability of one's self to verify the existence of one's self (which is a kind of circularity). And if you follow Descartes' reasoning, contingent on God's existence (which introduces the so-called 'Cartesian Circle' into his epistemology).
Example:
Theistic Presuppositionalism, an internet favorite and probably one of the most obnoxious forms of theistic argumentation in existence. But here is the catch: I think they are ultimately correct. But presuppositionalism is a perfect example of why circular reasoning can be unpersuasive. Presuppositionalism may be, in my opinion, pointing towards something that is true, but it's dialectically useless and only used seriously by psychopaths that want to solipsistically shut up atheistic debate opponents in a bad faith way.
Conclusion:
I'm just pissed because I was watching tiktok metaphysics debates recently and several of them just devolve into the debaters accusing eachother of question begging. But I see the same thing happen here on reddit all the time. So the conversation just loops people never getting past certain intuitive assertions because both sides just dogmatically dig in.