Perhaps you've seen it, but William Safire had a column in the New York Times magazine about this a few years ago.

Language changes all the time, and words/phrases come to have new meanings. I agree with you that this particular change is frustrating philosophically, and it does make me kind of grumpy when I hear it, but that said, I'm not sure that there's much we can do about it. It seems to me that it's already too late -- in ordinary use, "beg the question" has already come to mean something like "raise the question."

In philosophical discussion, of course, we can and should retain the original use of this phrase. I think of it much the way I do the terms "valid" and "sound". In ordinary conversation, it's perfectly acceptable to say "she makes a valid point" or "her point is sound", where both "valid" and "sound" are being used as synonyms for "true" or "plausible". But when discussing and evaluating arguments, we reserve the terms "valid" and "sound" as technical terms to apply to particular characteristics of arguments -- and in this context, the alternative ordinary uses are jarring to the ear.

Confession: I badly wanted to leave your question without an answer (hence making it not a question?)!

But it was too good a question. Or two good questions: (1) could there be questions to which there are no answers? And (2) could there be questions which have answers which we will never know?

If you think that it makes sense to say that reality isn't always determinate, isn't always a particular way, then the answer to (1) would be Yes. There are some questions in mathematics, for instance, to which some (but not all) mathematicians believe there is no correct answer; the Continuum Hypothesis is a famous example. Some (but not all) physicists hold that some features of the physical world are indeterminate as well, for instance that there simply is no right answer to the question of what precisely a particle's position and velocity are at a particular moment. On the other hand, if you believe that if a question is fully meaningful, then the relevant reality it concerns must settle the matter one way or the other, then (1) would have to be answered No.

The question (2) also gives rise to heated debate. As you can see elsewhere on this site, there are philosophers who believe that the fact that our minds have the particular structure they do makes it inevitable that some truths about our world will remain forever beyond our grasp. On the other hand, there are philosophers who think that any question whose answer is in principle not knowable by us is really not a clear question. The great American philosopher W.V. Quine (1908-2002) puts it in his inimitable way:

Questions, let us remember, are in language. Language is learned by people, from people, only in relation, ultimately, to observable circumstances of utterance. The relation of language to observation is often very devious, but observation is finally all there is for language to be anchored to. If a question could in principle never be answered, then, one feels that language has gone wrong; language has parted its moorings, and the question has no meaning. On this philosophy, of course, our central question has a sweeping answer. The question was whether there are things man could never know. The question was whether there are questions — meaningful questions — that man could in principle never answer. On this philosophy, the answer to this question of questions is no. [From "The Limits of Knowledge" in his The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (revised and enlarged edition).]

The question what the relation is between thought and language is, to my mind, one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy. That is to say, what one's view is about this matter will profoundly shape one's views on many other topics. What one's impression is of the current state of play will, however, depend upon what one has read. There are, as you say, many philosophers would suppose that thought is somehow dependent upon language. One famous example is Donald Davidson, who argues explicitly for this conclusion in "Thought and Talk". On the current scene, John McDowell is perhaps the most visible proponent of the view. Hilary Putnam has held a version of this view in the last several years, and it can be found as well in the writings of Michael Dummett. I could easily continue.

On the other hand, however, there are plenty of philosophers who reject this view and hold, as you suggest, that the ability to think does not depend upon the possession of language skills. Jerry Fodor, for example, would certainly suppose that pre-linguistic children and many non-human animals are capable of thought. Christopher Peacocke holds a simlar view (see his paper "Concepts without Words", for example). In fact, it's probably fair to say that most philosophers of mind would be in this camp.

More interesting to me, however, is the fact that most linguists, I think, and the overwhelming majority of psychologists would also be in this camp. There is a lot of very interesting work being done in psychology nowadays on infant cognition and conceptual development: At the moment, one hot topic is acquisition of numerical concepts, for exmaple. This work simply presumes that infants are cognitive agents, and the success psychologists have had operating on that assumption gives us good reason to believe it. Moreover, much work in psycholinguistics proceeds on the assumption that word-acquisition at the earliest stages is, for the most part, a matter of associating words with concepts one already has.

It's important to be clear here what one means by "have thoughts". You speak, in part of your post, about "whatever goes through the[] heads" of platypi. That's one sort of thing one can mean. But you will note that I have tended to speak of whether a creature is a "cognitive agent", by which I mean: Should we really think of the creature as having beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, that explain (or rationalize) its behavior the way our beliefs, desires, and the like explain (or rationalize) ours? The "should really" here is important, because we do of course explain animals' behavior in pyschological terms all the time. The issue is whether we should take such explanations fully seriously or should instead explain infants or animals' behavior in some quite different terms. The question what infants or animals have "going through their heads" and how similar it is to what goes through normal adult humans' heads is of less interest. As far as the status of animals is concerned, then, the place to look would be e.g. at ethnographic work on the great apes. Such work as with which I am familiar makes an impressive case that apes are cognitive agents in the relevant sense.

Note that this is not to say that the possession of language does not make some important difference to cognition. It pretty plainly does, and it's a nice question exactly what kind of difference that is.

To my ear, your sentence means "I was studying almost until dawn". So I take "nearly" to be an adverb that modifies the adjectival phrase "until dawn", to create a new adjectival phrase, "nearly until dawn", which in turn applies to your studying. Thus, I take the sentence to be structurally parallel to "I was running very fast", where "fast" plays the role of "until dawn" and "very" that of "nearly".

'Water' is a natural-kind term, and the natural-kind that 'water' refers to turned out to be H2O. In every possible situation, 'water' refers only to quantities of H2O. Twin-water is of a different natural kind, say, XYZ. The idea is that physical natural-kinds are defined by what they are made up of. So, the stuff made up of XYZ (and not H2O) is not water.

The intuition that the XYZ-stuff on twin earth really is water may come from considerations like these: The XYZ-stuff on twin-earth looks and tastes just like water; it is used in the same way that we use water (brush teeth with it, wash clothes in it, etc.). But what determines the meaning of a physical natural-kind term (it is thought) is its physical make-up, not how it looks or what it's used for.

How it looks and what it's used for "fix the reference" of 'water:' The stuff that looks like *that* (pointing on earth to H2O) and is used for teeth-brushing, etc. is water. It turned out (centuries later) that that stuff is H2O--and it had been H2O all along. Twin-earthians fix the reference of their XYZ-term the same way: The stuff that looks like *that* (pointing on twin-earth to XYZ) and is used for teeth-brushing turned out to be XYZ. Because earthians and twin-earthians use the same descriptions to fix the reference of the relevant terms, it may seem that the Earthian and Twin-Earthian terms for the stuff that looks like water should be the same. But because the descriptions denote different kinds of stuff (H2O and XYZ), the words for the stuffs do not mean the same thing. Twin-Earthians may use a word that sounds like 'water', but it isn't 'water,' since it refers to XYZ.

Philosophers say, 'Water' "rigidly designates" water. That means that in every possible world 'water' refers to what is in fact water in the actual world--i.e., H2O. A world without H2O is a world without water.

It's perhaps worth saying here that there are philosophers whose intuitions are closer to those of the questioner. Gabriel Segal, a member of this panel, has written a nice book called A Slim Book About Narrow Content defending a view not that distant from the one mentioned.

That said, it's important to be clear about what the intuition is supposed to be. As Lynne said (hi, Lynne), the intuition is one about what the term "water" refers to. Or again, the intuition is supposed to be that, if Oscar says, "There's water on twin earth", he speaks falsely. One doesn't have to have that intuition. Some people don't. But before you decide whether you really do, it's worth thinking hard about the fact, mentioned by Lynne, that water is supposed to be a kind of stuff just like gold. Fool's gold isn't gold, no matter how much it looks like gold, and it wouldn't be gold even if it looked a whole lot more like gold, because fool's gold isn't the same kind of stuff that gold is. What we mean by a "kind of stuff" is a hard question, and it's particularly hard as concerns Oscar pre-1850. There are some nice papers by Mark Wilson, e.g. "Predicate Meets Property", on this issue.

The intuitions about the 'water' example that philosophers focus on are, as explained above, about reference. They are also about truth. It takes a little work to connect reference and truth to meaning. One line of thought goes as follows. Suppose that Oscar lands on Twin Earth. Both Oscar and Twin Oscar point to a sample of XYZ and say 'That is water'. What Twin Oscar says is true - he is speaking Twin English and Twin English speakers standardly call XYZ 'water'. But what Oscar says is false. He thinks that the stuff in front of him is water, the same kind of stuff he was familiar with on Earth. And that is the thought he is expressing when he says 'that's water'. But if what Twin Oscar says is true and what Oscar says is false, then their words must mean something different.

I concur with Deniz that non-philosophers often don't respond to the example in the way that many philosophers do - although as yet no seroious data on this have been gathered. Often they either don't share the intuitions about reference and truth or they do, but they remain convinced that what the Twins mean by their words is the same.

As Richard says (thanks for the mention, Richard), I am with the non-philosophers. I think that in 1750 the English word 'water' would have been true of XYZ as well as H2O.

For some discussion of how lay intuitions differ from those of philosophers' in respect of these matters, see my 'Reference, Causal Powers, Externalist Intutions and Unicorns' on my web page.

An epiphenomenon is something that is real and has a cause, but does not in turn go on to cause other things. A common simile is that it is like the smoke coming out of the locomotive. Thus in the philosophy of mind epiphenomenalism is the view that experiences are caused by physical states of the brain, but do not in turn cause anything: they are just the smoke the brain gives off while it is working.