Motte-and-bailey fallacy

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position.[2][3] Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey hasn't been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)[4] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).[5]

History

Nicholas Shackel, who coined the term,[1] prefers to speak of a motte-and-bailey doctrine instead of a fallacy.[3] His original impetus was to criticize duplicitous processes of argumentation he found in works of academics such as Michel Foucault, David Bloor, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Berger and Luckmann, and in postmodernist discourses in general.[5][2]

John Murawski has described the reference to medieval castle defense like this:[5]

The Bailey is the productive area around the castle containing stables, workshops and other places exposed to enemy attack and difficult to defend; in the modern usage, it represents the controversial doctrine that is hard to defend philosophically but produces the desired political results. The Motte is a steep mound topped with an impregnable tower, or a keep, that's good for a hasty retreat and for shooting arrows at the encroaching foe. In philosophy, the Motte is the easy-to-defend, fallback pabulum that has no political value or cultural stock except as a bad faith evasive maneuver to save the Bailey.

Although Schackel is credited for the invention of the term, psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander is responsible for the popularization of the concept.[1] According to him, the motte-and-bailey fallacy is the opposite of the straw man and the weak man fallacy (sometimes called "nut-picking"),[6] where one attacks an indefensible position in order to claim an easy victory.[7]

Examples

Examples that have been proposed include:

According to Schackel, David Bloor's strong programme for the sociology of scientific knowledge makes use of the motte-and-bailey fallacy when trying to defend his conception of knowledge as "whatever people take to be knowledge" without distinguishing between beliefs which are widely accepted but contrary to reality and beliefs which correspond to reality. In this instance, the easily defensible motte would be the idea that what we call knowledge is what is commonly accepted as such, but the prized bailey would be that scientific knowledge is no different from other widely accepted beliefs. The implication being that truth and reality play no role in gaining scientific knowledge.[2]

There are several concepts related to the motte-and-bailey fallacy. It is built on the bait-and-switch tactic using equivocation to make the switch. The motte is dismissed as a pooh-pooh so that the bailey can avoid debate. The fallacy has been described as the inverse of the straw man, in "replacing a weak position with a strong position to better defend it" rather than "replacing a strong position with a weak position to better attack it".[7]

Philosopher John Holbo has called similar rhetorical moves "the two-step of terrific triviality":[12]

Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven't been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.

Deepity

A deepity is similar to a motte and bailey except that instead of there being two statements it has one statement with two interpretations. Instead of trying to win argument, a deepity is more commonly used to try to sound philosophically deep. A deepity statement is one that is apparently profound but actually asserts a triviality under one interpretation and something meaningless in the other. Generally, a deepity has (at least) two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be "earth-shattering" if true. The trivial interpretation is akin to the motte and the false statement is akin to the bailey.

A common example used to illustrate a deepity is the phrase "love is just a word". On one level the statement is perfectly true (i.e., "love" is a word), but the deeper meaning of the phrase is false; love is many things—a feeling, an emotion, a condition—and not simply a word.

According to Schackel, the motte-and-bailey fallacy relies on the appearance of profundity:[2]

Unlike normal examples of equivocation where one exploits already existing, perhaps quite subtle, differences of meaning, Humpty Dumptying is hardly subtle. The differences in meaning are so obvious that equivocating by use of them cannot normally be pursued without first softening up the audience. The softening up is effected by convincing the audience that the dual meaning is some how an exposition of a profundity.

Effect on public debate

According to Joseph Zabel, the effect of the fallacy on public discourse are nefarious and wide-ranging:[1]

The tactic also creates and reinforces echo chamber behavior; it allows one to easily dismiss critique without having to do the intellectual work necessary to critically examine one's positions. By its nature, it divides people and stifles true argument.

Zabel described the motte-and-bailey as a systematic conflation of controversial and uncontroversial positions,[1] and Murawski said the motte-and-bailey provides "linguistic cover" for controversial positions by associating them with uncontroversial ones.[5]

See also

References
  1. Zabel, Joseph (9 August 2017). "The Motte and the Bailey: A rhetorical strategy to know". heterodoxacademy.org. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  2. Shackel, Nicholas (2005). "The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology". Metaphilosophy. 36 (3). For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed ...
  3. Shackel, Nicholas (5 September 2014). "Motte and Bailey Doctrines". blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk. Practical Ethics blog, University of Oxford. Retrieved 23 May 2019. Some people have spoken of a Motte and Bailey Doctrine as being a fallacy and others of it being a matter of strategic equivocation. Strictly speaking, neither is correct. ... So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it.
  4. Anadale, Christopher (10 June 2019). The Motte & Bailey Fallacy (Lecture) (video). YouTube. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  5. Murawski, John (19 June 2020). "The 'Motte & Bailey': Political Jousting's Deceptive New Medieval Weapon". RealClearInvestigations. online. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  6. Aikin, Scott F.; Casey, John P. (October 2016). "Straw Men, Iron Men, and Argumentative Virtue". Topoi. 35 (2): 431–440. doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9308-5.
  7. Alexander, Scott (3 November 2014). "All in All, Another Brick in the Motte". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 8 July 2019. Retrieved 23 May 2019. The motte-and-bailey ... is a ... mirror image of ... the weak man fallacy [that] is replacing a strong position with a weak position to better attack it; motte-and-bailey is replacing a weak position with a strong position to better defend it.
  8. "#Talk About Trayvon: A Toolkit for White People on the Anniversary of Trayvon's Death" (PDF). BlackLivesMatter.com. Black Lives Matter. 26 February 2017. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 January 2019. Retrieved 20 June 2020. We demand an end to the wars against Black people. We demand reparations & targeted long-term investments to build a world where #BlackLivesMatter.
  9. "#DefundThePolice". BlackLivesMatter.com. Black Lives Matter. 30 May 2020. Archived from the original on 1 June 2020. Retrieved 20 June 2020. We call for a national defunding of police.
  10. "What We Believe". BlackLivesMatter.com. Black Lives Matter. Archived from the original on 30 September 2019. Retrieved 20 June 2020. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
  11. Alexander, Scott (7 July 2014). "Social Justice And Words, Words, Words". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 12 December 2019. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  12. "When I hear the word culture … aw, hell with it". Crooked Timber. 11 April 2007.
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