Motte-and-bailey fallacy
Imagine an argument like a medieval castle — with a strong, small tower and a sprawling, desirable courtyard. The 'motte-and-bailey fallacy' describes a rhetorical trick where someone defends a controversial idea by strategically retreating to a much safer, less interesting one when challenged. It's a clever, often frustrating, maneuver that can derail productive discussion, making it crucial to understand how it operates. The motte-and-bailey fallacy involves an arguer presenting a controversial claim, then retreating to a defensible, simpler claim when challenged. This tactic leverages ambiguity between two similar positions, allowing the arguer to avoid genuine refutation of their bolder assertion. Recognizing this fallacy helps clarify arguments and prevents debaters from being drawn into attacking a 'motte' when the 'bailey' is the real point of contention.
AI Summary
Imagine an argument like a medieval castle — with a strong, small tower and a sprawling, desirable courtyard. The 'motte-and-bailey fallacy' describes a rhetorical trick where someone defends a controversial idea by strategically retreating to a much safer, less interesting one when challenged. It's a clever, often frustrating, maneuver that can derail productive discussion, making it crucial to understand how it operates.
- The motte-and-bailey fallacy involves an arguer presenting a controversial claim, then retreating to a defensible, simpler claim when challenged.
- This tactic leverages ambiguity between two similar positions, allowing the arguer to avoid genuine refutation of their bolder assertion.
- Recognizing this fallacy helps clarify arguments and prevents debaters from being drawn into attacking a 'motte' when the 'bailey' is the real point of contention.
The Castle Defense that Became a Fallacy
To truly grasp the 'motte-and-bailey fallacy,' we first need to understand its namesake: a medieval motte-and-bailey castle. Picture a tall, stone tower — the motte — built atop a mound, surrounded by a larger, more comfortable area of land known as the bailey. The bailey, with its living quarters and resources, was the prized possession, but also vulnerable.
When attackers came, the strategy was clear. If the assault was light, defenders could hold the bailey. But if faced with a heavy siege, the outer bailey became indefensible. The logical move was to retreat to the motte — that dark, cramped, but ultimately impregnable stone tower.
The motte wasn't where anyone wanted to live; its sole purpose was defense. Once the marauders grew tired and left, the defenders could emerge from their fortified motte and reclaim their desirable bailey. This strategic retreat and re-occupation forms the perfect metaphor for a slippery argumentative tactic.
An Argumentative Sleight of Hand
In argumentation, the 'motte-and-bailey fallacy' occurs when a debater conflates two positions. One is the 'bailey' — a controversial, interesting, but difficult-to-defend claim. The other is the 'motte' — a modest, unexciting, but easily defensible position that shares some superficial similarity.
The arguer initially champions the controversial 'bailey.' But when challenged or pressed for evidence, they swiftly retreat to the 'motte,' insisting that's all they ever truly meant. This allows them to evade criticism, often portraying their opponent as unreasonable for even questioning such an obvious, modest point.
The Coining of the Term
This insightful concept was coined by philosopher Nicholas Shackel in 2005. Shackel preferred to call it a 'motte-and-bailey doctrine' rather than strictly a fallacy, emphasizing the deliberate strategic nature of the maneuver rather than just a logical error.
Shackel's primary motivation for identifying this pattern was to critique what he saw as deliberately obscure and evasive argumentation within postmodernist discourse. He pointed fingers at academic works by figures like Michel Foucault, David Bloor, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others.
Spotting the Fallacy: A Concrete Example
Consider David Bloor's 'strong programme' in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Bloor suggested that 'knowledge' is simply 'whatever people take to be knowledge,' blurring the lines between widely accepted beliefs and empirically validated truths.
Here, the 'motte' is the unassailable idea that what we commonly call 'knowledge' is indeed what society generally accepts as such. But the alluring 'bailey' is the far more radical claim that scientific knowledge is no different from any other widely accepted belief, implying that truth and reality play no special role in its acquisition.
Related Concepts: Semantic Shenanigans
The motte-and-bailey fallacy is often considered a specialized form of equivocation, where one meaning of a word or concept is subtly swapped for another without the audience noticing. It's not always a genuine mistake; sometimes, it's a deliberate 'concept-swapping' strategy.
Shackel also identified a related tactic he called 'Humpty Dumptying' — a nod to Lewis Carroll's character who famously declared words mean 'just what I choose them to mean.' This involves artificially redefining an elementary term to create a new, technical meaning while exploiting its broad, colloquial understanding.
The arguer first 'softens up' the audience, then presents their redefinition as a profound, deeper truth of the concept. By eliding both meanings, they create an impression of depth and complexity where none truly exists, making it hard to pin down their actual claim.
This strategy often results in what philosopher Daniel Dennett termed a 'deepity' — a statement that sounds profound but is either trivially true and uninteresting, or profoundly false and absurd. The motte-and-bailey shares this characteristic of sounding important, while its core may be hollow or mundane.
The Other Side of the Coin: Critical Analysis
While powerful, the concept of the motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't without its own critics. Rhetoric professor Randy Allen Harris argued that using this label can sometimes violate the 'principle of charity' — the idea that one should interpret an opponent's argument in its strongest, most reasonable form.
Harris suggested that critics who accuse others of retreating to a motte might themselves be guilty of an 'offensive corollary.' By unfairly attacking a caricatured version of the opponent's argument, they too are avoiding a true intellectual 'fight' on the actual 'bailey' of complex ideas. It's a reminder that both sides of an argument have a responsibility to engage thoughtfully and respectfully.
Article
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 that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer may claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
History
Motte-and-bailey fallacy
A motte and bailey castle. The motte is the hill with the fortified keep on top; the bailey is the larger, fenced area.
Philosopher Nicholas Shackel, who coined the term, prefers to speak of a motte-and-bailey doctrine instead of a fallacy. In 2005, Shackel described the reference to medieval castle defense like this:
A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land. [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.
Shackel's original impetus was to criticize what he considered duplicitous processes of argumentation 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.
The motte-and-bailey concept was popularized on the blog Slate Star Codex in 2014.
Examples
Motte-and-bailey fallacy
An example given by Shackel is the statement "morality is socially constructed". In this example, the motte is that our beliefs about right and wrong are socially constructed, while the bailey is that there is no such thing as right and wrong.
According to Shackel, David Bloor's strong programme for the sociology of scientific knowledge made use of a motte-and-bailey doctrine when trying to defend his conception of knowledge as "whatever people take to be knowledge", without distinguishing between beliefs that are widely accepted but contrary to reality and beliefs that correspond to reality. In this instance, the easily defensible motte would be 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, implying that truth and reality play no role in gaining scientific knowledge.
Related concepts
Motte-and-bailey fallacy
The fallacy has been described as an instance of equivocation, more specifically concept-swapping, which is the substitution of one concept for another without the audience realizing.
In Shackel's original article, he argued that Michel Foucault employed "arbitrary redefinition" of elementary but inherently equivocal terms such as "truth" and "power" in order to create the illusion of "giving a profound but subtle analysis of a taken-for-granted concept". Shackel labeled this type of strategic rhetorical conflation of the broad colloquial understanding of a term with a technical, artificially stipulated one "Humpty Dumptying", in reference to an exchange in Through The Looking-Glass where that character says "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
In Shackel's description, a motte-and-bailey doctrine relies on overawing outsiders with pseudo-profundity, much like what Daniel Dennett called a deepity.
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 somehow an exposition of a profundity. ... the strategy is, as in Foucault's "Truth and power", to first make use of the word in its redefined sense, then present the redefinition as if it had already been established as the deeper content of the concept. Finally, the impression of profundity is sealed by passages which elide both meanings at once.
Critical analysis
Motte-and-bailey fallacy
Responding to Shackel's use of the motte-and-bailey concept, professor of rhetoric Randy Allen Harris objected to what he saw as the use of the concept to gratuitously violate the principle of charity by distorting other people's arguments and failing to understand the other's position beyond what is required to attack it; Harris criticized such usage of the motte-and-bailey concept for "avoiding a true fight" by portraying the other unfairly, which Harris called the "offensive corollary" of the other's retreat to the defensive motte. In other words, the person who attacks someone else for retreating to the motte could be "just as guilty" of retreating to a "siege engine" instead of engaging in a deeper dialogue with the other "out on the bailey". Harris pleaded for a rhetorical analysis that would explore disagreements more carefully and respectfully.