Reality and Rationality
Thursday 23 December 2021
Sunday 18 December 2016
Motte and Bailey Doctrines
One of the difficulties of getting people to
behave better epistemically is that, whilst intellectual dishonesty is wrong,
it is difficult to convict people of intellectual wrongs. As David Stove showed
in his wonderful paper ‘What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?’ (The Plato Cult
and Other Philosophical Follies
Chapter 7 http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html),
there are indefinitely many ways of cheating intellectually and for most there
is no simple way to put one’s finger on how the cheat is effected. There is
just the hard work of describing the species in detail.
Some
time ago I wrote a paper entitled The Vacuity of Postmodernist
Methodology (http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2005.00370.x
or http://philpapers.org/rec/SHATVO-2) in which I described and named a number
such cheats that I detected in postmodernism. One of these I named the Motte
and Bailey Doctrine. There has recently been a flurry of use of this concept to
analyse ethical, political and religious positions (e.g. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/,
https://deusdiapente.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/the-motte-and-bailey-doctrine/,
http://freenortherner.com/2014/08/08/motte-bailey-example/?theme=suits,
http://mitrailleuse.net/2014/07/10/motte-buster/,
http://www.reddit.com/r/FeMRADebates/comments/2c1a4f/feminisms_harmful_bailey_and_the_dictionary_motte/) so I am taking the opportunity to have a look
at it again.
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.
For my original purposes the desirable but only
lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say,
the Bailey, represents philosophical propositions with similar properties:
desirable to their proponents but only lightly defensible. The Motte represents
the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard
pressed.
Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being
a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal. Once made it is relatively
obvious to those familiar with the doctrine that the doctrine’s survival
required a systematic vacillation between exploiting the desired territory and
retreating to the Motte when pressed. Clearly, the diagnosis is not confined to
philosophical doctrines: others may
suffer the same malady.
I have
been impressed by how well the recent users of this concept have deployed it as
a tool of analysis and don’t myself want to add to those analyses here. What I
do want to do is clarify something about its nature. 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. A fallacy is an argument that is invalid and
equivocation is giving different meanings to the same terms when you should be
keeping their meaning invariant. A doctrine, however, is a body of propositions, not an argument. So
a Motte and Bailey Doctrine cannot be a fallacy and shifting from asserting the
Bailey propositions to the Motte propositions is not in general effected
by giving different meanings to the same words or statements.
It is
possible that I am partly to blame for that misunderstanding since in the
original paper I mentioned that a Motte and Bailey Doctrine could be
constructed from a set of what I called Troll’s Truisms. Troll’s Truisms are
indeed based in equivocation A
Troll’s Truism is an ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may
trade on a trivial truth. For example, ‘morality
is socially constructed’ sounds like a radical assertion of cultural relativism
until we are told that by ‘morality’ the speaker means not morality itself but just
our beliefs about right and wrong. Of course, these beliefs are, in some sense,
socially constructed, if only because our acquisition of many beliefs is
mediated by language and beliefs about right and wrong are certainly among
those acquired in that way. Hence in this sense of ‘morality’ the statement is
true and trivially so. (At the time I named Troll’s Truisms I did not know of
the phenomenon of internet Trolling: now
that I do it seems to me a serendipitously fortuitous naming. Daniel Dennett
has recently taken to calling Troll’s Truisms ‘Deepities’.)
So a Motte
and Bailey Doctrine may be asserted by the use of Troll’s Truisms, using the
trivial truths for the Motte propositions and the exciting falsehoods for the
Bailey propositions. In such a case it would be correct to speak of the use of
strategic equivocation. However, in general they are not asserted in that way
and there are in fact many ways they can be advanced. In the paper itself I
analyse in detail the ways in which Michel Foucault, David Bloor, Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty set up Motte and
Bailey Doctrines by Humpty Dumptying, deploying what I call ‘Equivocal Fulcra’
and dancing the Postmodernist Fox Trot before they finally fall into the black
hole of absolute irrationalism.
All
that being said, once a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is in place, it
offers extensive opportunities for deceitful trickery in argument. The basic
fallacy that is available is offering the arguments for doctrines in the Motte
as if they were arguments for the doctrines in the Bailey. The crudest such
fallacy would have the form ‘Motte, therefore Bailey’, and certainly, despite
its crudity, there is no shortage of such argumentation. Something similar is
going on in the strategy of advancing the Bailey and then retreating to the Motte when criticised. On such
foundations, a myriad of persuasive fallacies may be built, and indeed, that
myriad is the very point of the Motte in a Motte and Bailey Doctrine: without
it the Bailey is lost.
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. For example, in some discussions
using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different
people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte
and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the
concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be
before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different
people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get
clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their
adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to
distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of
true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who
defend the Motte.
For a final worrying lesson, here
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=100375
is someone who has grasped the concept but who entirely mistakes its point,
apparently because he takes the Sophist’s perspective that goodness in
epistemic behaviour is answerable only to the standards of effective
persuasion.
Update 2: I'd like to add a clarification
to an example given in the original paper in response to challenges from a
number of different people in a number of different locations. In that example
I showed how Foucault sets up a Motte and Bailey doctrine about truth using
Humpty-Dumptying (the arbitrary redefinition of a word). The bailey in
this case contains radical philosophical propositions about truth
(identifying truth and power) which are what his statements express if we take
his use of 'truth' to mean truth. The motte contains the trivial
propositions that his statements express under his redefinition of 'truth' to
mean something other than truth.
Defending him on the grounds of his
redefinition is missing the essential dishonesty of what he is doing. He
purports to be offering a theory about truth, not something else, but the
trickery of the redefinition gives him a way out when it is proved (as I do in
the paper) that his theory of truth is false. Then it is claimed that he wasn’t
ever talking about truth but always talking of something else. But that makes
no sense of him using the word ‘truth’. He intends to be understood to be
offering a theory of truth, a radical theory of truth that undermines our
complacent beliefs about it. The function of the redefinition is precisely to
play the role of the impregnable role motte when placed under philosophical
scrutiny. Under that redefinition, his statements are true, but they’re not
about truth. Once the philosophical scrutiny is relieved, he and his adherents
return to what they really wanted, the radical but false propositions about
truth.
Sometimes evading this last point is attempted by claiming
that the refutation is based on speaking
of logical or scientific truth, which is not the truth he is talking about. This
is then defended by mentioning the apparent possibility of a proposition lacking scientific truth but
possessing some other kind of truth. This, however, is confused. There are not
separate properties, logical truth, scientific truth, every day truth, to be
spoken of. There is just truth. Speaking of logical truth, scientific truth, every
day truth and so on, are just rather
loose ways of speaking of logical truths, scientific truths, every day truths
and so on. Logical truths are truths of logic, scientific truths are truths of
science, every day truths are truths
about every day matters. Logical truths are true and in being so are possessed
of exactly the same property of truth as are possessed by scientific truths and
every day truths. So the adjectives ‘logical’, ‘scientific’ etc. characterise
the subject matter of the propositions, not the semantic property of truth had
by those propositions.
Finally, a great deal of philosophical mischief
and nonsense in postmodernism is recognisably traceable to Humpty-Dumptying. For
example, the foolishness of linguistic ontological relativism is exposed by the
old riddle of how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail ‘a leg’. The
answer is four: it doesn’t matter what you call a tail, that doesn’t make it a
leg.
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