Thread by @caitlinmoriah

conservatives and "centrist" trojan horses for the right wing don't understand the logical terms they worship so fervently, part 2:

In part 1, I focused on "guilt by association fallacy," something they pull out when you say someone they listen to shouldn't be believed because their financial or social connections are influencing their claims:

https://twitter.com/caitlinmoriah/status/1285607705277878273

I really thought I'd done one on ad hominem but I guess not. Guess I just yelled about it in a few different places. Maybe I'll do one later.

but today's thread is on jimmy concept's favorite misused logic term, the motte and bailey fallacy.

What's a motte and bailey? It's a type of castle where some of it was built separately on high ground so that if the main part fell, everyone could move to the secondary part, which is easier to defend

In argumentation, a motte and bailey fallacy is when you use a modest and easy-to-defend position as a cover to act like you're defending a much more extreme position.

e.g.,
BAILEY: democrats are satanic child traffickers
MOTTE: bill clinton is on the lolita flight logs

one mistake people often make when crying "motte and bailey" is to confuse "similar more defensible position" for "supporting argument" -- nobody is doing you a bamboozle here, they're just supporting their reasoning for the original claim

why would the statement "we need to convince them to do better" not follow from "we need to stop hosting and citing them and their supporters"? someone could logically think the one explains the motivation behind the other, which isn't a motte and bailey switcheroo

thinking it is a motte and bailey comes from motivated reasoning - if you want to believe the speaker is an irrational monster, you'll come up with reasons to see them that way.

another is to take two totally different people's claims and act like one person has made them both, like the post that inspired this thread did:

when challenged, the op said:

no, you can't put one person's statement in the motte and another's in the bailey. that's not a logical fallacy, that's just different people saying different stuff

the other issue with this is that the imagined phrase "physics and chemistry and psychology are all completely socially constructed" is a straw man - you can't put a straw man in the bailey position and act like you discovered a logical fallacy

no matter how many times they were corrected, they would not accept that the people they were memeing were saying something quite moderate and uncontroversial: that science is done by humans and is subject to human interpretation, including the effects of society on that human

if science were perfectly unbiased and a provided direct description of objective reality, we would never have been able to use it to defend geocentric models, or to spread the belief that vaccines cause autism. doesn't seem that wild and indefensible to me, but what do i know

so when you see this meme, or the phrase "motte and bailey," look deeper. it gets misused a lot to unthinkingly dismiss reasonable positions without having to deal with their content. don't fall for it