 You shouldn't confuse a Mott and Bailey argument for valid reasoning, just like you shouldn't confuse Mott's and Bailey's for dinner. I've been called out before for making a ton of episodes on intellectual rigor, the slow, methodical, nitpicking analysis of ideas to uncover problems or inconsistencies with them which don't appear on a more cursory inspection. I keep harping on it for many different reasons, not the least of which is my continued embarrassment at how bad my thinking was before I discovered it in earnest, but also it lies at the heart of several issues which many people face every day, like logical fallacies. A post hoc fallacy is just what happens when someone doesn't think about causation rigorously. A slippery slope fallacy is just what happens when someone doesn't think about necessary consequences rigorously. A strawman fallacy is just what happens when someone doesn't think about a counter argument rigorously. In that sense, all logical fallacies are really just names given to special cases of the same basic problem, using faulty intuitions instead of rigorous analysis when considering an idea. But it can help to have names for common forms of that mistake. If people fall victim to the same blindspot and reasoning again and again, putting a label on it can help us all unravel those errors more quickly. So with that in mind, let's put a label on one more, one which you've probably experienced but never really thought about explicitly except to say, that's just dumb. The Mott and Bailey fallacy. In medieval towns, usually built to repel enemy attacks, there was a popular sort of multi-level defensive scheme. The Bailey or courtyard was a low, flat region, only protected by a ditch or a moat, but where most of the town structures were built. On an overlooking hill or mound sat the Mott or Keepe, a heavily fortified and easily defended structure. The idea was that even in the event that the Bailey fell to some attacking force, the Mott provided ample, last ditch protection for the inhabitants of the town, raining down rocks and arrows and whatever else onto the invaders until they left. A Mott and Bailey argument, as first coined by philosopher Nicholas Shackle in response to some postmodernist philosophy which was irritating him, metaphorically uses the same technique. An argument employing this strategy actually uses two forms of a single argument. A strong form, one which is indisputable to anybody with any sense, and a weaker form, which isn't. The person advancing the argument switches back and forth between those forms as necessary depending on what sort of resistance they find for their ideas, despite the fact that they actually mean two different things. Shackle's chosen punching bag for his paper is the postmodernist assertion of social constructivism. The idea that what we think of as objective reality is actually a sort of cultural construct dictated by the language and concepts developed by our culture. Interpreted very broadly, that is kind of true. We do use socially imparted cognitive handles to break up the sensory input from our world into manageable concepts and people with different social backgrounds have different handles. Like in the ancient forms of various languages there is no separate word for blue and green. Their eyes didn't function any differently. They could still tell them apart, but it's probably fair to say that they didn't think about them the same way that we do. Even today physicists might think of these colors as different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Painters might look at them as different combinations of primary colors. People from different educational and social backgrounds think about the same input from the world in different ways. Duh. However, some postmodernist philosophers took that idea a step further, suggesting that what we think of as objective reality doesn't have any meaningful existence outside of those arbitrary structures and that things like facts and truth were just as arbitrary. That's less of a duh thing. If someone said this apple is red and someone else says that it's blue, most people would agree that that's not just a matter of, well that's just like your opinion, man. In fact, if you think carefully about it, it's sort of a self-refuting assertion. If the truth of social constructivism is just a matter of opinion, then why should we accept it? But using a Mott and Bailey strategy, if someone were to voice some objection to the more audacious version of the claim, the social constructivists could just retreat to their Mott saying, but I just meant that people use different concepts to interpret the world. All I'm saying is that maybe these people use different concepts to refer to the color of the apple, so they think about it differently. Maybe one of them has just never learned the color red and so they're using the closest word that they have. Yeah, okay, I guess. Therefore, the color of the apple is just a matter of opinion. Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, back up. Essentially, all of the interesting or provocative stuff happens out on the Bailey, largely by implication. But when forced into a more defensive stance by counterarguments, the person making claims retreats to a more boring or trivial version of their ideas. The Mott and Bailey strategy appears in all sorts of different places, in more or less ridiculous forms. To be clear, it's totally legitimate to back off from some more extreme assertion to try and find some common ground to build from. But it's never good to do so in a way which misrepresents your original position as being something that it's not. That misrepresentation isn't always just a case of word games either. For example, some people will assert that so-called alternative medicine is just as good as or better than genuine evidence-backed medicine. That homeopathy or aromatherapy or spirit healing will cure what ails you. However, if met with any appreciable resistance, like compelling research which shows pretty conclusively that these treatments are ineffective, rather than defending their initial assertion, they'll retreat to a much more easily defensible Mott of it being harmless. At least until the skeptic goes away. Hey, so long as it's not actively hurting anyone, what's the big deal? A nice placebo that makes people feel better? It's not the end of the world, right? You'll notice that nobody was arguing that these practices should be banned because they're harmful or because they don't make people feel good. But that's a much more defensible position. And you just know that as soon as they think they can get away with it, they'll be right back out on the bailey, saying, oh, you should definitely try ear candles. My mom swears by them. Again, these sorts of tactics depend on a lack of rigor in establishing a strict definition of what is being asserted and maintaining that definition throughout an argument. That doesn't imply that every time someone moves to argue for a more conservative position that you should jump at their throats. The problems only crop up when there's no differentiation made between two different positions of differing strength, saying that people use different social constructs to interpret the world isn't the same thing as saying that no interpretation is better than any other. Claiming that alternative medicine shouldn't be banned because it's not explicitly harmful isn't the same thing as asserting that it works. In the end, the lesson of the Mott and Bailey is pretty simple and is pretty much the same as any other cautionary tale about intellectual rigor. Say exactly what you mean, and don't try to hand wave your way around any counterpoints. That's what the catapults are for. Have you experienced any Mott and Bailey fallacies? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.