This analogy irritates me because it's based around a misunderstanding of what the 'bailey' is: the bailey is within the motte; it's not the surrounding lands. I can only assume that the writer is confusing the motte with the keep or something.
"A motte-and-bailey castle was made up of two structures, a motte, a type of mound–often artificial–topped with a wooden or stone structure known as a keep; and at least one bailey, a fortified enclosure built next to the motte."
This is a pretty confusing definition and argument. How does the author distinguish between Morality and "our beliefs about right and wrong"? The author seems to be appealing to universal objective truths, while waving away the notion that these truths are necessarily bound to human understandings of them.
If everyone called a tail a leg, it would be a leg. That's exactly how languages, and the truths surrounding languages, work and evolve!!!
Perhaps call it a bait & switch doctrine? The bait is an exciting proposition, but when you press the author for details, they perform the switch, and what's left is not really exciting anymore.
As for the example using morality, the whole point of absolute morality systems is that moral statements have a truth value independent of human "observation", and in such a world, the sentence "morality is socially constructed" means that the truth values of moral statements are socially constructed, which is exciting! But the switch or the motte in this case is that the author didn't mean that, they were talking about people's perception of morality the whole time, and it is a truism that perople's perception of morality is socially constructed, and that is boring.
Compare for example how exciting the proposition that objective reality is shaped by our thoughts (MAGIC!!!), vs the proposition that our subjective experience of reality is shaped by our thoughts (BORING!).
In the motte and bailey, the "bailey" is put front and center and only abandoned when a more defensible position when under attack ("everything is subjective").
In "bait and switch" the bait is put front and center, but it isn't the position that you want to take, it's one that's used to lure in new recruits ("learn how to learn!").
In some cases, the "motte" and the "bait" might be the same thing - a good bait can also be easy to defend, but not all philosophically defensible positions are particularly attractive.
The original critique is of the arguments of post-modernism's claims that beliefs are "socially manufactured".
If you go around arguing that since beliefs are socially manufactured, that the belief that mountains are made up of the bones of old giants is just as valid as belief in geology, someone is going to call you on it.
If you're asked to back up your claim that beliefs are socially manufactured, you can argue that to a mother, their child's abstract finger paintings can be considered as beautiful as as a Van Gogh. This claim is quite fair, and is not particularly assailable. You've retreated to a "motte", where your giant-bone-mountains is your "bailey".
The author immediately leaps into critiques of the idea that "rationality cannot be an objective constraint on us". For rationality to be a wholly objective constraint on us, we need perfect interactions with it. The other name for that is infallibility.
My argument is that Morality/Rationality is equivalent with "our beliefs about right and wrong". My feeling is that the author would now say that I am retreating to the Motte. I hold that there is no world where morality and rationality and even science are separated from "our belief about right and wrong". I feel like the author feels like they have a pure connection to the realm of Platonic forms.
Here's my theory about the Motte and Bailey. The Bailey is the poor understanding the author has about the "logic/rationale" behind postmodernism, the Motte is the understanding gained through further reasearch. The author it turns out, is fallible. Perhaps I can now dismiss this construction of theirs as a strawman? ;)
> My argument is that Morality/Rationality is equivalent with "our beliefs about right and wrong". My feeling is that the author would now say that I am retreating to the Motte.
I think you are confusing the author's examples of motte and bailey doctrines, with his description of the phenomenon itself?
He's trying to describe a thing that is larger than a logical fallacy, a system of argumentation when someone asserts two things, A and B, where A is a bold statement that is hard to defend, B is a boring statement that is easy to defend, and the person claims they are interchangeable, and moves from one to the other depending on the level of scrutiny.
>>Many of the philosophical doctrines purveyed by postmodernists have been roundly refuted, yet people continue to be taken in by a set of dishonest devices used in proselytizing for postmodernism. It is getting tiring to repeat refutations of the same type for each new appearance of these various manoeuvres. For this reason, then, rather than yet another set of specific refutations, I offer you instead my little museum of their rhetorical manoeuvres, each exhibit neatly labelled, each label inscribed with a name,each name adding to a vocabulary of dismissal.
I don't think he has really separated his examples from the philosophy they are criticizing. If I was to more broadly use his characterization of the phenomena, I could say that arguments about postmodernism are for the author the "bailey" and the A and B statment distinctions are the easy to defend and boring "motte". Of course, a statement that is a lie is intuitively wrong to most people!!!
However, for me to say that is also an easy way for me to accuse you of being disingenuous, of masking falsehoods with truisms. I'd prefer to say I respect your perspective and the very human context surrounding it, and perhaps through imperfect discourse and the sharing of our "logos" we can come to a greater understanding of each other's positions. For me to dismiss something out of hand with an unexamined claim of fallacy is shutting the gate on our discussion.
> I could say that arguments about postmodernism are for the author the "bailey" and the A and B statment distinctions are the easy to defend and boring "motte".
I think then that the author has illustrated the "ills" of postmodernism through their own example, just in their own philosophy? So their criticism of postmodernism is also a criticism of their criticism of postmodernism! lol!
> If everyone called a tail a leg, it would be a leg.
You are sorely confused. When mixing different languages, you need to keep track of which is which, otherwise you just end up making a pun. In this case, "if everyone called a tail a leg" hypothesizes an alternate English where the distal portion of a dog's spine is called "leg" instead of "tail". We'll call this English Prime, and denote English prime words with a hash sign, to distinguish them from ordinary English words: #leg.
Obviously, the sentence itself is still written in English, not in English Prime. Otherwise it would be impossible to ascribe any meaning to it, since we have not defined the meaning of any English Prime words besides #leg - and we could not even define that one without using English.
The only words that are to be interpreted as English Prime are the ones that are explicitly quoted from the hypothetical scenario. Therefore, "if everyone called a tail a leg" can be written as "if everyone called a tail a #leg".
Now we have the following:
- If everyone called a tail a #leg, it would be called a #leg. Clearly true.
- If everyone called a tail a #leg, it would be called a #tail. Clearly false.
- If everyone called a tail a #leg, it would be a tail. Clearly true.
- If everyone called a tail a #leg, it would be a leg. Clearly false.
You're right, I am confused. The concept of there being a central authority that determines what is English, what is a dialect of English, and what is pidgin, is ridiculous. Language is an ever-evolving construction with fuzzy edges that defies anyone's ability to ascribe definite true or false values to it. Words have different meanings to different people. #literally :)
Is d'oh a word? When did it become a word? Which dictionary defines what a proper word is? Yolo? Swag?
As an Australian, swag has a very different meaning to me than the meaning you are probably, in your current state of mind, ascribing to it.
