My father-in-law used to joke that his mother called him Stuart the Just, because he was always saying "But I was just...But I was just..." We have variations in English: "We were only..." "She was merely..." "All I asked was..." When people use these phrases, they are often hiding something. No, Stuart you weren't just looking in your sister's toybox to see what was there. No, she wasn't only dropping by to chat. No, you weren't merely looking on her phone to see if her mother had called yet.
I have been on a run for motte-and-bailey arguments lately. I have a few more coming. This is mostly because I am currently alert to them, but I suspect I hope to perform some instructive service along the way, saturating the summer of 2025 with examples and commentary.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the castles themselves, though this is an attractive picture that's fun to spend some time on. Analogies break down if you stretch them too far, but this illustration allows us to extend the idea just a bit. The motte is the most defensible place. It was often built first on an elevated area, which provides in itself some defensive advantage. In some descriptions the motte is the mound itself, and the keep is the fortified area.
Once the motte is in place it makes sense to live near it in case of emergencies. Outbuildings would spring up for stables, work areas, and housing. These in turn would be fortified as time and resources allowed. In the illustration above, there is an expanding series of baileys, and outside the moat there are plenty of fields for pasture and planting. The motte is extending its influence over an entire area. The whole enterprise expanded in stages and can be defended in stages.
In rhetoric or argument, a set of ideas can extend their influence over wider and wider areas. If you have a constitution and laws, a group can start from something quite basic, quoting "the Constitution says this," and be on safe ground. Not long after, they are saying "the Constitution also means this," expanding the idea out a little farther. If everyone goes along, it becomes a fortified place of its own. The xpansion goes fine until someone says "Hey, this isn't the Duchy of Toulouse anymore. You are encroaching into the Duchy. of Aquitaine. Stop that." If Aquitaine attacks with enough force, Toulouse falls back to an area it thinks it can defend. Unfenced fields are tought to keep enemies out of.
In the motte-and-bailey fallacy, what is usually the problem is the discovery that Toulouse has been encroaching into Aquitaine for a long time. It has been claiming lots of territory that isn't theirs, and Aquitaine quickly acquires some allies who say "Dagnabbit! Toulouse has been cheating. None of this has been theirs and they must be punished." Toulouse goes all the way back to the motte if necessary, saying "THIS IS OURS. You can't accuse us of lying and cheating. We own this."
From here we are going to the situation of "But we we're only quoting what the Bible says," because being deceitful about that "only" is a big deal.
1 comment:
I don't think your penultimate paragraph really works with your set up, especially the previous observation that if places are occupied by agreement then they become part of the fortification. If Toulouse has been encroaching on Aquitaine for a long time with no response, then Aquitaine doesn't have much of a claim. I would view the situation more that Toulouse leaves the keep with pikes in the air, banners flying, and trumpets blaring to advance on Aquitaine. When they find the border fortified and Aquitaine's allies on their flanks, they fly back to the bailey, all the while claiming they were just out for an afternoon ride.
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