Word of the Day: Motte-and-Baily Fallacy
The Left has employed some shady arguments to gather support for progressive aims.

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)[1] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
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An example given by [Philosopher Nicholas] Shackel [who coined the term] is the statement "morality is socially constructed". In this example, the motte is that our beliefs about right and wrong are socially constructed, while the bailey is that there is no such thing as right and wrong.
According to Shackel, David Bloor's strong programme for the sociology of scientific knowledge made use of a motte-and-bailey doctrine when trying to defend his conception of knowledge as "whatever people take to be knowledge", without distinguishing between beliefs that are widely accepted but contrary to reality, and beliefs that correspond to reality. In this instance, the easily defensible motte would be the idea that what we call knowledge is what is commonly accepted as such, but the prized bailey would be that scientific knowledge is no different from other widely accepted beliefs, implying truth and reality play no role in gaining scientific knowledge.
Nate Silver writes about the Indigo Blob, and offers a series of hypotheses about how it all works:
In American media and political discourse, there has been a fundamental asymmetry during the Trump Era. Left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent of the country.
In one of the hypotheses, he argues that the denizens of the Blob employ logical tricks, such as ‘motte-and-baily games’, to reject valid criticisms:
The Indigo Blob is not an undifferentiated mass. If you look closely, it contains multitudes. However, it’s to some people’s advantage to maintain the Blob’s ambiguity. Trying to disambiguate the Blob will often make you the subject of intense criticism on Twitter, and Twitter’s architecture has tended to make such dissent painful.
The basic critique here is that some people within the Indigo Blob have laundered the trust placed within their institutions as sources of expertise to advance a political agenda or for other self-serving purposes. For instance, by publishing misinformation that downplayed the possibility of a COVID lab leak in Nature Medicine to avoid causing trouble with China, giving credence to Trump, or drawing criticism of virological research. Or on a more routine level, by playing motte-and-bailey games between science and advocacy.
Many other people in the Indigo Blob don’t agree with this attitude and don’t partake in these behaviors. However, here is where Twitter plays a role. If you’re one of those annoying people like me who thinks there’s value in pointing out hypocrisy and other misbehavior from people in the Blob, you will get absolutely shat upon on Twitter. People feel extremely threatened when you point this stuff out. They will go great lengths to deter it. They will launch all types of ad hominem attacks against you. They will just flatly make stuff up about you. This is particularly likely if you are member in good standing of the Indigo Blob yourself, and have some credibility to critique them. Your credentials will be attacked, or you will be called a “closet right-winger”; anything to disqualify you.
By the way, the entire essay by Silver is worth reading.