But suppose that we were discussing something of which there were both sensible and crazy interpretations—held by different people. So:
group A consistently makes and defends sensible claim A1
group B consistently makes and defends crazy claim B1
and maybe even:
group C consistently makes crazy claim B1, but when challenged on it, consistently retreats to defending A1
I may be missing something but it seems to me that:
if C is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is no problem;
if B is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is a problem because they never defended claim A1;
if A is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is a problem because they never defended claim B1.
I hope I’m not being silly: would it be fair to say that you are pointing to the existence of the “accuse people who are not making a motte-and-bailey fallacy of making a motte-and-bailey fallacy” fallacy? Could we call it “straw-motte-and-bailey fallacy” or something?
would it be fair to say that you are pointing to the existence of the “accuse people who are not making a motte-and-bailey fallacy of making a motte-and-bailey fallacy” fallacy?
Yes, and to the fact that once such an accusation does get made, it can be basically impossible to disprove since it’s very hard to show that groups A and B actually exist and this isn’t just a ploy where everyone actually belongs to C.
I don’t think so(EDIT: I don’t think that looks like a new, separate “accuse people who are not making a motte-and-bailey fallacy of making a motte-and-bailey fallacy”, it looks like something else to me). I think the situation is that there is a label for group A+B+C. Someone doesn’t care about content made by group A+B+C because they perceive it as having motte-bailey doctrine.
This sounds like a bucket error (where one should get more content from A and ignore B and C) but I think it’s not feasible to make new bucket that would capture only interesting people.
I haven’t been in conversation where there was a problem like that. But I guess I’d try pointing out that:
- There’s some good content,
- There’s some bad content,
- They can checkout (specific examples) of content known to be high quality
- If they’re interested in getting all of the worthwhile content they’ll have to filter. Same as everywhere else.
I may be missing something but it seems to me that:
if C is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is no problem;
if B is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is a problem because they never defended claim A1;
if A is accused of motte-and-bailey fallacy there is a problem because they never defended claim B1.
I hope I’m not being silly: would it be fair to say that you are pointing to the existence of the “accuse people who are not making a motte-and-bailey fallacy of making a motte-and-bailey fallacy” fallacy? Could we call it “straw-motte-and-bailey fallacy” or something?
Yes, and to the fact that once such an accusation does get made, it can be basically impossible to disprove since it’s very hard to show that groups A and B actually exist and this isn’t just a ploy where everyone actually belongs to C.
I don’t think so(EDIT: I don’t think that looks like a new, separate “accuse people who are not making a motte-and-bailey fallacy of making a motte-and-bailey fallacy”, it looks like something else to me). I think the situation is that there is a label for group A+B+C. Someone doesn’t care about content made by group A+B+C because they perceive it as having motte-bailey doctrine.
This sounds like a bucket error (where one should get more content from A and ignore B and C) but I think it’s not feasible to make new bucket that would capture only interesting people.
I haven’t been in conversation where there was a problem like that. But I guess I’d try pointing out that:
- There’s some good content,
- There’s some bad content,
- They can checkout (specific examples) of content known to be high quality
- If they’re interested in getting all of the worthwhile content they’ll have to filter. Same as everywhere else.
Does it sound like something that could work?