I’m deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.
It’s as if “don’t-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.
Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.
I’ve seen/heard the term NVC for this in multiple places, and “non-violent communication” as the expansion whenever I’ve asked. I agree with others that the name is not great. The hyperbole of violence and the implication that not using it is akin to aggression is a pretty aggressive move itself. The term “NVC” is at odds with the tenets of NVC.
But it’s established and out there, and I generally have low hopes of changing a common usage. I hope the poor name doesn’t devalue the actual concept and attempt to separate observation from interpretation. Especially hyperbolic interpretation.
The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say “We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence” as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity.
So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans.
How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south. Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term “violence” works here.
It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie “not violent”, negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like “compassionate communication” (“is compassionate”, positive)
It occurs to me that “peacemaker communication” would be historically accurate, conveys what seems appropriate, and seems much better at avoiding controversial implications.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact.
If some people consistently and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people consistently and explicitly endorse the implication, then I don’t think that that’s motte and bailey? As I understand it, M&B involves the same person being inconsistent about the meaning, not different people sticking to consistent but conflicting interpretations; that’s just people disagreeing with each other.
My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:
“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]
So there’s something to that, but I’m a little wary about taking that interpretation too far. Taken far enough, it implies that if group A has a sensible take on a concept, then as soon as a group B shows up that has a bad take on it, you can use it to discredit A as a motte for B. It seems bad if we can discredit any concept—including valuable ones—just by making up a bad take on it and spreading it.
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
Now we are at the worst possible situation. Suppose that I belong to group A, and want to defend my group against an accusation. I say that no, we don’t believe in crazy claim B1, we actually consistently maintain claim A1, and always have. I have links to back this up.
The other person says that this is just a motte and bailey, digging up links of group C using A1 as a motte—and is entirely correct.
In the comments of that post, the most upvoted comment was one suggesting that you can distinguish a motte and bailey by looking at whether one of the groups actively disclaims the other:
If different people in the group make sensible and crazy interpretations, and you’re arguing with someone who claims to be making only the sensible interpretation, I’d expect that that person would at least be willing to
1) admit that other members of the group are saying things that are crazy. They don’t have to preemptively say it ahead of time, but they could at least say it when they are challenged on it.
2) treat known crazy-talking people as crazy-talking people, rather than glossing over their craziness in the interests of group solidarity.
I’m also very suspicious when the person with the reasonable interpretation benefits too much from the existence of (and the failure to challenge) the person with the crazy interpretation. His refusal to condemn the other guy then looks suspicious. The term for this is “good cop, bad cop”, and the fact that we have already have a term for it should hint that it actually happens.
So if we think that a party not explicitly disclaiming a bad interpretation makes it more of a motte and bailey, then a situation where a party does explicitly disclaim it should make it less.
Also, with regard to the bit you quoted… I’m not sure if you could characterize it as “true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte” if the ones who defend the Bailey and the ones who defend the Motte have positions that are the exact opposites of each other?
The original example of motte and bailey, as explained by Scott Alexander, was:
The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
Here what’s going is that the motte and bailey are basically weak and strong versions of the same claim, so people believing in the strong version can take support from arguments in defense of the weak claim. But if some people say that “yes I think people who don’t use NVC are being violent” and others say that “no that just happens to be an unfortunate established term, what kind of language you use has no bearing on whether you’re violent or not”… then that doesn’t seem like the strong and weak versions of the same claim? That’d be like saying that creationists and evolutionary biologists together form a motte and bailey, because both use the term “evolution” but assign different meanings to it (some saying that it’s true, some saying that it’s false).
I’m deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.
It’s as if “don’t-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.
Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.
I’ve seen/heard the term NVC for this in multiple places, and “non-violent communication” as the expansion whenever I’ve asked. I agree with others that the name is not great. The hyperbole of violence and the implication that not using it is akin to aggression is a pretty aggressive move itself. The term “NVC” is at odds with the tenets of NVC.
But it’s established and out there, and I generally have low hopes of changing a common usage. I hope the poor name doesn’t devalue the actual concept and attempt to separate observation from interpretation. Especially hyperbolic interpretation.
The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say “We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence” as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity.
So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans.
How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south. Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term “violence” works here.
It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie “not violent”, negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like “compassionate communication” (“is compassionate”, positive)
It occurs to me that “peacemaker communication” would be historically accurate, conveys what seems appropriate, and seems much better at avoiding controversial implications.
If some people consistently and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people consistently and explicitly endorse the implication, then I don’t think that that’s motte and bailey? As I understand it, M&B involves the same person being inconsistent about the meaning, not different people sticking to consistent but conflicting interpretations; that’s just people disagreeing with each other.
My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:
“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
So there’s something to that, but I’m a little wary about taking that interpretation too far. Taken far enough, it implies that if group A has a sensible take on a concept, then as soon as a group B shows up that has a bad take on it, you can use it to discredit A as a motte for B. It seems bad if we can discredit any concept—including valuable ones—just by making up a bad take on it and spreading it.
I talked about that in this post:
In the comments of that post, the most upvoted comment was one suggesting that you can distinguish a motte and bailey by looking at whether one of the groups actively disclaims the other:
So if we think that a party not explicitly disclaiming a bad interpretation makes it more of a motte and bailey, then a situation where a party does explicitly disclaim it should make it less.
Also, with regard to the bit you quoted… I’m not sure if you could characterize it as “true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte” if the ones who defend the Bailey and the ones who defend the Motte have positions that are the exact opposites of each other?
The original example of motte and bailey, as explained by Scott Alexander, was:
Here what’s going is that the motte and bailey are basically weak and strong versions of the same claim, so people believing in the strong version can take support from arguments in defense of the weak claim. But if some people say that “yes I think people who don’t use NVC are being violent” and others say that “no that just happens to be an unfortunate established term, what kind of language you use has no bearing on whether you’re violent or not”… then that doesn’t seem like the strong and weak versions of the same claim? That’d be like saying that creationists and evolutionary biologists together form a motte and bailey, because both use the term “evolution” but assign different meanings to it (some saying that it’s true, some saying that it’s false).