There’s something peculiar about the motte and bailey fallacy compared to many other fallacies. The former requires change (often via the passage of time) whereby one sneakily changes the contents of their central claim box*, hoping others won’t notice.
I have a theory: the motte and bailey fallacy would be harder to perpetrate if one’s argument had to be written out visually. This would freeze it in time and help people to detect central claim box-switching shenanigans.
* originally instead of “box” I was going to say variable in the programming language sense, but I didn’t want to get into the semantics of mutable versus immutable variables, which might lead to Rich Hickey’s famous talk on identity and state.
There’s something peculiar about the motte and bailey fallacy compared to many other fallacies. The former requires change (often via the passage of time) whereby one sneakily changes the contents of their central claim box*, hoping others won’t notice.
I have a theory: the motte and bailey fallacy would be harder to perpetrate if one’s argument had to be written out visually. This would freeze it in time and help people to detect central claim box-switching shenanigans.
* originally instead of “box” I was going to say variable in the programming language sense, but I didn’t want to get into the semantics of mutable versus immutable variables, which might lead to Rich Hickey’s famous talk on identity and state.