Well good morning! It never fails to amaze me how much I don’t know. It shouldn’t, on the grand scale of everything, humanity knows precious little, and I as a very small part of it know even less. But I was treated to an expression that I’d never heard before, I immediately fell in love with the metaphor, and want to build on it.
So What is a Motte and Bailey Fallacy?
According to Wikipedia, it 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 (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).”
In fewer words, the motte and bailey fallacy is when you say something egregiously stupid, and then when you’re called on your bullshit, you retreat to a more defensible rhetorical line and conflate the two arguments you just made. It’s related to shifting the goalposts, but the difference with a shifted goalpost is that the fallacier usually abandons their prior goalpost, M&B is used to reinforce it. I’ve seen this happen almost constantly over the last year, but I didn’t have the words to describe it before, and because I assume that I’m not special, decided to share the idea with you.
And What is Schrödinger's Cat?
This one is much more widely known, I think, as a result of being popularized by the Big Bang Theory (The TV show, not the actual theory, obviously). Again, according to Wikipedia, it is “a thought experiment that illustrates a paradox of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.”
Erwin Schrödinger devised the thought experiment as part of a conversation with Albert Einstein to illustrate issues that he had with an interpretation of quantum mechanics. I’m not even going to pretend that I have anything more than the barest passing familiarity with quantum physics, but the cat thought exercise is relatively digestible: In the exercise, you have a hypothetical cat, and you place that cat in a box with a Geiger counter and a radioactive material that has an exactly 50% chance of having a single atom decay over the course of an hour. If the counter reads the decayed atom, it signals a device that kills the cat, if the counter does not read a decayed atom, nothing happens, and the cat does not die. After an hour has passed, because of the 50% likelihood of the cat’s demise, and the inability to measure anything that would bias the likelihood one way or the other, for the purposes of hypotheticals that include the cat’s state of being we have to consider the cat both alive and dead until the box is opened and we have an answer.
A less gruesome way to run this experiment would be to have a box where if the decayed atom was thrown, something less fatal but measurable would happen, but the point Erwin was making required something that had a memory, his criticism was that even though from a quantum perspective the cat was both alive and dead, after the box was opened, if the cat was alive the cat would only ever remember being alive, because it had actually only ever been alive. Or maybe Erwin just didn’t like cats.
It was a really long way to ask the age old “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?” The answer is that things do happen whether or not they are observed, even if we cannot prove it, because of course they do.
So What Is Schrödinger’s Motte?
This came up in a conversation around CRT, which I want to point out: I correctly assumed was going to be an issue with legs. A fellow named Dave had posted, in part:
Right off the bat, let me say that CRT has a serious motte-and-bailey problem. The motte of CRT is simply the academic study of things like where the concept of “race” comes from, and how it evolves over time. […] We can point to Watson v Stone, where a judge opined a gun control law “was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.” It also involves challenging and exposing white perspectives that are being passed off as racially neutral, objective perspectives. Such enterprises embody the very soul of valuable, legitimate intellectual pursuits: to challenge our assumptions, to dig into why things are the way they are, to expand our minds to new and different points of view. I would argue this sort of approach is important to achieving real civic literacy in the United States.
That’s the motte. Unfortunately, CRT typically comes bundled with quite an extensive bailey. When we speak of people are being defined, politically and morally, by their race, that is racial essentialism, which is a form of reductionism, which is a lazy kind of oversimplification that genuine intellectual inquiry ought to eschew. When it is assumed that every racial difference must be due to racism, that is an unsupported claim, and furthermore it is a dogma, another perennial enemy of free inquiry and intellectual growth.
He’s right, of course, as I said before, CRT as it was originally envisioned in the works of Crenshaw and Bell had merit, and the application of CRT frameworks to current structures is not in and of itself a bad goal, there are situations where it might come away with a better way of doing things, and the search for betterment is worthy.
The problem is that the motte he’s talking about doesn’t exist in the wild. The people we’re talking to don’t retreat to that motte when they’re asked about CRT in K-12 schools, they don’t have an answer for the kinds of assignments we’re seeing in class, they don’t want to talk about the examples of racial essentialism that are being brought to light… They’re just saying that CRT doesn’t exist. And this fails utterly to interact with the argument.
If you as a parent got to peer into the window of your child’s classroom and saw something that you found deeply morally objectionable, would you be allayed by the assurance that you were calling it by the wrong label?
I have my doubts.
And so we have an argument with two states of being: The motte either exists or does not exist based on the relative knowledge or hackiness of the participant. And I know that doesn’t match up cleanly to the randomness of Schrödinger's cat, and we’re much more likely to come across a person with no conception under God what they’re talking about than someone informed, but I called it an “inelegant mixed metaphor” in the subtext for a reason, and we still have no way of actually knowing whether the person we’re talking to knows that the motte actually exists until we have the conversation.
Schrödinger’s Motte describes a situation where a motte argument exists and someone could make try to make that argument, but the average participant isn’t aware of the motte, or doesn’t have the expertise to properly describe it, so instead of making it, they just pretend that they never made the bailey argument.