Motte and Bailey, IV

There’s another activity that sometimes gets labeled “motte and bailey” unfairly: the process of making distinctions.

Distinctions can sometimes be the last refuge of intellectual scoundrels.  “What I meant by ‘deadly’ is …”  “The meaning of ‘is’ is …”

But then there are distinctions that, as a Catholic, I find quite reasonable.  “‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’ doesn’t mean you have to be baptized in water to be saved …”  The term John Henry Cardinal Newman used for this sort of thing is “development of doctrine”: as people have more time to think about what the Bible and tradition hand down, and mull over what it means, and defend it against objections, they come to understand it better, and elaborations ensue.

Of course, it’s possible to have a system which turns out to be false—as elaborations pile up, one eventually realizes that there’s a simpler explanation for the phenomena.  This is essentially what happened as the Ptolemaic description of the solar system aged: physical observations kept requiring more and more elaborate additions to Ptolemy’s original picture with the earth at center, until eventually people decided it might be simpler to try out the math with the sun at the center.

But the existence of distinctions that ultimately fail to preserve a false theory (epicycles failing to preserve heliocentrism) does not invalidate any attempt at using distinctions to preserve a theory.