Appeal: motte-and-bailey
From DEBATE: TRENT HORN VS. JAY DYER: SHOULD CHRISTIANS ACCEPT NATURAL THEOLOGY?.
- #8691:00:59overturned Trent Horn psogos: motte-and-bailey (+1)
The council overturned the call, so no points were given away.
“But even if someone picked a weaker form of foundationalism, I think a lot what you picked.”
Diogenes: Having defended self-evident, incorrigible starting points ("self evident truths like I exist") in his rebuttal, under cross-examination he falls back to a weaker foundationalism, which Jay immediately flags: "That's not the position you defended five minutes ago."- Aristotle overturn: On the record: Trent's opening/rebuttal position was that natural theology can start from self-evident truths (e.g. "I exist," "I am having perceptions") to avoid infinite regress or circularity; under sustained cross-examination pressure on the regress problem for "properly basic belief" itself, he floats "even if someone picked a weaker form of foundationalism..." as a hedged a fortiori fallback, but when Jay calls this a shift, Trent immediately clarifies "even the position that I have" and returns within the same breath to reasserting "truth is immediate," which is the same self-evident-truth position he held throughout, including in his closing statement. Motte-and-bailey requires a genuine retreat to an easier position under pressure and a later silent reversion to the stronger claim as though unchallenged; here the quoted sentence is interrupted and conditional ("even if someone picked..."), Trent explicitly disclaims that he has abandoned his own view ("even the position that I have"), and he returns to the identical self-evident-truth framing within the same exchange rather than smuggling it back in later unacknowledged — read charitably, this is a hedged fallback argument tested and clarified live under cross-examination, not a deliberate bailey-motte-bailey maneuver.
- Socrates overturn: Read blind, found nothing worth calling. Read against the surrounding lines, this is a transcription artifact of crosstalk: Trent's "But even if someone picked a weaker form of foundationalism, I think a lot" is cut off by Jay interjecting "what you picked," and the two fragments have been stitched together rather than representing one coherent statement by Trent. There is no complete claim, argument, or characterization here to hold Trent to; the substantive move (Trent retreating to weak foundationalism, Jay objecting that this isn't the position Trent defended earlier) only becomes legible in the next few lines. Nothing is plainly shown by this fragment on its own.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Trent's declared and sustained position in this cross-ex segment was strong foundationalism (self-evident, immediately-justified basic beliefs); the called line is a real-time hedge to a "weaker form" followed by a shift to a consensus-based justification, which departs from what he had just defended and was flagged as such by his opponent in the same breath. Trent's cross-ex answers moments earlier explicitly staked out strong foundationalism ("upon entertaining the proposition, the justification is also immediately apparent," "truth is immediate, and we do not have to infer them") — a classical, strong self-evidentist position. When Jay pressed the circularity of that specific claim, Trent hedged to "even if someone picked a weaker form of foundationalism" and then shifted his justificatory ground entirely, from self-evidence to "a lot of people, even atheists, would agree" — a different (consensus-type) warrant Jay immediately flagged in the transcript itself ("That's not the position you defended five minutes ago"), which is a live, textually-marked instance of retreating to an easier position under pressure while still trying to carry the earlier conclusion.
- Thesmothetes overturn: By the rule: even if: granting the claim and showing the conclusion fails. Trent's own words frame the move explicitly as hypothetical concession, not retreat: "But even if someone picked a weaker form of foundationalism..." — the "even if" is the textbook marker of granting a position for argument's sake, and he immediately confirms he hasn't abandoned his view ("even the position that I have") before returning, within the same exchange, to the identical strong claim he started with ("Truth is immediate, and we do not have to infer them"). Reading this as a covert bailey-to-motte retreat requires supplying an intent the transcript doesn't show, when the speaker's own words already announce the conditional, for-argument's-sake character of the hedge.
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