Motte-and-bailey fallacy

Rarity: Common

The most frequent rarity: most Wikipedia articles become Commons.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Science and technology

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle), also called the castle and courtyard, 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 and harder to defend (the "bailey").

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Motte-and-bailey fallacy”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Moreau.henri, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.