On Bullshit

In this, the Darkest Timeline, you're probably familiar with the essence of Frankfurt's argument about bullshit. Truth-tellers and liars share a common foundation that the truth exists, and that it matters. Liars sincerely want the something other than the truth to be believed, at least long enough for them to make use of the advantage. By contrast, bullshit has no concern with external reality. Instead bullshit is a kind of performative game, allowing the bullshitter to enhance his social status, without concern for the truth or falsity of his statements.

There's a bit at the end that I think captures the essence of Frankfurt's arguments, which move smoothly from Augustine to Wittgenstein. "Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at show more accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature." Sound like a certain very orange POTUS?

More narrowly, I think it'd be an interesting experiment to assign On Bullshit to writing-intensive college course. So much of academic writing is bullshit, in the sense that it is about performing "I am a knowledgeable expert" rather than about making real claims. Professors are just much better at it than students. I'd be fascinating in a class that allowed a student to be wrong, but hit them with the banhammer if they used bullshit. Any takers? show less

A delightful little treatise on the semantics of the word and how it differs from other words used to describe mendacity. The author, a Princeton Professor, argues that there are key differences between a lie and bullshit. A liar and a truth-teller play on different sides of the same game. A liar must acknowledge that truth exists in order to defy it. A bullshitter, on the other hand, has no interest in the truth and is only interested in furthering his own agenda. He could just as likely tell a truth without knowing it as a lie. If and unnamed American president were to swear to the Canadian prime minister that something is true that he doesn't know for sure just to win an argument, then that president would be a bullshitter. That's a show more pretty poor example, though, as no American president would ever do such a thing. show less

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it....

With this opening statement, Harry Frankfurt, professor of philosophy emeritus at Princeton U., begins his inquiry into "what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves...My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not…."

Originally published in 1986 in the journal Raritan Quarterly Review, this essay was published in book form in 2005, making it easily available to lay show more readers. It's just an itty bitty thing, slightly smaller than a mass-market paperback, and running only to 67 pages. But it spent nearly a half-year on the New York Times Best Seller List. Philosophers, it seems, are not alone in their interest in bullshit. And given the character of the current U. S. president and the Republican Party in general, now is the time to poke around in it.

It is surreal: A serious, academic analysis of the term "bullshit," defining it, differentiating it from possible synonyms, and focusing on applications and intent. Frankfurt concludes that neither truth nor falsity are the focus of bullshit. Rather, persuasion is the focus. A liar typically knows the truth and endeavors to misrepresent it convincingly. But a bullshitter is indifferent to truth, casually mixing fact and fiction to achieve his or her goal. Truth is beside the point. show less

Just about as good, as illuminating, and as dryly humorous as a philosophical treatise called "On Bullshit" should be. An exercise in ironic description, Frankfurt takes pains to distinguish bullshitting from ordinary lying, though his book is often as good as the sources he picks. Longfellow and St. Augustine and telling anecdotes about Wittgenstein seem like good sources, but he leans on the OED much more than is advisable. c'mon Harry, you're a professor! You should know that that's a freshman blunder!

But the book itself, whose most important argument might be that liars, despised though they are, have more respect for truth than mere bullshit artists, who tend to disregard the distinction between truth and falsehood more-or-less show more entirely, is both interesting and thought provoking. This one was written back in 2005, but you could say that it's really more relevant than ever now that you-know-who is leading the free world. A fun, recommendable read, but it might make you feel a bit nauseous for reasons that the author couldn't have foreseen. show less

Emeritus moral philosopher Frankfurt wrote a light magazine article disguised as a scholarly paper, which Princeton University Press proceeded to issue as a duodecimo hardcover with an austere, treatise-like cover styling. Surely there is an element of bullshitting involved in the very production of this enormously successful object. It has been through many printings since 2005, and is almost certainly far more owned than read -- despite the fact that it can be polished off in less than a half hour.

Frankfurt claims to offer a "theoretical understanding" of bullshit, commencing with a study of "the structure of its concept." In practice, nearly the whole book -- everything up to the final seven or eight short pages -- consists of show more lexical comparisons and fussing over various denotative and connotative approaches to the term "bullshit." In the end, however, a few significant issues are raised, or at least implied. Is bullshitting an appropriate implementation of an antirealist intellectual agenda? Does the bullshitter affirm or degrade his self-worth by his disregard for verity? Under conditions of sufficient ignorance, can sincerity and honesty be completely non-intersecting? show less

Living with the biggest bullshitter I've ever known distracted me somewhat from reading this impersonally. However, I've now a handy-dandy little argument in my pocket which supports my experience that bullshit is in its insidiousness far more unwieldy and destructive than lies. Liars, at least, respect that there is a truth which they withhold or obscure, and their lies are vulnerable to confession or exposure and therefore defeat; bullshitters are careless shape-shifters, to communicate with them is to engage in shadow-boxing. They are therefore impossible for a person who values truth and honesty to deal with. I appreciate Frankfurt's assertion that bullshitters, for having an eroded or entirely lost ability to recognise or even care show more about the truth, are greater enemies of the truth than those who tell lies. Think about gender, think about race, think about any specifically defined group of people in the world-- and all the bullshit generated about them by television and movies, artists, scientists, "experts", or any ol' group of dumbasses at work, the bar, on the internet. It's hard to defeat bullshit. It feels right in the hearts of those who perpetuate (or buy into) it, because they don't care if what comes out of their mouths is true or not; you can't hold them accountable and their consciences won't needle them a bit, because to them it's a matter not of truth (a fact-seeking activity) but "sincerity", a slippery category of self-knowledge, which itself is an unattainable objective. If it's true that good things come in little packages, the ideas and conclusions put forth in this bitty book are no exception. show less

A Bush aide, probably Karl Rove himself, famously called the reality-based community a thing of the past: "we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." This is the art of bullshitting, as defined in Harry Frankfurt's too short essay.

In the current "He said, she said", "teach the controversy" and "Let's leave it at that" media environment, truth is the first casualty. Slain not by its old opponent, the lie but by bullshit. A lie takes some effort to craft and maintain. Bullshitters don't care about cleaning up the mess they create. They don't care about the truth or the lie. The show more only object they have is to bullshit themselves past their audience's expectations so that they accept the bullshitter's consequences. TARP and the debt ceiling debate are recent examples of the deployment of massive bullshit. Bullshit is the opposite of the Popperian falsifiability. The bullshitter gets away with his act because revealing the truth takes too much time and effort. As long as the bullshitter refrains from complying with a test ("Hic Rhodos, hic salta."), he can continue in his anti-Wittgensteinian path. Wittgenstein proclaimed: "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." The bullshitter answers: "How dare you!" The only solution is to reinstate the fairness doctrine on TV.

To increase the incendiary notion of this booklet, I wish the author had applied his concept to the fertile fields of bullshit. Religion, the revealed truth that is anything but the truth. The stories of the liar-Baron Münchhausen and Joseph Smith cry out for a profound bullshit analysis. Advertising with its mantra "if you have nothing to say, sing it" and politics would be prime candidates as well. Keeping the text to his short foundational essay is quite lazy. show less