Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  If this story about facilitation is correct, then some substantial fraction of the bullshit that is found in disordered personalities is causally downstream of their distorted social perception. Notice further that this is a two-way street: bullshit—of the self-directed kind, at least—can worsen the impairment of social perception. For if you hide from yourself those parts of the social truth that you can see at first, your social perception gets even worse, in that you then simply see less of social reality.

  The Threat Posed by Bullshit

  My findings about bullshit in personality disorders have some notable implications concerning the kind of threat bullshit poses. First, bullshit threatens good social relations.

  I have claimed that pathological personalities are especially good bullshitters, generally speaking. They are also known for their distorted perceptions of social reality—which, like bullshitting, serve to distance them from the truth. Meanwhile, their relations with others are especially likely to be messed up in some systematic way: the antisocial exploits people, the borderline lurches wildly from one unstable relationship to the next, the dependent is a burden to those around her, the paranoiac imposes pathological jealousy on her partner, and so forth. Indeed, some such impaired social functioning is of the essence of personality pathology; what better criterion to use in deciding whether a personality is pathological?

  The disordered personality’s problems with the truth contribute greatly to her problems with people. Her bullshitting, and the distorted perceptions that help it along, are surely key contributors to her messed-up social relations. This is just a bit of common sense. People do not like getting bullshitted, so those who are given to bullshitting others easily become personae non gratae; it can be very exasperating to deal with someone in the grips of self-directed bullshit; and it is difficult to communicate with someone who is given to distorting what you say and do.

  It’s a platitude, though one that is forgotten all too often, that good, sound human relationships thrive on truthfulness. But this suggests a stronger principle: good relationships thrive on truth.54 If either party fails to see things clearly—basic, important things concerning who she is and what she wants, and the same basic facts about the other party—then the relationship is likely to flounder. This can result not only from deliberate deception, but also from the involuntary disconnection from the truth that poor perception brings. If either party wittingly or unwittingly hides some such important parts of the truth through bullshit or outright lying, the relationship is gravely threatened.

  Personality pathology is marked by lousy social relations, and the bullshitting of the disordered personality helps explain why her relations with others are lousy. I promised at the outset that applying my notion of bullshit to personality disorders could shed some light on how their core features can lead to social difficulties. I have now made good on that promise: impaired social cognition, a core feature of personality pathology, facilitates bullshit, which—among other elements of the disordered personality’s behavior—tends to ruin her social relations.

  Among the most interesting and provocative claims about bullshit that Frankfurt makes is that it is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. This is supposed to be because “through excessive indulgence in [bullshitting], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost” (On Bullshit, p. 60). Since I think the bullshitter does pay attention to the truth—at some level, in any case—I cannot agree. Still, like Frankfurt I think bullshit is an enemy of the truth in a way that lies are not—but a different sort of enemy than he described.

  The threat I have in mind stems from the fact that bullshitting can be unconscious while lying cannot. The habitual liar, like the habitual bullshitter, gradually obscures more and more bits of the truth. But generally speaking, it is easier to make a habit of bullshitting than of lying, because outright deception ordinarily provokes a sting of conscience. Where bullshitting is less than fully conscious, this sting is less than fully sharp, and is therefore a weaker deterrent.

  Bullshit thus poses a sort of threat to the truth that lying does not pose, or does not pose to the same degree. This does not imply that the total threat it poses to the truth is greater than that posed by lying, for lying may pose threats to the truth that bullshit does not pose. But these are questions about the comparative moral status of bullshit and lies, and that is a topic for another day.55

  6

  Performing Bullshit and the Post-Sincere Condition

  ALAN RICHARDSON

  Mission Statement

  This essay, aspiring to be one of the world’s best philosophy essays, will prepare readers to become exceptional theorists of bullshit, promote the values of a rigorous and sustainable philosophical community, and be an example of outstanding research serving the people of British Columbia, Canada, and the world.

  Harry Frankfurt’s goal in On Bullshit was “to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of [the] concept” of bullshit (p. 2). But, he left many things for his followers to do. For one, he set aside the question of attitude (theoretically if not practically)—that is, he expressed various attitudes toward bullshit even as he left unanswered the question of why our attitude toward it differed from our attitude toward lying.

  Frankfurt left “as an exercise for the reader” the “problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying” (p. 50). He also did not “consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit” (p. 2). This essay attends to these unconsidered points, since bullshit’s rhetorical purposes are exactly where its value lies and where we must seek to illuminate our attitudes toward it. Bullshit is, as we know, all well and good in its proper place. But it tends to transgress that place and crowd out other aspects of life.

  Shitty Attitudes: On the Use and Misuse of Bullshit in Life

  Let’s begin by using a charming anecdote of Frankfurt’s to amend his own account of bullshit. It is a story of Ludwig Wittgenstein as friend, offered by Fania Pascal (p. 24):

  I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog who has been run over feels like.”

  Frankfurt does not exhibit much patience with Wittgenstein’s sour and unsympathetic response, but the anecdote does aid in his diagnosis of bullshit as speech unconcerned with truth; Frankfurt finds Wittgenstein’s annoyance to lie in Wittgenstein’s sense that Pascal speaks in full knowledge that she does not know what she is talking about.

  Fair enough. If Wittgenstein had been a cruder man, the conversation could have gone this way:

  FP: I feel just like a dog that has been run over.

  LW: Bullshit! You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.

  But, notice that Pascal, in the context of a discussion about her health, had to utter something about her physical discomfort for Wittgenstein to get upset in this way—simply uttering something she was not in a position to know (“I feel just like the oldest living inhabitant of the nearest planet to Alpha Centauri,” for example) would not have induced such a response. Wittgenstein’s response, warranted or not, is attuned to the way in which the specific thing Pascal did say not only went beyond what she could know but also sought to elicit sympathy for her suffering. Indeed, the more given Pascal is to complaint or hypochondria, the more sympathy we have for Wittgenstein. The declarations of suffering among such people are often bullshit. (Indeed, it is only in rare cases, such as when a doctor asks us to describe a pain, that our reports of how much pain we are in are primarily information reports.) Bullshit is not simply any speech unconcerned with truth, then, but rather speech the truth of which is irrelevant but which aims to evoke some sort of positive attitude toward the speaker.56

>   If we take up the first-person situation, we get similar results. In planning to write a joint grant proposal, I can say to a colleague: “Here we have to add some bullshit about the training opportunities the grant will afford to graduate students. I have some boilerplate on that that I can import from another grant I have written.” I am willing to call this portion of our proposal bullshit precisely because it is meant to express a positive attitude toward the education of graduate students and, thus, to get the adjudicators to like the proposal, even though my own attitude for or against graduate education need not be accurately expressed by what I write. Or, again, consider the following sort of exchange, after a department meeting:

  GARY: (nervous and pale, his upper lip trembling) I didn’t know that you thought so highly of the Dean.

  ALAN: Oh, that was just bullshit; I wanted to appeal to the high opinion others have of him in order to pass the motion on hiring that Thomist I want to hire.

  Here we see a key difference between lying and bullshitting. If I was praising the Dean in order to win over his fans in my department for my side of an argument about hiring, I am not really lying in expressing something that is not my true attitude toward the Dean. My attitude toward the Dean was not the point of what I was saying about the Dean; I was engaged in something else entirely. Knowing my intention, you could not successfully accuse me of lying.57 Nonetheless, the remarks made about the Dean are relevant to the situation; I couldn’t have recruited support for my favored candidate by saying nice things about the local ice hockey team, even if my colleagues like the team better than they like the Dean, the team being irrelevant in the situation at hand.

  Similarly, when I complain that the son of a friend does not know how to disguise his disappointment at the presents I give him, I am complaining that this child has not learned courtesy conventions that are the nearest kin to bullshit. The sort of honesty involved in saying, straight-away, “I hate this stupid sweater” is not warranted in the gift-receiving situation, if the gift was itself offered in good faith. (Compare the case of your older brother, who seems to give you only joke presents. After thirty years of this, you might say, “Why do you keep giving me this bullshit?” He has failed the sincerity conditions of gift giving; his is a series of bullshit acts, raising questions about the nature of your relationship.) We don’t want him to lie and say “Thank you for this sweater; I love it,” but we’d like him to be courteous and say “Thank you for this sweater.”

  So, the sort of bullshit that one recognizes as bullshit and seeks (as Wittgenstein did in relation to Pascal) to deflate is more than saying X without being a position to know that X. In addition, X and the utterance of X are meant somehow to reflect well on the speaker. This contrasts with the sort of bullshit that is offered as entertainment or to kill time among those who mutually understand the conversation they are in not to be an attempt to convey accurate information. Thus, I think, contrary to Frankfurt (p. 11), that at least the sort of bullshit that evokes “That’s bullshit” as a response does have pretentiousness as a constitutive element. But, not all bullshit is liable to evoke that response. Indeed, some bullshit is stock-in-trade and when well-crafted discharges a legitimate function.

  Bullshit as a Condition of Life

  Bullshit, therefore, is vastly more widespread than straight-out lying. Bullshit is a sort of misdirection; lying is direct and to the point. Students lie when they say they tried to turn in their papers but the office was closed; they bullshit when they come to office hours to offer up excuses for why they could not possible turn in their papers on the due date. What they say in such circumstances is rarely evidently false (if it were, it wouldn’t work), it is simply a story put together in such a way as to get them what they really want, which is an extension. They do this by evoking sympathy for their circumstances, which have to be plausibly true and, importantly, hard to check.

  Bullshit is in fact so ubiquitous that one cannot engage in some activities without engaging in bullshit. Consider grant proposals again. These require a sort of breathless discussion of how ground-breaking and exciting your research is, how it requires a hundred thousand dollars to do, how fabulous it will be to have research assistants (who will do your photocopying and be paid fifteen thousand a year for the privilege), and so on. Proposal writers know that this is all bullshit, but generically-necessary bullshit; proposal readers know it, too. Readers discount and ignore exactly what the writers put in as the bullshit component. But, no one will succeed if she does not put in the bullshit. One must perform certain values in a grant proposal even though they count for nothing. (It is like figure skating, which requires compulsory figures but doesn’t count them.) This is the equivalent of Frankfurt’s pompous Fourth of July speaker (pp. 16–18): patriotism is the order of the day on the Fourth of July in the United States, and no one takes expressions of patriotism offered on that day seriously precisely because on that day they are utterly pro forma. Nonetheless, no Fourth of July orator can safely set patriotic themes aside. That would be a spectacular mistake in judgment and value, a confession of a profound ignorance of the very genre.

  The grant proposal and the Fourth of July oration are, indeed, bullshit genres. Another bullshit genre, perhaps the most important in academic life, is the letter of reference. All letters of reference are unreliable as guides to the genuine virtues of the applicants. Yet straight-out lying (“Mortimer invented the Internet, and his oils hang in the Louvre”) would be counter-productive. Confident assertions of bullshit have to be on points on which legitimate disagreement is widely accepted and on which standards of evidence can be expected to diverge. Thus, I can write that “Mortimer’s Ph.D. thesis offers a counterfactual account of causation that is a significant contribution to our understanding of causation” without fear that I have engaged in gratuitous and counter-productive bullshit. Indeed, if I am Mortimer’s advisor, I am supposed to write this, even though the number of Ph.D. theses in philosophy that are significant contributions to anyone’s understanding of anything is vanishing small.

  A reader’s bullshit detector might start sounding if I say, however, something like “Mortimer’s contribution is the most significant contribution to the understanding of causation since Hume.” Such a claim is almost always over-the-top even within a genre in which bullshit is expected; I have here entered the terrain of gratuitous and damaging bullshit. I must write bullshit but not induce my readers to say “That’s bullshit” in response.58

  So, we have the beginning of an answer to one question Frankfurt left as an exercise for his reader: Our attitude toward bullshit is more benign because there are various things we do in which we cannot succeed without the right amount of bullshit. Moreover, there are other activities in which attitudes and acts that are close kin to bullshit (courtesy, for example) are necessary for the maintenance of civility. Honesty is rarely the best policy in cases in which honesty is not the whole point of the enterprise. That is why bullshit is everywhere; it is dishonesty without tears.

  The interesting questions begin just when we recognize bullshit’s ubiquity. Letters of reference are a bullshit genre, so in order to write a good letter of reference for Mortimer I will have to bullshit. Yet, it is, it seems, not hard to imagine a world in which a letter of reference is simply an honest appraisal. Such a world might seem more functional than our world, since it is harder to evaluate bullshit accurately and effectively than it is to evaluate the truth. So how did the letter of reference become a bullshit genre? This, it seems to me, is a question for sociology and for rhetoric. Philosophers should be a bit chary about venturing a priori answers to such questions, but there are real conceptual difficulties that a bit of philosophy can help with here, even if it cannot wholly sort them out.

  An answer that suggests itself immediately appeals to free-riders. If everyone else is truthful about his or her students while I bullshit about mine, mine will do better on average than they ought to do (provided I bullshit well). So the letter of refer
ence genre tends towards bullshit. But this is not sufficient. My students might do better in getting into graduate school than they should if I bullshit and no one else does. But, my bullshit will not make them succeed in graduate school.59 So, if my assessments are bullshit while everyone else’s are not and, thus, my students get in to better schools than they should, the sanction should quickly come to rest on me—my students are worse than my letters let on, and my letters will quickly come to be regarded as bullshit.60

  At this point, now that we have seen that bullshit often matters and may be unavoidable, I begin to want to distance myself even more from Frankfurt’s account of bullshit. Bullshit in bullshit genres like letters of reference is, as Frankfurt concedes (pp. 22–23), well-crafted. I write letters that are dishonest in a sense, but I do not write things that are false; I do care that my claims are “true enough” or, to use Stephen Colbert’s coinage, “truthy.” I write “Mortimer will be an asset to any PhD program that accepts him; I recommend him without reservation” precisely because if I were honest that I do worry that his personal reticence will make him ill-suited to the pressure cooker of some departments, he will not get in—not just to those departments but to others in which he will do well. I tick the “top ten percent” box if it is the highest one available or the “top five percent” box if that one is, because I am not certain what either really means when the issue is “takes initiative” and the damage of putting Mortimer in the second rank is much higher than the damage of over-estimating him. Indeed, letters of reference can be extraordinarily well-crafted. Sometimes I wish my “without reservation” to be seen as bullshit. But I do not write my reservations into the letter; they appear in precisely how I do and do not say some things.