Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Two Tauroscatological Schools

  G.A. Cohen’s excellent article, “Deeper into Bullshit” (Chapter 8 in this volume) marks the beginning of two distinctive schools in bullshit thinking. Cohen separates what he calls Cohen-bullshit from Frankfurt-bullshit. He also observes, not without satisfaction, that one doesn’t need a Frankfurt bullshitter to generate Cohen bullshit. Cohen points to several differences between the bullshit he is interested in and the bullshit he sees Frankfurt addressing.

  The key difference between the two, however, is that whereas Cohen focuses on bullshit as a product, irrespective of how it is generated, Frankfurt concentrates on the act of bullshitting itself. I will call these two approaches to bullshit the structuralist school and the intentionalist school because of their respective emphasis on structure and intention. Since in the intentionalist school we are speaking of the act of bullshitting, intention refers to the reason, motive, or purpose with which the act is engaged in, like courting a woman with the intention to marry her, or approaching a tourist with the intention to steal her purse.

  Within the intentionalist school the focus is on the bullshitter, not the bullshit. The essence of bullshitting is that the bullshitter does not care about the truth of his statements, because he is indifferent to how things really are, or because he believes that whatever he says doesn’t really make a difference. Often, but not always, the bullshitter tries to hide his indifference to truth. When the bullshitter is publicly hostile to “those old-fashioned prigs who still hold on to the notion of truth”68—a view that is in vogue in certain relativist, postmodernist, and neo-pragmatist circles—this indifference may even be openly flaunted. Within the intentionalist school the bullshit that results is only of secondary interest; it is simply what we get when people bullshit. What counts is the intention of the producer.

  At face value it seems that intentionalists fail to appreciate that one person’s bullshitting can generate another person’s insight. This suggests that intention doesn’t guarantee bullshit, as the intentionalists claim. We may call this the insight problem. I think, though, that the insight problem is best treated as a case of unintended consequences—like someone dodging an unpleasant task by reading this essay instead is an unintended consequence of me writing it. The intentionalist can argue that just as I cannot take any credit for having helped someone dodge a particular task, the bullshitter cannot take any credit for what value others might see in what he excretes. I will return to this a bit later.

  Within the structuralist school, in contrast, the focus is squarely on the bullshit. On this view whether something counts as bullshit has little to do with the intention with which it is generated, but depends wholly on its intrinsic features. For instance, a piece of writing that is “unclarifiably unclear,” Cohen observes, is bullshit, no matter what its author’s intentions were or what went through his head when he wrote it (p. 130). To determine whether a certain text is bullshit, one must analyze the text, not speculate about the intentions of its author. True, those intentions may explain how the bullshit came to be, but in the end those intentions are irrelevant to the question what makes something bullshit. Bullshitting and bullshit are on this view logically independent. Someone who is bullshitting may unwittingly produce brilliant insights, while someone who is genuinely concerned with truth but who happens to have been hanging around with the wrong crowd, may become a veritable fountainhead of jargonistic bullshit. For the structuralist, what counts as bullshit is determined by its structure, or the lack thereof, and not by how it is produced.

  There are a few, admittedly rather uneven reasons why I feel more attracted to the intentionalist school. One of these is that much has already been written about Cohen bullshit, albeit under different names, and that various strategies have already been developed to separate bull from knowledge. These include, among others, Descartes’s insistence on clear and distinct ideas, the verificationist principle of the logical positivists, and the pragmatists’ pragmatic maxim. To these can now be added the Cohen-Brown test, on which something is bullshit when it is just as plausible as its negation (p. 132). The intentionalist school, in contrast, brings in something important that till now has been almost entirely ignored.

  A second reason for favoring the intentionalists’ approach is that although I agree with Cohen that the bullshitter can generate genuine knowledge, even if only by accident, I am not so sure that this exempts it from being bullshit. Take a physician and a sham astrologer who respectively make a false and a true prediction about the death of a certain celebrity—the physician after physically examining her and studying her medical record, the astrologer by consulting Tarot cards which he does not really believe in and which he doesn’t quite know how to read. Should we abstain from calling the astrologer’s conclusion bullshit simply because it turns out his prediction was the right one? My view is that we should still call it bullshit because of how the claim was generated. That the claim happens to be true, or that important segments of the argument are innovative, carefully crafted, or make sense, is another matter. Even when the bullshitter just happens to get it right, it remains bullshit until someone who is not bullshitting has gone over it, affirmed it, and thereby transformed it into knowledge.

  This gets us back to the insight problem. Precisely because the focus is on intention, the product of one person’s bullshitting can be another person’s insight, just as one person’s trash can be someone else’s treasure. The claim that a certain chair cannot be at once trash and treasure mistakenly assumes that these are qualities intrinsic to the object, on a par with the chair being wobbly or the chair being extended in space. The structuralist school takes this stance: calling something bullshit is very much like calling a chair wobbly. The intentionalist school denies this. Just as calling something trash has to do with the attitude that is taken towards it, calling something bullshit has to do with the intention with which it is generated, and not with any of its intrinsic qualities. Just as no chair is trash in and of itself, no claim or argument is bullshit in and of itself. In fact, the discovery that one’s bullshitting is taken by someone as genuine insight can come as quite a shock to the bullshitter, as happened with William Perry’s undergraduates who bullshitted their way through an exam and later discovered that they got an A for it.69 Of course none of this means that no claim or argu-ment can be plain nonsense in and of itself. But nonsense need not be bullshit.

  The Epistemic Imperative

  To get a better grip on bullshitting, I will contrast it with genuine inquiry. For the purpose of this paper I will interpret inquiry (including, but not just including, genuine inquiry) as any activity that leads to knowledge claims that are in some aspect new to those participating in the activity. Now it may be argued that the bullshitter, who doesn’t care about the truth of what she is arguing for, cannot possibly be engaged in inquiry, so that contrasting bullshit with inquiry is misguided. However, because bullshitting and inquiring are alternative ways of responding to questions that are posed or problems that are raised, the two can be compared and contrasted. Someone who is bullshitting about whether cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, or whether homosexuals should be allowed in the army, stands in the same arena as those who really seek to know whether something is true or whether something should be allowed. To the untrained ear the genuine inquirer and the bullshitter may be indistinguishable. In fact, the bullshitter, who is far more flexible because she is much less restricted in what she can say, may even be the most convincing. In short, bullshitting and inquiring are sufficiently similar to warrant comparison.

  There is another reason why contrasting bullshitting with genuine inquiry is insightful. Even the most avid bullshitter is not likely to accept bullshit from others in matters that are of real importance to him. For instance, when he is feeling sick he wants not bullshit, but the doctor to genuinely inquire into his ailment. Bullshitting, prevalent as it may be, is essentially a free-rider problem. Bullshitters are like people that hop on
the bus without buying a ticket. One can only do this as long as others pay for the busses to go. The same is true for bullshitting. With the exception of areas of no practical importance (such as metaphysics or literary criticism), bullshitting can flourish only in an environment that is secured by people who do more than just bullshit.

  Contrasting bullshitting with genuine inquiry also puts us on track to cure it. A general loss of faith in the very possibility of genuine inquiry, or in the possibility of genuine inquiry in certain areas (often extending to everything except the hard sciences), is an important cause of the prevalence of bullshit.

  To understand genuine inquiry we ought to turn to the pragmatists, and especially to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophical importance is increasingly recognized. For the pragmatists, knowledge is generated through our interaction with a world that poses real problems that generate living doubt. Hence, inquiry takes the form of problem-solving, and any conception of knowledge that banishes knowledge from the world in which we live is firmly rejected. Because of its focus on action, pragmatism is a natural fit for the intentionalist school.

  Following Peirce, I define genuine inquiry as any inquiry that is fueled by the desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking, or involved (perhaps indirectly) in asking. Peirce defined science that way.70 To define science in terms of the scientific method, as was done traditionally, was for Peirce to put the cart before the horse. If inquiry is conducted with the right attitude, methods that further that inquiry will evolve naturally in the course of that inquiry. The use of scientific method by itself doesn’t guarantee that inquiry is conducted with the right attitude, as the pseudo-inquirers may be more successful in reaching their goals when they use methods developed by scientists. In short, what makes something scientific is not the correctness of the conclusions, nor the methods employed, but the attitude with which it is conducted. The resulting conception of science is a very broad one. It includes any inquiry that is engaged with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking. Thus conceived, it encompasses the work of homicide detectives who want to find the murderer, philologists who seek to recover the meaning of an ancient text, politicians who want to know which health plan best serves the public, and car mechanics who are looking for the cause of a suspicious rattle.

  What characterizes genuine inquiry is neither its methods, nor its results, but the attitude with which it is conducted. Inquiry should be engaged in with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions that are being asked. Taking this posi-tion does not commit us, however, to the view that we can solve all the questions we can possibly ask. It doesn’t even commit us to say that any particular question we ask must be solvable merely because we were able to formulate the question. All it commits us to is that when we try to answer a particular question we proceed from the notion—or the postulate, if you will—that that question can be answered, and hence that we direct our inquiry in such a way as to find that answer. One possible outcome of that inquiry might be that the question was ill-posed, which may lead to its abandonment or point to a new question that seems to have better prospects. Formulating better questions is one way of advancing our knowledge.

  To truly counter the bullshitter, however, we must show that genuine inquiry is not a pipedream, but something attainable. One thing that keeps genuine inquiry within our reach is that its aim is not something grand and abstract, like “discovering the whole truth,” but, modestly, finding answers to the questions that are actually being asked. This raises the question of what it is to answer a question. Staying close to the intentionalist stance, we can say that a question is answered (or resolved) when the doubts that initiated the question have been satisfied. This may raise an eyebrow or two, since at least on the face of it the correctness of an answer seems independent of what the inquirer believes it to be, something that is borne out by the fact that occasionally (if not to say often) people are quite satisfied with a wrong answer.

  Several things can be said about this. Whether the answer he comes up with is mistaken or not, once the inquirer has satisfied himself that he has found the answer, he will stop inquiring. Put differently, the satisfaction of the inquirer brings the inquiry to conclusion. Subsequent doubts about this answer can cause the same inquirer, or others, to reopen the investigation until everyone is again convinced that the right answer has been reached, and then inquiry once again comes to a close. Such new doubt can emerge when new facts come to light, or when the question is looked at with fresh eyes. For many of our questions this is a long and torturous process, sometimes involving generations of inquirers.

  This account of inquiry also points at something else: inquiry is a deeply social enterprise. Given our assumption that the inquirer is really interested in uncovering the right answer, reasonable doubt expressed by others, especially when they are peers, is powerful fuel for rekindling doubt. In fact, interaction with others is often the only way that personal biases, quirks, lacunae, etc., can be ironed out.

  The above claim that the answer to the question must be independent of what the inquirer thinks it to be is misleading. What is really meant is that the answer is not determined by what the inquirer believes it to be. However, we can maintain the opposite: the answer that solves the puzzle will determine, or at least influence, what the inquirer is going to conclude if he is interested in finding that answer and if he is given enough time to complete the inquiry. Put differently, whereas the doubt that generates the question can be seen as the efficient cause of inquiry, the answer can be considered its final cause; it is that toward which genuine inquiry directs itself. Pragmatists even go a step further. Rejecting any view as meaningless on which truth is made into something that is in principle unattainable, they argue that the answer that would be agreed upon in the long run by the community of all inquirers is the truth with respect to that question.71 There is no more to truth than that. It is called the final opinion, in that neither new facts nor fresh eyes can elicit any doubt that the answer that has been reached is indeed the right one. We do not need to go that far for our purpose—which is merely to show that wherever the outcome matters genuine inquiry is superior to bullshitting—but it does show that a robust theory on which genuine inquiry is truth-indicative is possible.

  Remaining with the pragmatists a little, we can say that although for countless questions the moment a final opinion could be reached lies infinitely far in the future, there are also countless questions for which we have already reached such an opinion or for which such a final opinion is in our reach. However, at the same time, since we are human and hence fallible, there is no guarantee that in any actual case the answer we have reached, and have come to agree upon, is correct. Hence, though we can say that many of our answers must be true (how else could we survive?), we cannot point at any single one of them and say with certainty that the answer to that particular question is true. Consequently dogmatism, which maintains that there are certainties we can identify and build upon, goes out the window.

  This, however, by no means forces us into skepticism, as is often assumed. The skeptic concludes from the fact that we can doubt any of our answers that we can doubt all our answers. But that simply doesn’t follow. From the fact that a passenger can occupy any vacant seat in the train it does not follow that she can occupy them all. The viable third option that presents itself here is that of the fallibilist, who argues that though we can trust many of our beliefs to be true, we cannot single out any particular belief as true. The fallibilist is like someone who is building a house in a swamp. Though none of the foundation poles hit solid ground, all of them combined keep the house firmly in place. Hence, whereas skepticism undermines the very possibility of knowledge, fallibilism does not.

  The above, very brief discussion of inquiry allows us to recast the scientific attitude in terms of a general epistemic imperative:

  When engaging in inquiry we should always proceed upon the hope that there is a true ans
wer to the questions we ask and act from a desire to find that answer.

  The Problem with Bullshitting

  Where there’s an imperative there are ways it can be violated. Bullshitting is one such violation, but there are others. Let us look at a few. Peirce, who inspired the imperative, directed most of his own criticism against what he called “sham reasoning.” In sham reasoning, the intent is not to find true answers to the questions asked, but to find facts that will support a conclusion that is already believed. Creationism, which uses science specifically to support the preconceived notion that the universe is created literally as explained in the Old Testament, is a paradigm case of sham reasoning. The creationist already knows the answer. His attention is focused on finding the facts that support it and refuting the arguments that deny it. The creationist, however, genuinely believes that the theory of evolution is wrong. It has to be wrong because its conclusions are wrong. Hence, the creationist isn’t bullshitting. In contrast to the bullshitter, the creationist cares about how things really are. However, he is not a genuine inquirer either, because the conclusion is set beforehand and isn’t negotiable.

  A different type of violation—one that Susan Haack has dubbed “fake reasoning”—occurs when the inquirer is not concerned with finding the right answer, but with some ulterior goal, one that is related to the inquiry but is in essence extraneous to the question that is being inquired into.72 An inquirer who receives funding from a large corporation has a strong incentive to produce work that gives the results her sponsors want hear. Someone who is working toward a conclusion, not because he thinks it is the right answer, but because it will give him fame, save his career, bring in research money, land him votes, etc., is a fake reasoner. A marketing campaign that tailors claims about the benefits of a product to scenarios that maximize the company’s profit is engaged in fake reasoning as well. A special kind of fake reasoning is that which is designed to absolve the reasoner of responsibility. We can find this with cold-blooded murderers who plea temporary insanity, corporations that seek to avoid damage claims, and politicians that smooth over the gap between what they promised and what they actually did.