Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Note that the fake reasoner need not actively doctor the results. The influence of ulterior goals can take place at a subconscious or even at an unconscious level. The fake reasoner is also not a bullshitter. The issue is not that he doesn’t care about the truth, as with the bullshitter, but that there are certain other goals that he cares about more. He is not a genuine inquirer either, as finding the right answers is not his highest priority. Sure, his reasoning may be shaky, he may twist language, massage his statistics, or embrace logical fallacies with vigor, but all that does not make him a bullshitter, at least not in the intentionalist school. The fake reasoner per se still believes in genuine inquiry and departs from it only because of other reasons more pressing in his eyes—the inquiry being only one of several balls that are being juggled.

  A third violation is that of prematurely dismissing the inquiry as going nowhere, so that the answer to the question we are asking is a defeatist “we’ll never know.” This is the approach of the skeptic. But there is a difference between being convinced that there is no truth and not caring whether what one says is true. Consequently, the skeptic too is no bullshitter.

  So, what then is bullshitting? What makes someone a bullshitter—at least in the intentionalist school of Frankfurt and others—is that he doesn’t care about the truth or the correctness of his statements, either because of a total indifference to how things really are, or because of the belief that whatever he says makes no difference at all, his voice being only one in a sea of others, many of which more powerful, and all clamoring for attention.73 The sales clerk who doesn’t care about the company she works for, and who tells her customer that the shoes she is trying really look great on her without paying any attention to whether they do or not, is bullshitting. There is no motivation to get things right, nor to deceive; there isn’t even any ulterior motive. In bullshitting claims are made, judgments cast, arguments presented, all with the unbearable lightness of those who are free of any responsibility or commitment, even if it is a freedom that is rooted in a profound sense of impotence or insecurity.

  A lack of faith in genuine inquiry, intellectual laziness, being forced to speak on issues one knows too little about, all contribute to a culture of bullshitting. And it is a culture that can very well feed on itself. Bullshitting invariably invites more of it. It would be a mistake, however, to limit one’s search for bullshitting only to spent scientists, oily politicians, or slick marketers. When philosophy itself is boldly identified, per Richard Rorty, with “carrying on the conversation” and truth is defined as “what your peers will let you get away with,” even the perennial search for wisdom is being reduced to mere bullshitting. What this means is not just that what some philosophers say is jargonistic, obscure, or meaningless, but that even philosophers are not immune to losing the desire to really search for answers to the questions they are raising. The temptation to just blurt out what sounds good and the power of whatever sounds good to find willful ears (generally including one’s own) is just too great.

  Not all violations of the epistemic imperative are so simple and straightforward. They can be blended, and even combined, with genuine inquiry. The fake reasoner who doesn’t care what people think, or who has lost all respect for his audience, may resort to bullshitting when trying to bridge the gap between the results he needs and the results inquiry would bring him. He makes factual claims and explanations without caring whether they are true or false, whether they make sense or not, or whether they are even convincing. The same can be said for the sham reasoner who seeks to defend his holy truths in a political arena where he is faced with an audience that steadfastly refuses to see things as he sees them. Also the genuine inquirer may engage in bullshitting when playing the game of keeping corporate sponsors, university administrators, or grant agencies happy, furnishing them with facts, findings, and arguments he doesn’t himself believe. One can even bullshit about bullshitting. 74 It’s important, however, to keep such second-order bullshitting separate from first-order bullshitting. Otherwise one runs the risk of losing the child with the bathwater, as when one would dismiss excellent research because of the bullshitting with which its findings were made public.

  In light of the above, one might still argue that there are some situations where bullshitting is productive, and that even within genuine inquiry there is a proper place and time for it. Frankfurt’s discussion of the bull session points in this direction (pp. 34–37). Bullshitting could be interpreted as creating the right atmosphere for inquirers to vent new hypotheses they feel unsure about or draw wild analogies that contain a potential key for further progress. However, there remains an important difference between brainstorming, however creative, and bullshitting. Returning once more to the central premise that drives the intentionalist school—that what makes something bullshit is the intention with which it is generated—we can say that what distinguishes a brainstorm session from an evening of bullshitting is that the participants in the former are interested in discovering something, a desire that is altogether absent among bullshitters. Bullshitting lacks the openness of mind and the ability to adapt in face of new insights that are essential for anything to be taken seriously or as worth pursuing. True, what bullshitters excrete may on occasion prove useful to others, but that’s an accidental and unintended consequence. Taken in that way, listening to someone bullshit is no more part of inquiry than serendipitously hitting upon some insight while browsing tabloids or while mindlessly driving through town.

  So Why Bullshit?

  Having distinguished bullshitting from genuine inquiry as well as from sham and fake reasoning, and having said something about why people engage in those activities, the question remains: Why do people bullshit? Why do people make epistemic claims without caring whether they are true? Leaving pure epistemic sloth aside and with no pretense of being exhaustive, I will say a little about two (mutually reinforcing) reasons why people bullshit: the social pressure to speak on any issue (often combined with the notion that whatever one says makes no difference), and a lack of faith in the possibility—or the usefulness—of genuine inquiry. Because I have separated bullshitting from sham and fake reasoning, some motives often attributed to the bullshitter properly belong to the sham or the fake reasoner.

  Within a liberal democratic society, as Frankfurt notes, every individual is expected to be a responsible citizen who is able to instantly voice an opinion on countless pertinent and not so pertinent issues (p. 63). This expectation goes back to the Cartesian rejection of authority and the Enlightenment’s appeal that everyone should think for himself. However, when the situation is such that one is forced, or conditioned, to speak with conviction on many issues one knows little about, one will be unable to always speak from a genuine desire to find true answers. For one thing, there simply isn’t the time. Moreover, in cases where one is not directly affected there is little motivation to do so. Being relatively detached from the issues one is voicing opinions about, and finding that one’s voice is just one among many, has the liberating effect that what opinion is being voiced does not make any difference. Hence, there’s no real need to be concerned about the truth of what one is saying.

  In addition to the feeling that one does not need to engage oneself in genuine inquiry for many of the issues one is asked or feels compelled to voice an opinion about, there is the belief that genuine inquiry is far too romantic an ideal to be worthy of actual pursuit. Generally, such a prophylactic pessimism follows the disillusion caused by a failed search for certainty. I hope that the above account of genuine inquiry, which makes no reference to something like “Truth with a capital T,” and with its fal-libilistic stance, makes a sufficient case to counter this type of bullshitter.

  When addressing the issue of the prevalence of bullshit it may be fair to say that the Enlightenment’s narrow focus on individuals has made bullshit its natural outcome, as it leaves every individual to fend for himself in an overwhelming epistemic landscape. Put differently, one way of
looking at the prevalence of bullshit is that it is the price we are paying for the Cartesian-style epistemic emancipation that developed into a linchpin of the ideology of modernity, an ideology that situates knowledge within the individual and makes any appeal to authority suspect.

  Hence, the best way to counter bullshitting is to restore confidence in genuine inquiry and insist that people be in earnest when they make epistemic claims. Confidence in genuine inquiry also alleviates the need to be able to speak on any and every issue, as it allows one to rely on the work of others. Scientists work like this. Unless there is good reason to doubt the work of their colleagues in other fields of research, they take the results they obtained at face value, assuming that they are the product of genuine inquiry.

  Now one might object that by focusing on inquiry I did not cast my net wide enough, because there is more to life than inquiring into things, even if we include sales clerks helping customers find the right shoes. May there then not be some other function of bullshitting that is not a violation of the epistemic imperative? Take, for instance, the formulaic “It’s nice to see you!,” which is not intended to reveal or conceal the speaker’s real feelings, nor to convince the addressee about the true nature of those feelings, but rather to make the addressee feel at ease. It could be argued that the claim’s truth value doesn’t matter for that, so there’s is no need for any of those involved to concern themselves with the claim’s truth value, thereby making bullshitting permissible.

  In response to this, it might be suggested that this is not a case of pure bullshitting but that it is bullshitting for a cause, and that the claim “It’s nice to see you!” is in effect a purported product of inquiry, even if this inquiry amounts to little more than a reflection upon one’s feelings. With the formulaic “It’s nice to see you!” this inquiry is simply not engaged in because no matter what the inquiry would reveal about our feelings toward that person, the best strategy remains to say “It’s nice to see you!” That is what best serves the purpose that is deemed more important, which is to ease our interaction with that person—making it technically a case of fake reasoning. What this comes down to is the belief that it is not always best to be earnest. Just as there may be situations where it is better to lie, there may be situations where it is better to bullshit.

  Alternatively, take the case of a few friends that are just having a good time by horsing around a bit for fun. Their bullshitting serves no other purpose than that they enjoy doing it; it plays a role not unlike that of playing Scrabble or some other game. However, since we are still dealing with a situation that involves passing off claims as knowledge, however casually, it satisfies the broad definition of inquiry given before, on which inquiry encompasses any activity that leads to knowledge claims that are in some aspect new to those participating in the activity. Such cases of horsing around can be defended, though, by arguing that in situations where the conclusions reached do not matter, the enjoyment of the activity can overrule the epistemic imperative. Yes, bullshitting too has its aesthetic appeal.

  The fact that these two cases can be interpreted in terms of inquiry doesn’t prove that all cases of bullshitting can be satisfactorily interpreted that way. Personally, I doubt that this can be done. What it does show, however, is that looking at bullshitting from the perspective of inquiry gives us a viable framework through which to interpret and evaluate bullshitting. A better understanding of bullshitting may be a first step, not only towards detecting and identifying bullshit, but also towards countering or preventing it when it is inappropriate.

  II

  The Bull by the Horns

  Defining Bullshit

  8

  Deeper into Bullshit

  bullshit n. & v. coarse sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing. - v. intr. (-shitted, - shitting ) talk nonsense; bluff. bullshitter n.

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

  —Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, pp. 33–34

  1 Without the Shit of the Bull

  Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit” is a pioneering and brilliant discussion of a widespread but largely unexamined cultural phenomenon. Upon being honored by an invitation to contribute to a volume that celebrated his work,75 I decided to focus on Frankfurt’s work on bullshit, partly because it is so original and so interesting, and partly because bullshit, and the struggle against it, have played a large role in my own intellectual life. They have played that role because of my interest in Marxism, which caused me to read, when I was in my twenties, a great deal of the French Marxism of the 1960s, principally deriving from the Althusserian school.

  I found that material hard to understand, and, because I was naive enough to believe that writings that were attracting a great deal of respectful, and even reverent, attention could not be loaded with bullshit, I was inclined to put the blame for finding the Althusserians hard entirely on myself. And when I managed to extract what seemed like a reasonable idea from one of their texts, I attributed to it more interest or more importance (so I later came to see) than it had, partly, no doubt, because I did not want to think that I had been wasting my time. (That psychological mechanism, a blend, perhaps, of “cognitive dissonance reduction” and “adaptive preference formation,” is, I believe, at work quite widely. Someone struggles for ages with some rebarbative text, manages to find some sense in it, and then reports that sense with enthusiasm, even though it is a banality that could have been expressed in a couple of sentences instead of across the course of the dozens of paragraphs to which the said someone has subjected herself).76

  Yet, although I was for a time attracted to Althusserianism, I did not end by succumbing to its intoxication, because I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigor was not matched by conceptual rigor in its intellectual practices. The ideas that the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false. (Failure to distinguish those opposed interpretations produces an illusory impression of interesting truth).

  No doubt at least partly because of my misguided Althusserian dalliance, I became, as far as bullshit is concerned, among the least tolerant people that I know. And when a set of Marxists or semi-Marxists, who, like me, had come to abhor what we considered to be the obscurity that had come to infest Marxism—when we formed, at the end of the 1970s, a Marxist discussion group which meets annually, and to which I am pleased to belong, I was glad that my colleagues were willing to call it the Non-Bullshit Marxism Group: hence the emblem at the head of this article, which says, in Latin, “Marxism without the shit of the bull.” (The group is also called, less polemically, and as you can see, the September Group, since we meet each September, for three days.)

  2 Two Species of Bullshit

  I should like to explain how this chapter reached its present state. I read Frankfurt’s article in 1986, when it first appeared. I loved it, but I didn’t think critically about it.

  Having been asked to contribute to the present volume, I reread the article, in order to write about it. I came to realize that its proposal about the “essence” of bullshit worked quite badly for the bullshit (see Section 1 above) that has occupied me. So I wrote a first draft which trained counter-examples drawn from the domain of the bullshit that interests me against Frankfurt’s account. But I then realized that it was inappropriate to train those examples against Frankfurt, that he and I are, in fact, interested in different bullshits, and, therefore, in different explicanda. Frankfurt
is interested in a bullshit of ordinary life,77 whereas I am interested in a bullshit that appears in academic works, and, so I have discovered, the word “bullshit” characteristically denotes structurally different things that correspond to those different interests. Finally, and, belatedly, I considered, with some care, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) account of “bullshit”, and, to my surprise, I discovered (and this was, of course, reassuring) that something like the distinct explicanda that I had come to distinguish are listed there under two distinct entries.78

  So, instead of citing cases of the bullshit that interests me in disconfirmation of Frankfurt’s account, I now regard it as bullshit of a different kind.79 Which is not to say that I have no criticism of Frankfurt’s treatment of the kind of bullshit that interests him.

  Frankfurt is partly responsible for my original, misdirected, approach. For he speaks, after all—see the second epigraph at the beginning of this article—of the “essence” of bullshit, and he does not acknowledge that the explicandum that attracted his interest is just one flower in the lush garden of bullshit. He begins by saying that the term ‘bullshit’ is very hard to handle, analytically, but, as we shall see, he rather abandons caution when he comes to offer his own account of it.