Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Consider, then, the OED reading of ‘bullshit’:

  bullshit n. & v. coarse sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing.80 - v. intr. (-shitted, -shitting) talk nonsense; bluff. bullshitter n.

  The bullshit that interests me falls under definition 1 of the noun, but the bullshit that interests Frankfurt is closer to what’s defined by definition 2 of the noun. And that is because of the appearance of the word ‘insincere’ in that second definition of ‘bullshit’. In definition 2 of the noun ‘bullshit’, bullshit is constituted as such through being the product of discourse governed by a certain state of mind. In this activity-centered definition of bullshit, the bull, conceptually speaking, wears the trousers: bullshit is bullshit because it was produced by a bullshitter, or, at any rate, by someone who was bullshitting at the time. Bullshit is, by nature, the product of bullshitting, and bullshitting, by nature, produces bullshit, and that biconditional, so understood that ‘bullshitting’ enjoys semantic primacy, is true of Frankfurt’s view of the matter.81

  Definition 1, by contrast, defines ‘bullshit’ without reference to the bullshit-producer’s state of mind. The defect of this bullshit does not derive from its provenance: almost any state of mind can emit nonsense or rubbish, with any old mix of sincerity and its lack. Here the shit wears the trousers, and if there are indeed “bullshitters,” and “bullshittings,” that correspond to the bullshit of definition 1, then they are defined by reference to bullshit: but it may be the case, as I meant to imply by that ‘if’, that the words ‘bullshitting’ and ‘bullshitter’ don’t have a stable place on this side of the explicandum divide.82 However that may be, definition 1 supplies an output-centered definition of the noun: the character of the process that produces bullshit is immaterial here.

  Note, moreover, how the alternatives in the brief entry on the verb ‘to bullshit’ match alternatives 1 and 2 in the definition of the noun (even though that entry isn’t, as it perhaps should have been, sub-numbered ‘1’ and ‘2’). One can “talk nonsense” with any intentions whatsoever, but one cannot unknowingly or inadvertently “bluff”: bluffing is a way of intending to deceive. (I’m not sure, by the way, that the dictionary is right in its implication that it suffices for bullshitting, in the non-bluff sense, that you produce bullshit, in sense 1: innocent producers of bullshit might be said not to be bullshitting when they produce it.83)

  It is a limitation of Frankfurt’s article that, as we shall see, he took for granted that the bull wears the semantic trousers: he therefore focused on one kind of bullshit only, and he did not address another, equally interesting, and academically more significant, kind. Bullshit as insincere talk or writing is indeed what it is because it is the product of something like bluffing, but talking nonsense is what it is because of the character of its output, and nonsense is not nonsense because of features of the nonsense-talker’s mental state.

  3 Bullshit and Lying

  At the beginning of his article, Frankfurt describes a complexity that afflicts the study of bullshit:

  Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely—simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked. (pp. 2–3)

  I have no problem with Frankfurt’s first remark, to wit, that “bullshit” has a wide use in which it covers almost any kind of intellectual fault. To circumvent this problem, to identify a worthwhile explicandum, we could ask what ‘bullshit’ denotes where the term does carry (as Frankfurt implies that it sometimes does) a (more or less) “specific literal meaning,” one that differs, in particular, from the meanings carried by words that are close to ‘bullshit’, but instructively different in meaning from it, such as the word ‘horseshit’, which, at least in the United States, denotes, I believe, something characteristically produced with less deviousness than characterizes the production of (OED-2) bullshit. And I think that, for one such meaning, Frankfurt has provided an impressively discriminating (though not, as we shall see, fault-free) treatment: much of what he says about one kind of bullshit is true of it but false, for example, of horseshit.

  Frankfurt’s second remark, about the difficulty caused by the fact that “the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous,” is more problematic. Notice that this remark is meant to be independent of the first one (hence the words ‘For another . . .’), as indeed it must be, since no phenomenon could be thought to correspond to ‘bullshit’ where it is an undifferentiated term of abuse. In making this remark, Frankfurt must suppose, if, that is, he supposes, as he appears to do, that he will command the reader’s agreement, that the reader has some “specific, literal meaning” of ‘bullshit’ implicitly in mind. But that is extremely doubtful, partly because it is a gratuitous assumption (and, indeed, as the OED reveals, a false one) that ‘bullshit’ has some single “specific, literal meaning.” In a word: how can we be expected to agree, already, that bullshit is “vast” and “amorphous,” when no specification of ‘bullshit’ has yet been provided?

  However that may be, Frankfurt leaves these preliminary problems behind, and plunges right into his subject, by reviewing, refining, and developing a definition that Max Black once gave of ‘humbug’ (which is close to bullshit of the OED-2 kind), and then by commenting on an example of real or feigned rage expressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein against (putative) bullshit uttered by Fania Pascal.

  Emerging from the Black and Wittgenstein discussions, Frankfurt very surprisingly says, that “the essence of bullshit . . . is . . . lack of connection to a concern with truth—. . . indifference to how things really are” (pp. 33–34), where that indifference (see the Frankfurt passage quoted in the paragraph that follows here) is concealed by the speaker. It’s the word ‘essence’ that surprises me here: it seemed to be implied by Frankfurt’s preliminary remarks that the term ‘bullshit’, considered comprehensively, denotes no one thing whose essence one might try to specify,84 and Frankfurt had not in the interim indicated a particular region of bullshit, whose bullshit might, perhaps, be identified by an essence.

  Frankfurt later elaborates his definition as follows:

  This is the crux of the distinction between him [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he [the bullshitter] and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are. (pp. 54–55)

  Notice that, when Frankfurt elaborates what is supposed to be a proposal about bullshit, he speaks not of “bullshit” but of the “bullshitter.” This confirms that it is the bull that wears Frankfurt’s trousers. But he wrongly takes for granted that that is the only important or interesting bullshit that there is.

  Now, in the light of the semantic promiscuity of ‘bullshit’ that was discussed at the outset of this section, it was, so I have suggested, unwise of Frankfurt to cast his claim as one about the “essence” of bullshit, as he does in the pp. 33–34 passage. He should have submitted his indifference-to-truth the
sis as an attempt to characterize (at least) one interesting kind of bullshit, whether or not there are other interesting kinds of it. Let us assess his thesis as such, that is, not with the ambitiously generalizing status that Frankfurt assigns to it, but as an attempt to characterize one kind of bullshit, and, in particular, an activity-centered kind of bullshit. I return to the distinct bullshit-explicandum , which corresponds to OED definition 1, in Section 4 below.

  Consider Frankfurt’s statement, with which we may readily agree, that

  The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. (p. 22)

  I find it hard to align this remark with Frankfurt’s proposal about the essence of bullshit: advertisers and politicians are often very concerned indeed “to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality” (p. 55) and to design what we might well call “bullshit” to serve that end (yet the quoted p. 55 words are used by Frankfurt to characterize the purpose of liars as opposed to bullshitters). Is it not a problem for Frankfurt’s proposal about the essence of bullshit that those whom he designates as paradigm bullshitters engage in a great deal of what is not, for Frankfurt, bullshitting?

  Frankfurt might say (as he must, to sustain his proposal) that, when advertisers and politicians seek to cover up the truth, they are doing something other than bullshitting. But when we are inclined to agree with Frankfurt that advertising and politics supply paradigms of bullshit, it is not the subset of their doings to which his proposal points that induces our inclination to agree. I think we are induced to agree partly because we recognize at least some lying to be also bullshitting.85 Frankfurt’s contrast between lying and bullshitting is malconstructed, and he erred, I believe, because he failed to distinguish two dimensions of lying, which we must separate if we are to determine the relationship between lying and Frankfurt’s bullshitting.

  Standardly, a liar says what he believes to be false: let us call all that his standard tactic (or, for short, his tactic). Liars also standardly seek to deceive their listeners about some fact (other than the fact that they disbelieve what they say): we can call that the liar’s (standard) goal. And normally a liar pursues the stated goal by executing the stated tactic: he says something that he believes to be false in order to induce his listener to believe something false. (Usually, of course, what I have called the liar’s “standard goal” is not also his ultimate or final goal, which may be to protect his reputation, to sell a bill of goods, to exploit his listener, or whatever.86 But the liar standardly pursues such further goals by pursuing the goal which liars (as I have said) standardly seek. None of these further goals distinguish the liar from non-liars.)

  Now, what I have called the “standard tactic” and the “standard goal” of lying can come apart. Consider what was one of Sigmund Freud’s favorite jokes:

  Dialogue between two travelers on a train from Moscow: “Where are you going?”

  “To Pinsk.”

  “Liar! You say you are going to Pinsk in order to make me believe you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk. So whom are you trying to fool?”87

  Suppose that the first traveler’s diagnosis of the purpose of the second traveler’s uttering ‘To Pinsk’ is correct: let us therefore call the second traveler ‘Pavel’ (because of the ‘P’ in Pinsk), and let us call the first traveler ‘Trofim’. On the indicated supposition, Trofim is right to call Pinsk-bound Pavel a liar, since, as Frankfurt says, the liar is someone who tries “to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality” (p. 55), and that’s what Pavel is trying to do to Trofim. The peculiarity of the present example is that Pavel here seeks to deceive by telling the truth. Pavel does not, in my view, lie, on this occasion, but he nevertheless proves himself to be a liar. Pavel’s goal is the standard goal of the liar, but his tactic, here, is to speak the truth. (The important and entirely non-verbal point is that the standard goal and the standard tactic of lying lose their normal association here, not whether Pavel is lying, or telling a lie, etc.)

  A converse case, in which the standard tactic subserves a non-standard goal, would go as follows. Pavel knows that Trofim knows that Pavel habitually lies, at any rate when it comes to disclosing his intended destinations. But, on the present occasion, it is very important to Pavel that Trofim should believe the truth about where Pavel is going. So Pavel, once again traveling to Pinsk, says that he is going to Minsk, precisely because he wants Trofim to believe the truth, which is that Pavel is going to Pinsk. I don’t know, or very much care, whether Pavel thereby lies, but he is not here “attempting to lead [Trofim] away from a correct apprehension of reality,” save with respect to his own state of mind: he wants him to think he’s trying to get Trofim to believe something false, when he’s not.

  We must, accordingly, distinguish two respects in which liars characteristically traffic in falsehood. Liars usually intend to utter falsehoods, while intending that they be thought to be speaking truthfully; but that is quite separate from their standard goal, which is to cause a misrepresentation of reality in the listener’s mind.

  What is the bearing, if any, of this distinction, on Frankfurt’s distinction between lying and bullshitting?

  The root difficulty for Frankfurt’s bullshitting-lying distinction, the difficulty underlying the problem with his advertiser example, is that, while Frankfurt identifies the liar by his goal, which is to mislead with respect to reality, he assigns no distinctive goal to the bullshitter, but, instead, identifies the bullshitter’s activity at the level that corresponds to what I have called the liar’s tactic. The standard liar pursues his distinctive goal by asserting what he believes to be false and concealing that fact. Frankfurt’s bullshitter asserts statements whose truth-values are of no interest to him, and he conceals that fact. But Frankfurt assigns no distinctive goal to the bullshitter that would distinguish him from the liar. And, in fact, Frankfurt’s bullshitters, as he identifies them, have no distinguishing goal: they have a variety of goals, one of which can be precisely to mislead with respect to reality, and that, indeed, is the goal of bullshit advertising.88 Advertisers and politicians spew a lot of bullshit, and they indeed seek to induce false beliefs about reality, but those are not, as Frankfurt must have it, separate but, typically, coincident activities on their parts.

  The failure to distinguish the level of tactic from the level of goal runs throughout the discussion. Frankfurt writes at p. 47 (my emphasis):

  Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.

  The problem is that this falsehood is at the level of tactic, whereas phoniness is at the level of goal. If bluffing is like bullshit, that is partly because bullshitting, too, is often devoted to conveying something false—although often not by saying that false thing itself.

  As Frankfurt says, the bullshitter may not care whether or not what he says is true. But Frankfurt has confused that with the bullshitter’s not caring whether his audience is caused to believe something true or false. That explains an error that Frankfurt makes about the Fourth of July orator whom he describes at pp. 16–18 (my emphases)89:

  Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.” This is surely humbug . . . the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about
the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country’s history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech.

  It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statement as false. Rather . . . the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history.

  The orator’s unconcern about truth is, mistakenly, identified at the level of his goal, rather than, in line with p. 55, merely at the level of his immediate tactic. For the bullshitting orator, as Frankfurt describes him, might well care a lot about what the audience thinks about the Founding Fathers.90 If the orator had been Joseph McCarthy, he would have wanted the audience to think that the “new beginning” that the Founding Fathers “created” should persuade the audience to oppose the tyranny supposedly threatened by American Communism. The fact that it is not “fundamental” that “the speaker regards his statements as false” in no way implies that “he is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history.” (Similarly, advertisers may not care whether or not what they say is true, but they do care about what their audience is caused to believe, or, rather, more generally, about the thought-processes that they seek to induce in people.91)