Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Frankfurt’s ideas about bullshit are not the only ones on the table. There’s also G.A. Cohen’s. Cohen finds fault with Frankfurt’s “indifference thesis” insofar as the various aims attached to bullshitting include some that require misdirection with respect to reality, that is, lying. And if some lying is bullshitting, Frankfurt’s claim that bullshitting is entirely different from lying must be, well, wrong. Cohen cites advertisers (whom Frankfurt tags producers of classic, paradigm bullshit) as bullshitters, and notes that, like liars, they are keen to steer us away from the truth. The mistake, as Cohen has it, lies in confusing the bullshitter’s not caring “whether or not what he says is true” with his “not caring whether his audience is caused to believe something true or false” (pp. 127–28). Cohen claims that the bullshitter’s negligence of the truth of what he says sits alongside an obsession for the truth about what others believe. Advertisers, to continue the example, care not at all if the new Ford Humiliator is the best-built or most reliable SUV but loads about the truth of what we believe about it.

  A second complaint of Cohen’s cuts deeper. He claims that Frankfurt’s account of bullshit is incomplete. It misses out on an important, and different, kind of bullshit. In focusing “on one kind of bullshit only,” writes Cohen, Frankfurt

  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. (pp. 121–22)

  On Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, the bull, to borrow Cohen’s expression, “wears the trousers”; bullshit is whatever we get from the bull. What we need, according to Cohen, is a bullshit- (rather than a bull-) centered account of bullshit—an account of bullshit or nonsense independent of facts about the person serving it up (such as, for example, her mental state). And Cohen delivers an admittedly preliminary account of bullshit in this sense, one that emphasizes as a sufficient condition of bullshit its “unclarifiable unclarity” (p. 131). Something, a sentence for example, is unclarifiable “if and only if it cannot be made clear.” It’s disappointing that Cohen declines to say what ‘clear’ means —and, indeed, he lets on that he doesn’t think it’s even “possible to [say what ‘clear’ means], in an illuminating way” (p. 131). But it’s an ironic disappointment, so at least we have that.

  Frankfurt and Cohen each have some ideas about bullshit, then, and, not surprisingly, they are at odds. My own idea about bullshit consists, I hesitate to divulge, in adding yet more ideas about bullshit to the mix, in the hope of resolving what appear to be irresolvable differences between Frankfurt’s idea and Cohen’s. This strategy of simplifying the conceptual stew by adding more things to it strikes many (my students especially) as a bit perverse. But it is in fact a reliable (and, partly for that reason, quite popular) way to actually make progress in these sorts of matters, especially when the ideas added to the mix have garnered decent reviews on the intellectual stage; when they have, that is, a respectable intellectual ancestry. Determining this strategy’s success in the particular instance of this paper I leave as an exercise for the reader.

  The ideas I’ll be bringing to bear on the schism between Cohen and Frankfurt are the ideas associated with logical positivism—the premier, passionate, remarkably successful, and altogether thoroughly entertaining anti-bullshit philosophical program of the 1920s and 1930s (its end met, tragically but not surprisingly, at the hands of two of the twentieth century’s premier bullshit programs, European fascism and the Red Scare106). There are clear parallels between logical positivism and contemporary anti-bullshit programs,107 and, in fact, I’m surprised that so far so few, Frankfurt included, have either noticed the parallel or drawn upon it to add to the current discussion.108 But no matter; perhaps this book, and even this essay, is a start.

  The logical positivists were not shy about bringing the hammer down on bullshit, but as often they described what they were up to in the appropriately positive terms of promoting unity among all the domains of genuine knowledge. Their idea was that the unity of science meant making clear the connections various domains of knowledge bore to one another, and that that led to eradication of the hidden depths and dark recesses that could serve as massive underground bullshit bunkers. “Unity of science!” they sang, warbling ‘science’ in its very general, distinctly German, sense. So using the logical positivist’s own ideas about bullshit, its source, and its eradication to unify Frankfurt and Cohen’s accounts, as I intend, invokes, it seems to me, good anti-metaphysical karma.

  No Bullshit, Please, We’re Austrian

  Now the logical positivists railed against metaphysics rather than bullshit. If you happen to be worried that the positivist’s metaphysics isn’t Frankfurt’s (or Cohen’s) bullshit, then I aim to allay your worries by showing how the logical positivist’s metaphysics unites Frankfurt’s, and Cohen’s, bullshit. The most famous instance of positivistic railing against metaphysics, I believe, is Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 “Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language.”109 Philosophers know this essay as the one in which the young Rudolf Carnap takes the then far-better established German philosopher Martin Heidegger to task for writing, on p. 34 of his 1929 Was Ist Metaphysik?, “Das Nichts selbst nichtet,” that is, ‘The nothing noths’.110 Here was a choice bit of metaphysics, Carnap noted, and just the sort of thing that we ought to overcome (rather than ponder, examine, debate, or refute) by sober, and rather elementary, logical analysis of the sentence itself. Carnap’s essay is hardly the only instance of a logical positivist assault upon metaphysics, but (recall my ridiculous deadline) it’s the only one I’ll consider here. There is on the ontological horizon a succession of interesting articles and books with titles like “Neurath on Bullshit,” “Reichenbach on Bullshit,” “Quine on Bullshit,” and so on, and someone (other than myself) ought to write them.

  Carnap’s target, and the target of the logical positivists generally, was meaningless utterances, but not just meaningless utterances. Carnap is interested in the much more interesting topic of meaningless utterances that can be, and often are, presented as and widely understood to be meaningful—their utter-ers might, for example, present them (falsely) as though they had a meaning, or the people who read or hear such utterances might believe (again, falsely) that they have a meaning. Such utterances are pseudo-sentences, and Carnap’s claim is that metaphysics consists precisely of such pseudo-sentences. Spelling this out means, first, giving an account of what it is for an utterance to have meaning (thereby identifying what it is for it to be meaningless as well) and, second, explaining how it is that meaningless utterances could ever be confused with meaningful ones—how, we might say, metaphysics happens. Perhaps it’s not hard, having said even just this little, to see how Carnap’s approach to metaphysics might incorporate both Cohen’s bullshit-centered notion of “unclarifiable unclarity” and Frankfurt’s idea that bullshit is a certain intention, characterized by the disregard for the meaning of what one says (and, by that fact, for the truth). Both are afoot in the metaphysics Carnap begs us to overcome.

  Examples work wonders for Carnap. He invites us to imagine an encounter with someone using the word ‘teavy’, a new word, or at least a word new to us:

  In order to learn the meaning of this word, we ask him about its criterion of application: how is one to ascertain in a concrete case whether a thing is teavy or not? Let us suppose to begin with that we get no answer from him: there are no empirical signs of teavy-ness, he says. In that case we would deny the legitimacy of using this word. If the person who uses the word says that all the same there are things which are teavy and there are things which are not teavy, only it remains for the weak, finite, intellect of man an eternal secret which things are teavy and which are not, we shall regard this as empty verbiage. (p. 64)

 
The meaninglessness of ‘teavy’ stems, Carnap holds, from the fact that what Carnap calls the term’s elementary sentences—sentences with the form “x is teavy” (such as ‘This world is teavy’ or ‘My brother is teavy’)—cannot be deduced from other sentences. At the time, this meant for Carnap that the elementary sentences could not be verified.111

  Utterances, as opposed to terms, can be meaningless as well, even when all the terms they contain are meaningful. There are trivial cases (Carnap offers ‘Caesar is and’), but also cases like ‘Caesar is a prime number’, which might at first glance be taken as meaningful. This latter category contains pseudo-statements, things that aren’t statements but might initially be taken to be (in Carnap’s world, margarine, which isn’t butter but can be passed off as butter, would be pseudo-butter). Meaningfulness for utter-ances, as for words, amounts to a certain disconnectedness to other claims: we cannot, in principle, bring evidence to bear on the meaningless expression, either for it or against it. Carnap offers as examples of these Heidegger’s ‘We find the nothing’ and ‘We know the nothing’; ‘The nothing noths’ wins special Carnapian exasperation points for being not just a meaningless arrangement of terms, but for having among its terms a meaningless one to boot, the pseudo-verb ‘to nothing’ (p. 71).

  A Little Carnap in Everyone

  Carnap’s notion of meaninglessness, his main diagnostic tool in his battle against metaphysics, is a much more precise rendering of “unclarifiable unclarity,” Cohen’s main diagnostic tool in his battle against bullshit. This is why I am genuinely surprised that Cohen doesn’t mention Carnap or, for that matter, any of the logical positivists. I believe the parallel is confirmed by a careful, sustained, reading of Cohen’s paper alongside Carnap’s; but, really, that’s the sort of thing one ought to do in private.

  But I will offer a consilience that bolsters my claim. Cohen offers nonsense as an example of bullshit, and by ‘nonsense’ he means not merely unclear discourse but discourse that can’t be made clear: the mark of such unclarity is that “any apparent success in rendering it unobscure creates something that isn’t recognizable as a version of what was said” (p. 130). This manner of identifying the unclarifiable by its disconnectedness to other statements or texts is just Carnap’s strategy for isolating the meaningless. For Carnap, it is not as though there are antecedently meaningful sentences, and connecting a new sentence to one of these somehow infects the former with the latter’s meaning. The idea, rather, is that something is meaningful just in bearing the right (presumably, logical) relation to other assertions or texts. And it’s the same for Cohen: it’s not as though there are clear sentences out there, the clarity of which seeps into other sentences if we position the latter correctly. Clarity is a matter of bearing the right relation to other claims. So it’s a demonstration of profound unclarity if, in trying to show a sentence’s connection to others, you inevitably mangle the claim with which you began into “something that isn’t recognizable as a version of what was said.” This shows that there was no such connection to begin with.

  On Carnap’s account, then, our language holds, for us, its users, a danger. For in allowing for the formulation of nonsense words and meaningless expressions it allows us to lapse into bullshit. Carnap frequently mentions the possibility of being “misled,” or “seduced,” by our language, and he means misled or seduced into metaphysics. But that is not the only danger. Because our language allows for the formulation of pseudo-words and pseudosentences, it is a powerful and effective tool that can be exploited by those whose aims are served by misdirection or the obfuscation of truth short of lying, that is, by bullshitters in the Frankfurtian sense. By the very fact that they present meaningless statements as meaningful they express their disregard for the truth, and by the fact that they utter meaningless statements they can’t be lying; they are, after all, saying nothing.

  In this regard, consider these two more passages from Carnap’s essay, each of which emphasizes the intention of the metaphysician—the bullshitter, as I read it. The first invites us again to imagine a new term, ‘toovy’ this time, which, in contrast to ‘teavy’, is meaningful:

  Let the sentence “this thing is toovy” be true if and only if the thing is quadrangular.... Then we will say: the word “toovy” is synonymous with the word “quadrangular.” And we will not allow its users to tell us that nevertheless they “intended” something else by it than “quadrangular”; that though every quadrangular thing is also toovy and conversely, this is only because quadrangularity is the visible manifestation of toovyness, but that the latter itself is a hidden, not itself observable property. We would reply that after the criterion of application had been fixed, the synonymy of “toovy” and “quadrangular” is likewise fixed, and that we are no further at liberty to “intend” this or that by the word. (p. 64)

  For Carnap, the example is intended to show that the meaning of a term is exhausted by the deductive relationships the term’s elementary sentences bear to other sentences; anyone who claims for a term a meaning not captured by those deductive relationships cannot be offering us a meaning at all. But the example tells us as well about the intentions Carnap clearly thinks are tangled up with metaphysics. We too would dismiss anyone who continued to profess additional meaning for ‘toovy’ after its synonymy with ‘quadrangular’ had been laid bare. What’s her problem?!? Absent appeals to absurdity, comedy, or idiocy (three well-known bullshit-defeaters deserving of much more philosophical attention), such flagrant disregard for meaning can be explained only by concluding that it was never the toovy-talker’s intention to convey information to us in the first place, or even steer us away from some information (to, that is, lie). She must have wanted to accomplish some other end for which uttering such pseudostatements would be of use. ‘Toovy’ was a meaningful term all along, but in her disregard for the term’s meaning the toovy-talker was engaged in metaphysics . . . that is, bullshitting.112

  The second passage I have in mind, in which Carnap comments on the intentions behind metaphysics, comes, interestingly enough, in the context of Carnap’s answer to the question of why there is so much metaphysics, and why we seem to put up with it—confirmation, incidentally, of my view that Carnap and Frankfurt are talking about the same thing. “How could it be,” Carnap asks, “that so many men in all ages and nations, among them eminent minds, spent so much energy, nay veritable fervor, on metaphysics if the latter consisted of nothing but mere words, nonsensically juxtaposed?” (p. 78). How, indeed? What’s with all this metaphysics?

  Carnap’s answer is that metaphysics is a consequence of a desire to express some “general attitude towards life” (Lebenseinstellung) combined with a mistaken impression that an attitude (towards life or anything else) is a state of affairs, that is, the kind of thing that can be expressed by a declarative sentence. An attitude towards life can be expressed, but only in art, poetry, or music; to attempt its expression in assertions, as though the attitude were not an attitude but a state of affairs, is futile.113 “Thus in the case of metaphysics,” Carnap writes, “we find this situation:”

  Through the form of its works it pretends to be something that it is not. The form in question is that of a system of statements which are apparently related as premises and conclusions, that is, the form of a theory. In this way the fiction of theoretical content is generated, whereas, as we have seen, there is no such content. It is not only the reader, but the metaphysician himself who suffers from the illusion that the metaphysical statements say something, describe states of affairs. The metaphysician believes that he travels in territory in which truth and falsehood are at stake. In reality, however, he has not asserted anything, but only expressed something, like an artist. (p. 79)

  On its face, this diagnosis renders metaphysics rather benign. That is a strength, of course, if the question is why we tolerate it. And as far as the parallel with bullshit goes, it gives us another answer to the question of why bullshit is both ubiquitous and tolerated. To wit: b
ullshit arises when people have something they want to get across and are confused, perhaps but not always culpably so, about what tools are appropriate to that task.

  But alongside these somewhat contented observations about metaphysics, and bullshit, in our life, there is of course a critical current in Carnap, and Frankfurt, and we can’t afford to miss it. Carnap describes the case in which the metaphysician as well as his audience is under the illusion that his utterances make sense, but there are, as Carnap was more than aware, cases in which the metaphysician, but not the audience, is under no such illusion. After all, metaphysics can only “pretend to be something that it is not” if behind the metaphysical utterance is a metaphysician pretending to say something, knowing at the same time that he is not. This is bullshit, Frankfurt-style, pure and simple. It’s more egregious, of course, to the extent that the metaphysician-bullshitter propagates the illusion in his followers even after we’ve called him on his insolence regarding the meaninglessness of his utterances or, in Frankfurt’s phrase, regarding the truth-value of his claims. Heidegger was a metaphysician before Carnap penned “Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” but his metaphysical bullshit was more offensive after Carnap called him on it. Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for modern-day Frankfurt bullshitters. On Bullshit’s placement on the New York Times bestseller list not only sold a pile of books; it raised the moral stakes on people who don’t care about the truth of what they say.