Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  The Unity of Bullshit

  Recall that Cohen employed a rather useful metaphor to distinguish his view from Frankfurt’s: Frankfurt’s account of bullshit focuses upon the bull, and his, Cohen’s, starts from the bullshit. In light of our discussion of Carnap’s anti-metaphysical program and my promise to unify Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s account, it will pay to return to the metaphor.

  There is a certainly a distinction to be drawn between a bull and bullshit, and between bullshit and the bullshitter. But, my local veterinarians assure me, a bull that doesn’t shit is no bull, at least not for long. And it takes, as David Hume might put it, no nice metaphysical head to realize that we get bullshit from a bull, not necessarily of course, but in fact, in this world and all the close possible ones. Cohen’s metaphor not only serves his purpose, but it ought to remind us that the two sides of bullshit, Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s, are two sides of one thing. There are in this world those whose have ends that are served by a misuse of language, and whose desires trump or even eradicate any concern they might have had for the meaning or the truth of what they say. These are Frankfurtian bullshitters, and so be it. But we also have a tool, a language, that is amenable, perhaps even suited for, just the sort of misdeeds bullshitters have in mind. All of us have, or can, fashion Cohen-style bullshit on demand, and so be that. Combine the two and you have fodder for books like this one and Laura Penny’s, and for that matter for the many, many, conversations held today that included the phrase “This is such bullshit.” Carnap, of course, didn’t know from Frankfurt and Cohen in 1932, but he knew bullshit. His approach to it gave us the intellectual goods on offer today from Frankfurt and Cohen, and then some.

  Ah, but what to do? Is it any solace to have one account of bullshit over two, if our aim at the start was, implicitly at least, to get rid of the bullshit? The question of how to respond to bullshit is more pressing, and depressing, when we realize not just that the bullshit tide is rising, with no recess in sight, but that all those enthusiastic bullshit-eradication programs of yore, logical positivism included, have that rather embarrassing odor of ambition-cum-failure. In this context, the very end of Laura Penny’s book might look at a first glance like the quintessential twenty-first century post-whatever reply to bullshit: a none-too-hearty “Oh, well.”

  But that’s just a first glance. Here’s a suggestion that may sound less antique and more plausible the more our intolerance for bullshit and its perpetrators grows. Our analysis of bullshit as one part tool (a language amenable to misuse) and one part intention (to put something over by means of that tool) invites a strategy oddly familiar to advocates of gun control: control the gun. In this case, of course, it’s control the language, the tool that bullshitter’s employ. No one, not Frankfurt, Carnap, Cohen, or Penny, suggests that we will eradicate from our midst those with intent to bullshit; indeed, sometimes that very enemy is us. Bullshitters are inevitable. But we can take in hand the tool the Frankfurtian bullshitter turns to, and needs: our language. This taking in hand need not be the fashioning of the ideal language that Carnap and many (though, notably, not all) of the Vienna Circle imagined, or even the conceptual clean up Cohen calls for.

  Again, I’m moved by the last line of Penny’s book, and I don’t mean the choice verb. The language we use, English or whatever, is ours, together, and each of us bears responsibility for its misuse and abuse in our presence. When one of us misuses it, placing it in the employ of bullshit, it is no prissy matter of grammar or style that is at stake but a common temple being defaced. Your task, gentle reader, is to stand at the door of the temple. This can mean writing a book, or an essay, or a letter, or a blog, but it will also and more often mean holding a sign, raising a hand, casting a vote, or interrupting a conversation.

  It’s a daily, mundane, thankless, and unending task, but it will be the way out when the alternative becomes too much bullshit to bear. Take some heart that you will be joined, in spirit if not in corpus, with Carnap’s robust colleague, Otto Neurath, who impressed upon his wide audience that the shape of the world around is the result not of reasons beyond our control—pseudorationalism, Neurath called this idea—but of our own choices.114 It really is up to us.

  10

  Raising the Tone: Definition, Bullshit, and the Definition of Bullshit

  ANDREW ABERDEIN

  I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn’t the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It’s the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he’ll tell you that it’s true socialism. And the brewers’ trade papers: they’re full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner.115

  Bullshit is not the only sort of deceptive talk. Spurious definitions, such as those quoted above, are another important variety of bad reasoning. This paper will describe some of these problematic tactics, and show how Harry Frankfurt’s treatment of bullshit may be extended to analyze their underlying causes. Finally, I will deploy this new account of definition to assess whether Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit is itself legitimate.

  Semantic Negligence

  Frankfurt’s principal contribution to the study of bullshit is the distinction he draws between the bullshitter and the liar. Whereas the liar represents as true something he believes to be false, the bullshitter represents something as true when he neither knows nor cares whether it is true or false (On Bullshit, p. 55). As Frankfurt amply demonstrates, this indifference is much of what we find most objectionable about bullshit. The liar has a vested interest in the institution of truth-telling, albeit a parasitical one: he hopes that his falsehoods will be accepted as true. The bullshitter may also hope to be believed, but he himself is not much bothered whether what he says is true, hence his disregard for the truth is of a deeper and potentially more pernicious character.

  Our outrage is conditioned on our being the objects of a deception. When we know what the bullshitter is up to we can be much more indulgent. As the comic novelist Terry Pratchett observes of two of his characters, “they believed in bullshit and were the type to admire it when it was delivered with panache. There’s a kind of big, outdoor sort of man who’s got no patience at all with prevaricators and fibbers, but will applaud any man who can tell an outrageous whopper with a gleam in his eye.”116 The gleam in the eye is essential here: it is this complicity between bullshitter and audience which constitutes the “bull session” (On Bullshit, p. 34). Only when it escapes from the bull session and masquerades as regular assertion is bullshit deceptive; however, the insidious nature of this deception degrades the commitment to truth upon which public discourse depends.

  One way of characterizing Frankfurt’s innovation is as the introduction of a new category of linguistic misbehaviour, which we might call ‘semantic negligence’. It is this concept which enables him to distinguish the bullshitter from the liar. In British and American common law, a civil claim for negligence arises when the defendant has a duty of care to the plaintiff which he neglects to exercise, thereby harming the plaintiff. Here the deceptive bullshitter has a duty to tell the truth; neglecting this duty harms his audience if they come to believe his false statements. His indifference as to the truth value of his statements, that is whether they are true or false, a meaning-related or semantic property, may thus be termed semantic negligence. Lying involves a higher degree of culpability, since the liar convinces his audience of falsehoods intentionally, not just foresee-ably. Frankfurt’s insight is that conventional accounts of deception provide no middle ground between this higher level of culpability and complete innocence, and therefore no room for many familiar forms of deceit, such as bullshit. My contention is that semantic negligence may arise with respect to features of meaning other than truth value, and as such may be used to disentangle a wide variety of deceptive dialectical p
ractices. Furthermore, semantic negligence is itself a matter of degree. The legal understanding of negligence acknowledges that the associated culpability can range from inadvertence to willful blindness. We may generalize Frankfurt’s position further by recognizing that some instances of semantic negligence are worse than others. In assessing the gravity of semantic negligence we should ask questions such as ‘How foreseeable was it that deception would arise?’ and ‘How much at fault is the speaker in not foreseeing this?’.

  A Caricature History of Semantics

  My argument will draw on themes from the philosophy of language, chiefly the pioneering German logician Gottlob Frege’s disambiguation of the naive understanding of ‘meaning’. In what may be considered the primal moment of analytic philosophy, Frege drew a threefold distinction between Sinn, Bedeutung, and Färbung, or sense, reference and tone. The sense of a term is what we understand if we understand what the word means. The reference, however, is the thing which the word picks out. Hence, as Frege explains, “a proper name (word, sign, combination of signs, expression) expresses its sense, [but] stands for or designates its reference. By employing a sign we express its sense and designate its reference.”117 For example, the sense of ‘the longest river in the world’ is just what we understand by the words in this phrase. Clearly, having that understanding does not depend on knowing what the reference is (the River Nile, all four thousand miles of it), let alone on having seen the river in question. The last of Frege’s three divisions, tone, is the least familiar: it may be defined as that aspect of the meaning of an expression that is irrelevant to the truth value of any sentence in which it may occur. In languages with large vocabularies, like English, it is often possible to restate a phrase using different words, but preserving both sense and reference. Continuing with the earlier example, consider ‘Earth’s lengthiest natural watercourse.’ The change here is one of tone.

  Frege’s distinction between sense and reference was not entirely original. Many earlier philosophers, perhaps as early as Aristotle, drew similar distinctions between these aspects of the meaning of a word or expression. In this context the terminology ‘intension’ and ‘extension’ is often used instead of sense and reference respectively. With proper nouns, and definite descriptions, like the example in the last paragraph, the terminology coincides exactly. With other sorts of noun, “concept nouns” as Frege calls them, sense and intension have the same meaning, but the reference is to the concept under which the members of the extension fall. The value of distinguishing between the reference and extension of a concept noun is most apparent when talking about short-lived or rapidly propagating things. Expressions such as ‘snowflake’, ‘mayfly’, or ‘web page’ have constantly changing extensions, but more or less fixed references. By concentrating on reference rather than extension, we can disregard superficial changes of this kind. Frege’s approach was innovative in several respects, most of which go beyond the scope of this article, and has had a profound influence on subsequent philosophy. A crucial insight of Frege’s is that sense cannot be reduced to reference: different terms can have the same reference, but different senses. In his well-known example, ‘the evening star’ and ‘the morning star’ both refer to the same object, the planet Venus, although the senses of these phrases are clearly distinct. Indeed, it was a genuine scientific discovery in the ancient world when it was realized that these two familiar sights were one and the same. Without the distinction between sense and reference we would be unable to describe this discovery.

  Frege’s formalizing project required the suppression of tone: “separating a thought from its trappings” as he puts it.118 Tone is the part of meaning from which we must abstract before logical analysis can begin. This abstraction is essential to the representation of inference in terms of logical form—that is, formal logic. For example, ‘and’ and ‘but’ are formalized in the same way, despite their difference in tone. (Consider ‘He is a patriot and supports the government’ versus ‘He is a patriot but supports the government’.) This is entirely appropriate for the logic of mathematics, which was Frege’s primary concern, since tone is seldom of significance in mathematical reasoning.

  What is nuanced in the master can become dogmatic in the pupils. Many of Frege’s successors sought to extend tone-free logical analysis to natural language. Amongst more popular writers this idealism could become extremism. Consider, for example, the psychologist Robert Thouless’s claim that “We must look forward to the day when the thinking about political and international affairs will be as unemotional and as scientific as that about the properties of numbers or the atomic weights of elements.” Whereas many logicians attempt to treat the terms of natural language as though they were tonally neutral, Thouless hopes to eliminate altogether “Such words as ‘progress’, ‘liberty’, ‘democratic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘reactionary’, ‘liberal’, ‘freedom’, . . . .”119 This Orwellian scenario exhibits the limitations of Frege’s program. Although enormously successful in the formalization of technical language, and an inescapable foundation for any study of natural usage, it has little to say about tonal properties which play a substantial part in ordinary discourse. Thouless’s procrustean fantasy of excising from our language what our logic cannot analyze is a desperate remedy diametrically opposed to the real solution: taking tone seriously. Further progress in the study of natural argumentation will require us to rehabilitate this repressed element. We shall see that this project is foreshadowed in the Yale ethicist Charles Stevenson’s account of what he called persuasive definition.

  Persuasive Definition

  As introduced by Stevenson, a persuasive definition (PD) of a term “purport[s] . . . to alter the descriptive meaning of the term . . . but . . . not make any substantial change in the term’s emotive meaning.” 120 Although he coined the terminology, Stevenson was not the first person to spot this phenomenon. Indeed he quotes the memorable attack on PD from Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza with which we began. Stevenson also introduced the converse stratagem, persuasive quasi-definition (PQD), in which the emotive meaning of a term is altered without changing the descriptive meaning. When PD is discussed in logic textbooks it is usually treated as though it were invariably fallacious.121 However, this betrays the hostility to tone we diagnosed in the last section. As Stevenson recognized, many cases of PD are much less objectionable: the difficulty is in drawing a principled distinction between harmless and malign instances of PD. Stevenson’s account of PD is couched in unfamiliar terms: ‘descriptive’ and ‘emotive’ meaning. These reflect his understanding of the meaning of an expression as a dispositional property of that expression, representing its potential to cause a psychological response in its hearer or utterer (p. 54). Descriptive and emotive meanings are then distinguished as provoking cognitive or emotive psychological responses respectively. Few if any modern philosophers would find this account even remotely congenial. Detailed criticism would be out of place here, although we can observe that the account is closely related to the emotivist theory of ethics, sometimes called the Boo-Hurrah Theory, on which ethical terms, such as ‘good’, are merely expressions of an emotional attitude. That Stevenson’s ethical and semantic theories have fallen out of fashion may explain the comparative neglect of PD. However, we shall see that this concept is independent of the theoretical context in which Stevenson articulated it.

  Specifically, Stevenson’s definition of PD may be restated in Fregean terms as changing the sense or reference of a term, while representing the tone as unchanged. Replacing the slippery distinction between emotive and descriptive meaning with that between sense, reference and tone has several advantages, besides the rescue of PD from its theoretically suspect origins. Firstly, tone is not just emotive. It can also, for example, be jargon-laden (with any number of different jargons), bureaucratic, politically correct, affectionate, poetic, boorish, metropolitan, circumspect, dated, or many other things. Secondly, a threefold distinction provides for a more fine-grained an
alysis of dubious definition-like activity than the simple binary of PD and PQD. Table 1 distinguishes the sixteen different possibilities that can arise from changing () or keeping fixed (—) the sense, reference and tone of a term, as well as the term itself.

  Table 1 Options for Change

  We can also begin to see how the concept of semantic negligence which we derived from Frankfurt’s discussion of bullshit may be used to distinguish good from bad PD. The persuasive definer represents the tone of his redefined term as unchanged: this may or may not be negligent of him. He might be justified in believing the tone will not change, making his usage unobjectionable. He might realize that the tone will be dramatically affected by the redefinition, in which case he is unlikely to expect his move to be accepted. Or he may be negligent as to whether the tone is faithfully preserved. This strategy is not overtly deceptive, since the tone could be unchanged. Rather, the speaker’s lack of control over the tone, and indifference as to its eventual disposition, makes his utterance semantically negligent. In this respect it is analogous to bullshit, not lying.