Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

In our discussion of semantic negligence we suggested that different degrees of negligence are possible, depending on the risk of deception occurring and how much at fault the speaker is in not foreseeing that deception would result. Aphoristic definitions, such as “By ‘work’ I mean action done for the divine”122 and perhaps Huxley’s “Conservatism is true socialism,” are usually so surprising or paradoxical that they are unlikely to be truly deceptive. Many other definitions are inseparable from the theories which produce them: as Stevenson observes, “To chose a definition is to plead a cause” (p. 210). There’s no reason to accept such definitions unless one is convinced by the arguments with which the theory is defended. This situation is common in scientific contexts, where it is typically unproblematic: good practice requires the definer to make the theoretical indebtedness of his definitions explicit. Definers in natural language are likely to be less scrupulous, hence their interlocutors may be misled into endorsing the conclusions of arguments they would not judge sound, were they to be given a fair opportunity to appraise them. The resulting deception may be deliberate, but is just as likely to be inadvertent: it is easy to confuse oneself as well as others with this sort of definition. Such behaviour is less culpable than outright deceit, just as bullshit is less blameworthy than lying, but as with bullshit, it is also peculiarly pernicious since it degrades the standards of discourse.

  Broadening the Analysis

  In the previous section I introduced and clarified the definition of PD and suggested how it may be related to bullshit. I shall develop this account further below, but first I will explore the relationship between PD and a variety of allied phenomena, all of which may be included within the same analysis, thereby broadening our understanding of semantic negligence.

  Low and High Redefinition

  As commonly used, these terms describe the redefinition of an expression so as to include extra cases (low redefinition) or exclude existing cases (high redefinition). Hence they are defined solely in terms of what would happen to the reference of the expression if the redefinition were successful. However, the change in reference will typically be effected by a change of sense, since that is the principal means of redefining a term. Moves of this kind partially coincide with PD, although the two should not be confused: PD can occur without a change of reference, as we shall see, and not every change of reference is PD. Strictly speaking, only one of low and high redefinition need be addressed, as each can be defined in terms of the other. A low redefinition of a term is a high redefinition of the complement of that term, and vice versa. (The complement of a term is the term under which everything not falling under that term falls.) For example, consider the motorist who, upon conviction for drunk driving, argues that he is not a real drunk driver, but had just been caught out after a miscalculated drink. (One too many double whiskies, perhaps.) His argument could be understood as a high redefinition of ‘drunk driver,’ or a low redefinition of ‘non drunk driver,’ so as to include the driver in question. This example could also be understood as PD, since the motorist wishes to avoid the stigma, that is the pejorative tone, of ‘drunk driver,’ which he hopes will remain fixed as he effects his self-serving redefinition. The motorist may have convinced himself that his redefinition is just, but only by a wilfull blindness to its departure from conventional usage.

  The No-True-Scotsman Move

  Suppose that some traditionally minded Scot averred that ‘No Scotsman takes sugar with his porridge’. When confronted with incontrovertible evidence that one Hamish MacTavish of Inverness does exactly that, he may retreat to the qualified statement ‘No true Scotsman takes sugar with his porridge’. A shift of this sort, christened the No-True-Scotsman Move by the British philosopher Antony Flew, is a special case of low or high redefinition. 123 What makes it special is that, since the reference of ‘Scotsman’ has been redefined specifically to exclude Scotsmen who take sugar with their porridge, the new statement is not only true, it is true of necessity. Whereas the original claim said something bold and potentially false about the world, the new claim is equivalent to ‘No Scotsman who does not take sugar with his porridge takes sugar with his porridge’, which must be true, but says nothing at all. Since the speaker’s motivation is presumably to preserve the positive tone he associates with ‘Scotsman’, his move may be seen as PD. However, the real danger is that the two statements look and sound much alike, and may be confused, giving the impression that the original contentious statement is true, even though it has been clearly falsified. This is as likely to result from carelessness as from outright deceit, making this another instance of semantic negligence, here with respect to either the reference of ‘Scotsman’ or the truth value of the original statement. Thus, if the speaker continues to behave as though his original statement were true, he is exhibiting classic Frankfurt bullshit.

  Monster Barring

  The Hungarian philosopher of mathematics Imre Lakatos distinguished several colorfully labeled possible responses that may be made to a counterexample which seems to refute a cherished conjecture. One of the least helpful of these, ‘monster barring’, consists in the “sometimes deft but always ad hoc redefinition” of crucial terms, by which means any counterexample can be eliminated.124 We can see that this technique, gerrymandering a term to protect a claim from any possible refutation, is comparable to Flew’s No-True-Scotsman Move. However, Lakatos’s account situates monster barring within a family of related techniques, some of which are more productive. For example, ‘exception barring’ addresses counterexamples by restricting the scope of the conjecture so that it is no longer falsified. Explicit restatement of this kind, as in ‘No Lowland Scotsman takes sugar with his porridge’ perhaps avoids the pitfalls of the No-True-Scotsman Move by making explicit the theoretical commitments of the speaker.

  Dissociation

  This is a very wide-ranging category under which much of the above may be subsumed. It may be defined as the splitting of a concept into two, thereby replacing the term with two qualified terms which divide the reference of the original term between them (New Rhetoric, p. 411). Many different pairs of qualifiers can arise, although the most influential is that of ‘real’ versus ‘apparent’. In the ‘Scotsman’ example the use of ‘true Scotsman’ may be understood in this way, as may Huxley’s explicit dissociation of ‘ordinary’ from ‘true’ temperance. Indeed, the Belgian rhetoricians Chaim Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca, in whose work dissociation originates, observe that PD is characteristically a special case of the dissociation of reality from appearance (New Rhetoric, p. 447). Dissociation can be explicit and well-motivated, in which case it is not only legitimate but indispensable to complex thought. However, it can also be deployed in pursuit of an unearned advantage in argument. In such cases the dissociating arguer talks as though the tone must remain attached to the part of the concept he has designated as real, but he has no way of ensuring this, making his behaviour semantically negligent.

  Courtesy Meaning

  This phrase was coined by the classicist and philosopher R.G. Collingwood to describe the use of an expression chosen for its “emotional colouring” rather than its “descriptive function.”125 Collingwood’s specific concern was the use of ‘art’ to describe what might better be called ‘entertainment’. He sees this usage as motivated principally by the positive associations, or tone, the word possesses. This may be understood as a special case of PD, since the reference of the term is adjusted while the tone remains fixed, although the usage which Collingwood describes is unlikely to be expressed as a definition. The choice of terms for their courtesy meaning is clearly semantically negligent, since the chooser gives no thought to the sense of the term.

  Euphemism

  Replacing a word which is perceived as malign in tone with a new expression intended to preserve the sense and reference while resetting the tone to neutral or benign associations is a tactic of some antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it politic to refer to the Furies as the ‘Eumenides’
or ‘Kindly Ones’, lest the notoriously short tempers of these vengeance demons be provoked. Of course, ‘bullshit’ itself has had many euphemisms, including ‘humbug’, ‘balderdash’, ‘poppycock’, or ‘bunk’ (On Bullshit, p. 5). In modern times, euphemism is familiar from politically correct usage, such as ‘sex workers’ or indeed ‘persons presenting themselves as commodity allotments within a business doctrine’ for ‘prostitutes’, as well as government or military language, such as ‘superprompt critical power excursion’ for ‘nuclear meltdown’.126 The proliferation of both these categories of euphemism has been a source of much concern.127 However, as the feminist critic Germaine Greer observes, “It is the fate of euphemisms to lose their function rapidly by association with the actuality of what they designate, so that they must be regularly replaced with euphemisms for themselves.”128 This phenomenon, which has been termed the “euphemism treadmill” 129 is a common one—consider the sequence of terms which have been used to refer to minorities of race or sexual orientation. The process can only be arrested when underlying attitudes towards the individuals under discussion improve: the comparative stability of ‘gay’ and ‘black’ suggest some recent progress. In most PC and nukespeak usage, however, the underlying attitudes are unchanged, and the euphemism tends to backfire just as Greer describes.

  Backfire

  To see how a definition can backfire, we must first distinguish the various ways in which it may be attempted. We can see from Table 1 that each of PD and PQD now corresponds to three distinct options, and that there are several other possibilities. We shall discuss each of them in turn.

  The null case a, in which nothing changes, represents the ideal of pure description which dictionary definitions purport to offer. PD corresponds to the cases b, c and d. In most of the examples of PD discussed above a change of sense is used to bring about a change of reference, making such cases instances of d. However, in b only the reference changes. It might be argued that this cannot happen. When we (re)define a term the aspect of its meaning which we can most easily affect is its sense, so the simplest way of changing the reference of a term is to change its sense. If this were the only way of changing the reference, then b, as well as f, j and n, would never occur. However, as we saw in the drunk driver example, arguers can attempt to exclude an individual from the scope of the reference of a term while ostensibly preserving the sense. Such attempts may fail, and certainly exhibit semantic negligence, but the intent is to change the reference alone.

  Conversely, in c only the sense is changed. This may be less typical than d, but real world cases exist. One such is the so-called Model Law definition of ‘pornography’, stated by the radical feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as “the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in words.”130 The aim of the proposed law was to criminalize existing pornography. So, although the definition changes the conventional sense of ‘pornography’, it was not intended to alter the reference. Presumably the tone was also intended to remain the same, or perhaps to become even more condemnatory. This definition also provides an insight into the propensity of PD to backfire. Sceptics of MacKinnon and Dworkin’s theory of pornography may wonder whether women are ever ‘subordinated’ by pictures or words, or more generally whether all the material conventionally identified as pornography has this effect. The concern is that MacKinnon and Dworkin were negligent in not sufficiently securing the reference of the term they sought to redefine: their definition relies on an argument about the effect of pornography which not everyone finds convincing. This is borne out by the subsequent fortunes of the Model Law. Although ruled unconstitutional in the United States, a similar definition has entered Canadian law, where it has led to raids on gay bookshops but has had limited effect on mainstream pornography.131 Hence the effect of the new definition, although intended as c, ended up as d: the reference drifted to include materials to which it was not intended to apply, while excluding much of what it was supposed to cover.

  Persuasive quasi-definition (PQD) is dual to PD: as we have defined it, it occurs when the tone changes but either the sense or reference remains the same, that is cases e, f and g. As observed above, the easiest aspect of meaning to change directly is the sense. Changing the tone is more difficult. It may be attempted without changing the other components of meaning: an instance of e, as in the rehabilitation of abusive terms such as ‘queer’. Note that redefinitions of this kind must proceed indirectly, by using the term in contexts liable to encourage an association with the desired tone, or “by gestures, tones of voice, or rhetorical devices such as similes and metaphors” (Stevenson, p. 278), since the tone of a term cannot just be stipulated. It is also possible, as in cases f and g, to bring about a change in tone through a change in sense or reference. This may be deliberate, but can also happen inadvertently when a would-be persuasive definer loses control of the tone he is hoping to keep fixed. This sort of backfire can also result in case h, which we may call ‘degenerate definition’, since it does not preserve any aspect of the term’s meaning.

  Even degenerate definition can be deliberately pursued. For example, consider the technical meanings attributed by economists and sociologists to expressions such as ‘unproductive labour’ or ‘conspicuous waste’.132 In each case the definer not only departs from the standard sense and reference, he also professes to use the terms without their conventional pejorative tone. In practice, that tone swiftly creeps back, even in the works of the definers, making this usage PD, a backfire from h to d.

  An example which shows both how PD can be used legitimately and successfully, and how it can backfire into PQD, or degenerate definition, occurs with the definition of ‘rape’. The crime of rape has been recognized for many centuries. Over the course of this history both its sense and its reference have evolved substantially: a process which some modern commentators see as not yet satisfactorily concluded. We cannot hope to recount this narrative in full detail, and will concentrate on three major theories of rape, each of which produces a distinct definition. On the traditional theory, rape is a property crime. In societies where women were seen as belonging to men, rape was understood as an injury one man does to another by interfering with the reproductive activity of his women.133 On the liberal theory, rape is sex without consent. This is the definition which is most familiar in the modern world. However the traditional theory cast a long shadow: it lies behind the marital rape exemption clause which was to be found in the rape laws of the United Kingdom and most U.S. states as recently as the 1980s (Defining Reality, p. 53). On the radical theory, rape is a “terrorist institution” by which the male sex subordinates the female (“Rape and Persuasive Definition,” p. 449). The radical feminists who defend this theory seek to “redraw the line between so-called normal (heterosexual) intercourse and rape” by replacing or substantially redefining the criterion of consent (p. 450).

  There are two changes of definition here: one historical, from the traditional to the liberal definition, and one hypothetical, from the liberal to the radical. The tone has remained largely intact throughout: always negative, although perhaps increasingly so, as societal attitudes change. The adoption of the liberal definition seems to have begun as case c: a change of sense which preserved the traditional reference—at some theoretical cost, since the required marital exemption clause is unjustifiable on the liberal theory. Over time this theoretical tension was resolved with the abolition of that clause, thereby changing the reference of ‘rape,’ and making the cumulative change an instance of d. Each step was stable, and did not backfire, because not only was the new definition backed by a coherent theory, but that theory was argued for successfully by the proponents of the definition.

  The proponents of the radical definition are also aiming for d, albeit in one step, as they propose not only a new sense, but also a much wider reference. They hope that this can be accomplished without any reduction in the negative force of the tone. However, one recur
ring criticism of their move is that such reduction is inevitable, and thereby “trivialize[s] legitimate rape, and mocks those women who have been truly brutalized” (“Rape and Persuasive Definition,” p. 438). The sometime radical feminist Keith Burgess-Jackson dismisses this concern as question-begging, since it presumes that the new cases falling under the redefined reference of ‘rape’ are not as bad as the original cases, which he says the radical theory denies. However, this response is itself question-begging: it assumes that the whole theory will be adopted, not just the definition of one word: ‘rape’. But, as the rhetorician Edward Schiappa reminds us, “Putting new laws on the books does not ensure that all individuals responsible for enforcing those laws will immediately assimilate the new definitions and categories” (Defining Reality, p. 60). The effect on society as a whole is likely to be even more diffuse, especially for a theory as sharply at odds with conventional wisdom as the radical feminists’. Thus it is predictable that, even if a radical feminist definition of ‘rape’ was enacted into law, the conventional moral weighting of the new cases would persist, thereby diluting the tone. Thus the definition would backfire from d to h.

  The remaining lines in Table 1 correspond to cases where the term itself has changed. There are several ways of bringing this about. Euphemism, if successful, exemplifies case m: the new term has a new tone, but preserves sense and reference. The sort of backfire characteristic of the ‘euphemism treadmill’ is a shift to case i: the tone reverts to that of the old term. Euphemism, as conventionally understood, involves a very specific change in tone, from pejorative to neutral or laudatory. However, case m covers all shifts of tone, including those that go in the opposite direction (‘dysphemisms’) and those which are oriented on an entirely different basis. Euphemism (and dysphemism, and other such changes) can be accompanied by other shifts in meaning. For example, ‘visually impaired,’ although used as a euphemism for ‘blind’ has a somewhat different sense and reference, taking it in the direction of case p.