Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  First, pretence is not an essential ingredient of bullshit. Fania Pascal’s utterance, for instance, qualifies as such, though there is no element of deceit or fakery involved. A mere indifference to the truth is apparently all that is needed.

  Of course, a speaker will often try to conceal his own indifference when he knows that his audience is very concerned about how things really are. A politician, for example, who is primarily interested in getting re-elected instead of getting things right, has to hide this fact. The bullshit he sells will usually be accompanied by pretence and deceit. However, this combination is not inevitable. Just imagine a politician who is fed up with all the fakery and phoniness and starts talking bullshit openly, without hiding his complete indifference to the truth. The audience will probably feel shocked and the outcry, “Bullshit!” will be heard everywhere. Yet, in contrast with the Fourth of July orator mentioned by Frankfurt, this speaker is not hiding what he is up to. Thus, in Frankfurt’s view, his speech cannot count as bullshit. This is a very counterintuitive conclusion.

  Frankfurt’s distinction between bullshit and bull sessions is just as counterintuitive. For suppose one would ask the participants in a playful bull session what they were doing. A natural response would be: “We are just talking bullshit.” Likewise, people witnessing a bull session will readily acknowledge that bull sessions consist mainly of bullshit. Frankfurt ignores this and claims there is a fundamental difference between bullshit and bull sessions. This distinction, centered around the presence or absence of pretence, is inevitably artificial. After all, as Frankfurt observes, the term ‘bull session’ is most likely an abbreviation or sanitized version of ‘bullshit session’ (p. 38).

  Second, bullshit is not always a bad thing. Although the term is typically used to express indignation, irritation or disapproval, bullshit is not always offensive. Frankfurt finds this particularly hard to understand. He is genuinely puzzled by the fact that “our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying” and leaves it “as an exercise for the reader” to find out why this is so (p. 50). Perhaps the answer is not so difficult. Why is our attitude towards bullshit, resulting from a manifest indifference to the truth, so benign in many circumstances? Because in many circumstances the concern for truth and accuracy is not—and should not be—our primary concern. For instance, it is not our main concern, and rightly so, when someone is in terrible pain and in need of a comforting conversation. Wittgenstein’s failure to appreciate this makes him, in Frankfurt’s own words, “absurdly intolerant.”

  A bit of bullshit from time to time might even be a good thing. That is what the old butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes to realize when he is reflecting on the practice of “bantering,” or as contemporary Americans would call it, “bullshitting”:

  There is a group of six or seven people gathered just a little way behind me who have aroused my curiosity a little. I naturally assumed at first that they were a group of friends out together for the evening. But as I listened to their exchanges, it became apparent they were strangers who had just happened upon one another here on this spot behind me. . . . It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves so swiftly.... I rather fancy it has [something] to do with this skill of bantering. Listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I would suppose, the way many people like to proceed. In fact, it is possible my bench companion expected me to banter with him—in which case, I suppose I was something of a sorry disappointment. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in—particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.138

  Indeed, we should perhaps look at the whole matter of bullshitting more enthusiastically than Frankfurt does. As a means to lay contact with others or keep the conversation going, it can be a source of human warmth and a blessing rather than a curse. Hence, we are not so sure that the world would be a better place without it. Just imagine that every conversation were to be informed by a strong concern for the truth. Conversations would be terribly fatiguing. For as Oscar Wilde once said: “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.” This is probably one of the reasons why Wilde himself was not too concerned about truth and accuracy in conversation. And we may be thankful for that. The world would certainly be a duller place without Wilde’s splendid witticisms and epigrams, nearly all of which are brilliant examples of bullshit.139

  In “Concealment and Exposure,” Thomas Nagel discusses another case of “benign bullshit”: “If I say, ‘How nice to see you’, you know perfectly well that this is not meant as a report of my true feelings: Even if it happens to be true, I might very well say it even if you were the last person I wanted to see at just that moment.”140 Despite an obvious lack of concern for the truth, Nagel makes the case for polite formulae like this. “The first and most obvious thing to note . . . is that they are not dishonest, because the conventions that govern them are generally known. If I don’t tell you everything I think and feel about you, that is not a case of deception, since you don’t expect me to do so” (p. 6). Furthermore, polite formulas are a sine qua non of a stable society as they leave a great range of potentially disruptive material unacknowledged and therefore out of play. Nagel certainly seems to have a point. Polite bullshit is often to be preferred to truthful expressions of hostility, contempt, derision, sexual desire or aversion.

  What about Frankfurt’s most central claim, however, that the essence of bullshit is an indifference towards truth?

  A Different Kind of Bullshit

  According to Frankfurt, the most distinctive feature of bullshit is one situated in the speaker’s state of mind. The bullshitter is indifferent and hides this indifference. However, it would appear that an utterance often qualifies as bullshit purely as a result of certain of its objective features independent of the speaker’s stance. This suggests that there is another kind of bullshit that should be explained not by reference to the state of mind of the producer but rather by pointing to certain salient features of the “product” itself.

  This is the basic idea of G.A. Cohen’s response to Frankfurt. In “Deeper into Bullshit,” Cohen notes that Frankfurt’s definition of the “essence” of bullshit does not sit well with the kind of bullshit that concerns him the most, namely the bullshit abundant in certain academic circles and best exemplified by the French continental tradition. This sort of bullshit cannot be explained by reference to the indifference or insincerity of the producer. After all, some of the most hideous examples appear to be the result of honest academic efforts. What is missing in these cases is an appropriate connection to the truth, not as far as the state of mind of the producer is concerned but with respect to features of the texts themselves. More specifically, it is the “unclarifiable unclarity” of those philosophical or sociological texts, says Cohen, that constitutes their high bullshit content.

  An unclarifiable text is not only obscure but is incapable of being rendered unobscure, at least in a text that could be recognized as a version of what was originally said. A helpful trick is this: add or subtract a negation sign from a text and see whether that makes any difference to its plausibility. If not, Cohen says, one may be sure that one is dealing with bullshit (p. 132). Unsurprisingly, he concludes his analysis in the same way as Frankfurt, with a call to oppose and expose bullshit whenever possible. Academic discourse should always aim for the truth, and texts that are so obscure that the question of truth becomes irrelevant are a threat to any serious academic enterprise.

  Now that we have a basic distinction between two kinds of bullshit, Frankfurt-bullshit and Cohen-bullshit, we can ask the question: does this distinction enable us to classify all the “flowers in the lush garden of bullshit”? In other words, is every instance of bullshit necessarily an instance of Frankfurt-bullshit or Cohen-bullshit? To ans
wer this question, let us return to books like Chakra Balancing Kit or The Hidden Messages in Water Crystals or Numerology Helps You to Master Your Relationship and to Find the Right Career or Astrology: A Cosmic Science. Do we have a convincing account now of the specific kind of bullshit to be found in these pseudoscientific works? It does not appear so.

  The plethora of pseudoscientific nonsense, though widely recognized as a paradigm of bullshit (if you Google ‘astrology and bullshit’, for instance, you get 290,000 hits), remains surprisingly unharmed by the attacks of Frankfurt and Cohen. Neither provides an appropriate explanation for this form of bullshit. Firstly, pseudoscientists typically have a firm and sincere belief in their practice and go to great lengths to prove the truth of the doctrines they endorse. They are not indifferent to the truth, quite the contrary. Thus, Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit does not seem to apply. But Cohen’s definition falls short as well, for the predictions and statements of pseudoscientists are often very specific and explicit as opposed to unclear or unclarifiable. Just think of astrologers predicting an earthquake or hurricane on a specific date or bogus healers providing a detailed diagnosis and assessment of a patient’s condition.

  Here’s a serious lacuna in the literature on bullshit. Not only is pseudoscientific bullshit very prominent and visible, there is also no doubt that the bullshit of pseudoscientists is at least as damaging and therefore as deserving of strict scrutiny as the bullshit produced by advertisers or academics. After all, how many people are really affected by the philosophical impotence targeted by Cohen? And how many people are nowadays really deceived by advertisers? (In fact, people often seem to expect “good bullshit” from these professionals rather than complete truthfulness . . .) Pseudoscience, though sometimes an innocent pastime, is known to have a large and damaging impact on the lives of many and to pose a threat to the credibility of science, medicine and even politics. These effects certainly warrant further investigation into the what, how, and why of this third kind of bullshit.

  But this is not the right place to carry out that kind of investigation. For one thing, it would necessitate a detailed account of the nature of pseudoscience which would go beyond the scope of this chapter. However, we do want to draw attention to a short, pertinent remark made by Cohen. After discussing unclarifiability as the key component of bullshit, he briefly identifies “arguments that are grossly deficient either in logic or in sensitivity to empirical evidence” as another possible source of bullshit (p. 131).

  These features, insensitivity to evidence and fallacious reasoning, must be central to any analysis of pseudoscientific bullshit. Admittedly, this characterization remains rather vague. But as a general rule, and in order to avoid bullshit, we believe it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

  III

  It’s All Around Us

  Bullshit in Politics, Science, Education, and the Law

  12

  The Republic of Bullshit: On the Dumbing-Up of Democracy

  MARK EVANS

  Harry Frankfurt claims that “bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (On Bullshit, p. 63). He then suggests that democracy may be especially prone to the production of bullshit because it fuels “the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”

  It is the most popularly received wisdom about politics that politicians and others close to the exercise of power—media commentators, lobbyists, and suchlike—are inordinately disposed to pollute the polity with bullshit. It is much more unusual and arresting to contend that the ‘ordinary citizens’ are also somehow responsible for some of democratic political culture’s less edifying elements, particularly with respect to Frankfurt’s very specific conception of bullshit as discourse which is essentially indifferent to the truth: bullshitters, for him, don’t really even care that they don’t know what they are talking about.141

  For many, to claim such a thing would be not only arrogantly and offensively patronising but also a fundamental assault on democracy itself. The ordinary citizens are democracy’s heroes: the people who are ultimately sovereign in the land, who graciously bestow the trust of office on those few of their number who have convinced them through the rigors of public debate of their fitness to rule, and who revoke that grant when they judge their representatives to have failed them. Their plain, good common sense is, at the heart of its self-image, democracy’s very lifeblood. It’s the basis on which citizens are to be honored, equally, as masters of their own political fates. Their elected politicians may be prone to bullshit and other misdemeanours, but democracy survives their failings—so the story runs—because of its genius in its ultimate empowerment of the ordinary citizens.

  So to say, with Frankfurt, that democracy itself actually encourages citizens to bullshit looks like a critical blow to one of its justificatory props. If such bullshitting isn’t already bad enough in itself, the propensity to bullshit would also indicate a crucial degradation, if not total lack, of the critical acumen required to guard against other, perhaps more devastating forms of deformity in political life which thrive on untruth. And yet . . . there is something very reminiscent of the Emperor’s new clothes here. Hasn’t Frankfurt simply dared to utter something which is, when we pluck up the courage to query the treasured commonplaces of democratic life, really rather obvious? Hasn’t it actually been said from democracy’s very inception onwards, by those who share Plato’s insight that political understanding is an expertise that we cannot possibly all share?

  I shall call this claim “the Frankfurt thesis,” and I argue that it should be taken very seriously. But, even setting aside democracy’s own rosily optimistic mythology, some might immediately object to the thesis. Suspecting that it is paradoxically manifesting an indifference to the truth all of its own, they might claim that, in contemporary democracy, the fact of the matter is not that citizens don’t care about the truth. The real crisis democracy faces is that, nowadays, citizens just don’t care about politics. And many who make this observation central to their understanding of democracy would reject the idea that it connotes political incompetence on the citizenry’s part. Rather, they would say that apathy or indifference is generally rooted in a well-founded cynicism about a system that so consistently fails to provide good government: why should citizens care much about, and engage with, a process that apparently cannot deliver what they would wish of it?

  This alternative view can be called “the cynicism thesis” and I think that, actually, both are partly right. Adopting them thus does not turn one into an anti-democrat; the theses are arguments about, not against, democracy, and the point of elaborating them is to analyse how we might tackle the problems they identify. In fact, many supporters of the cynicism thesis have urged that what we need is more meaningful opportunities for citizens’ participation (what political theorists today often refer to as ‘deliberative democracy.’) And they would highlight modern information and communications technology as the means by which greater and more informed participation can be realised.

  The Frankfurt thesis shows—if it is valid—that matters cannot be as simple as that—and this is good reason for throwing such an uncomfortable argument into the debate about the health of democracy.

  Bullshitting and Lying in Politics

  The full elaboration of the Frankfurt thesis will require other conceptions of ‘bullshit’ to supplement Frankfurt’s own, but we can begin with his ‘indifference-to-truth’ definition to see how we might use ‘bullshit’ both polemically and conceptually in political analysis. It’s probably fair to say that when people condemn their politicians as bullshitters, they generally haven’t made Frankfurt’s distinction between bullshitting and lying.142 For him, in contrast to bullshitting, the act of lying is premised upon knowledge of, and concern for, the truth: the liar knows
what is true and is concerned to conceal it (On Bullshit, p. 33).

  Most politicians probably do tell lies some of the time, and some perhaps do tell lies a lot of the time. And it is belief in the truth of this claim that often gives rise to support for the cynicism thesis, basing its rejection of political engagement on the assumption that ‘all politicians are liars and hypocrites, only in politics for their own selfish ends no matter what lofty goals and concerns they pretend to have’. Less subtle articulations of this view treat politicians almost as if they are a sub-species of humanity (or a species of sub-humanity) defined by its congenital disposition to lying and incompetence. But it’s surely implausible to think that the modus operandi of politicians is to apprehend the truth and then systematically attempt to conceal it, all the time, as ‘Frankfurt-lying’ would have it.

  Many different kinds of people go into politics, and for many different kinds of reason, at least some of which are sincerely based on principled commitment; and it is anyway incredible to believe that everyone in the political process can consistently muster the peculiar psychological energies necessary literally to live by lying in the way many seem to assume politicians must.143

  This isn’t to deny, however, that political behavior and discourse is beset with evasion, prevarication, dissembling and other forms of disconnection to the truth: what Frankfurt has given us, with his conception of bullshit, is a way of characterising this without misleadingly sweeping it into the overly narrow category of ‘lying’. To appreciate its utility in this regard, let us also equip ourselves with G.A. Cohen’s distinction between “aim-bullshitters”—those whose consciously entertained goal it is to produce bullshit—and “disposition-bullshitters,” who are unintentionally prone, for whatever reason, to produce bullshit. On Frankfurt’s definition, liars are always ‘aim-liars’, so to speak, but not all bullshitters aim to bullshit (see Chapter 8 in this volume).