Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Part I of Bullshit and Philosophy, “To Shoot the Bull? Rethinking and Responding to Bullshit,” contains papers that say something about bullshit itself—its causes, say, or its effects, or the reactions we have to it. One natural reaction to most forms of bullshit, for example, accuses the bullshitmania of our time (and books like this) of over-reaction. What’s so bad about bullshit?, one might ask.

  Scott Kimbrough’s “On Letting It Slide” takes up this question, noting that in many situations we gladly sacrifice our usual regard for truth for the sake of (among other things) the feelings of others, keeping the peace, or simply entertaining ourselves. Kimbrough reminds us that we let much (though not all) bullshit slide, and perhaps we ought to.

  For Conseulo Preti, avoiding bullshit (a “menace,” she argues, for which audience as much as manufacturer is to blame) might be a matter of emulating a life notably bullshit-free; her “A Defense of Common Sense” offers the early twentieth-century analytic philosopher G.E. Moore as one such exemplary life.

  George Reisch’s “The Pragmatics of Bullshit, Intelligently Designed” looks at bullshit and pseudoscience to argue that bullshit is not an indifference to truth, or meaning, as Frankfurt and Cohen suggest, but rather an attempt by the bullshitter to run two conversations at once, one, as Reisch puts it, “concealed within or downplayed alongside the other.” Reisch’s approach, he claims, explains why we are often so tolerant of bullshit.

  But for Kenneth Taylor and Sara Bernal the interesting questions about bullshit pertain less to its definition or our reaction to it than to the reasons for its ubiquity. Taylor’s “Bullshit and the Foibles of the Human Mind,” for example, suggests that the institutional bullshit that surrounds us is abetted by mechanisms of reasoning deeply embedded in our shared cognitive architecture. Taylor’s chapter illustrates these well-established “foibles” of the human mind, but it also points the way to a culture less steeped in the bullshit these foibles enable. We must, Taylor implores, marshal education to guard ourselves and our children against our own cognitive foibles, and we must deliver “the very means of public representation and persuasion” to a far wider and more diverse array of people. Sara Bernal, in contrast, is struck by a parallel between bullshit and various pathologies of personality. In “Bullshit and Personality” she argues that the extraordinary bullshit of the disordered personality arises from an impaired social cognition and results, naturally, in hobbled social relations.

  In “Performing Bullshit and the Post-Sincere Condition,” Alan Richardson unveils a variety of bullshit yet unnoted in the chapters so far—“performative bullshit,” exemplified in Customer Service Pledges and Mission Statements. Responding to this bullshit, Richardson suggests, is a matter either of producing “self-evident bullshit that outperforms its covert competitors” (in the manner of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show) or of rethinking our inherited Enlightenment values.

  Cornelis de Waal, on the other hand, sees bullshit as a violation of a pragmatism-inspired “general epistemic imperative” to always “proceed upon the hope that there is a true answer to the questions we ask and act from a desire to find that answer.” De Waal’s “The Importance of Being Earnest: A Pragmatic Approach to Bullshitting,” thus argues that satisfying the imperative—avoiding bullshit—is largely a matter of sharing the burden of inquiry with our community rather than shouldering it ourselves in the fashion of Descartes.

  Part II, “The Bull by the Horns: Defining Bullshit,” contains four papers that, in one way or another, try to fix our target—that is, to define exactly what bullshit is, so that we can more easily spot it, at least, and get rid of it, at best. Leading off this section is G.A. Cohen’s classic essay, “Deeper Into Bullshit,”7 a direct response to Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” (and the only chapter in this book not written especially for it). In “Deeper Into Bullshit,” Cohen suggests that Frankfurt’s definition has missed the mark, or at least failed to attend to a kind of bullshit char-acterizable not in terms of the intention of the person who produces it (per Frankfurt’s approach) but in terms of its “unclarifiable unclarity.” Many of this book’s other chapters respond to Cohen’s essay.8

  The next three chapters shed light on this debate by bringing various other intellectual resources to the table. For Gary Hardcastle, the dinner guest is the anti-metaphysical thought of the Vienna Circle’s Rudolf Carnap. Hardcastle’s “The Unity of Bullshit” argues that the anti-metaphysical program of Carnap and his fellow scientific philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s gives us a perspective that unites the sort of bullshit identified by Frankfurt and Cohen.

  Andrew Aberdein, by contrast, in his “Raising the Tone: Definition, Bullshit, and the Definition of Bullshit,” calls upon Charles Stevenson’s notion of a “persuasive definition” to help us place Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit in a wider context. Per his title, Aberdein reaches back to the nineteenth century’s Gottlob Frege to re-introduce the concept of tone into the debate about bullshit.

  And then, Hans Maes’s and Katrien Schaubroeck’s “Different Kinds and Aspects of Bullshit” raises fundamental and critical questions for Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit (including questions about the moral status of bullshit, but more on that below), considers Cohen’s thoughts on bullshit on this score, and raises the question of where pseudoscience belongs in the ever-lusher garden of bullshit.

  Though it has been enjoying its recent foray through literary and philosophical treatises under its own name, bullshit lives and breaths in the world off the page. Our final section, then, is “It’s All Around Us: Bullshit in Politics, Science, Education, and the Law.” In On Bullshit, Frankfurt suggested that democracy, in demanding of everyone an opinion on everything, inadvertently promotes bullshit. Mark Evans’s chapter, “The Republic of Bullshit, Or: Were Plato, Strauss and Those Guys Right All Along?” examines this suggestion among historically significant criticisms of democracy.

  Similarly, Vanessa Neumann’s “Political Bullshit and the Stoic Story of the Self” provides a detailed account of the sort of bullshit one is apt to find in international politics. She suggests that we can better understand and manage such bullshit if we attend to Stoic theories of self and the role narrative plays in persons’ lives.

  In “Bullshit at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems,” Heather Douglas treats us to examples of bullshit drawn from the skeptical side of the debate over global warming. She shows how incomplete information and, perhaps more significantly, mistaken understandings of scientific objectivity can serve the ends of bullshit.

  David Tietge is concerned to defend rhetoric, understood as the study of language and the role it plays in our lives, from its all-too-frequent association with bullshit. His “Rhetoric Is Not Bullshit” makes the case that a resuscitation of rhetoric in the college and even the high-school classroom may be precisely the antidote to bullshit. Finally, Bullshit and Philosophy closes with an chapter from Steve Fuller, fresh from his role as an expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, et al., concerning the place of Intelligent Design in the ninth-grade public school classroom. Fuller’s wide-ranging chapter, “Just Bullshit,” draws upon a wealth of examples from popular culture, the history of science, and jurisprudence to call attention to the threat of bullshit in anti-bullshit programs themselves.

  As we noted, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit did not initiate an interest among philosophers in bullshit; that interest had been there for centuries, if not millennia. But the book’s popularity did manage to remind philosophers and non-philosophers alike of academic philosophy’s special relation to bullshit. Our hope, of course, is not just that these chapters help others learn and think about bullshit, but that they also remind philosophy itself that its links to popular culture are much closer and mutually rewarding that most of us realize. To borrow from a tale told here by Scott Kimbrough, there is something right in the common reaction—“that’s bullshit”—many have to academic philo
sophy. But that’s not because philosophy produces it, it’s because philosophy is one of our best defenses against it.

  I

  To Shoot the Bull?

  Rethinking and Responding to Bullshit

  1

  On Letting It Slide

  SCOTT KIMBROUGH

  I have a very frank six-year-old daughter. Recently, upon seeing our house painter puffing away his break, she shouted that smoking is unhealthy—loudly enough to be heard through the closed window. Mortified, my wife and I immediately shushed her. She doesn’t yet understand why anyone should be offended by an accurate point of information. But there are many offensive truths. William Ian Miller notes the danger of indiscreet truth-telling in his remarkable book, Faking It (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003):

  Truth is not accepted as a defense in such cases; in fact, one of the chief themes of this book is that truth is an offense, seldom, if ever, a defense. (p.142)

  Miller’s reminder that truth isn’t always welcomed can help solve a puzzle posed by Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit:

  The problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (p. 50)

  Frankfurt raises this issue because he worries about the damaging consequences of a declining respect for truth. Bullshitting, in his view, constitutes a greater threat to truth than lying. For unlike bullshitters, liars at least care what the truth is. Frankfurt defines bullshit as a lack of concern for truth, writing that “indifference to how things really are . . . [is] the essence of bullshit” (p.34). Consequently, if we really care about truth, Frankfurt reasons that we should condemn bullshitters even more than liars. But of course that’s not what happens: more often than not, we let bullshit slide. Frankfurt wonders why this is the case, though he doesn’t try to explain it himself. This essay takes up Frankfurt’s unanswered question.

  Tolerable Bullshit

  Assume Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit is correct: bullshit results from a lack of concern for truth. Now put that definition together with Miller’s insight that truth is not always our primary goal in conversation. It follows that much of what we say on a daily basis is bullshit. But does it also follow that we should change our ways? Not always. Far from merely tolerating bullshit, we often value it as an indispensable resource.

  For example, Miller offers a trenchant analysis of the social point of apology. We teach our children to apologize by forcing them to say things they don’t really mean. Truth, in this context, is the last thing we want. A true description of my son’s state of mind after hitting his sister would go something like this: “I hurt her because I wanted to.” In place of this accurate account, we teach him to say that he’s sorry. Perhaps someday he’ll mean it. In the meantime, he at least learns that hitting will not be tolerated. Plus, his sister gets to see him humbled for his wrongdoing. Miller explains the dynamic:

  Q: What is the substance of the satisfaction to the wronged person in an unfelt apology? A: The pain it costs the apologizer to give it.... Apology is a ritual, pure and simple, of humiliation. (Faking It, p. 88)

  In characterizing apology as a humiliation ritual, Miller by no means rejects or discourages it. Quite the contrary, he sees that injurers must pay for their wrongs or they will never learn to stop committing them. Like many other cases of moral instruction, the teaching of the art of apology sacrifices truth for more immediately worthy goals, including peace and character building.

  Miller doesn’t mention what coerced recitations he visits upon the child who receives the apology, but in my house the victim is forced to say she accepts the apology. She doesn’t mean it, either. But the message of the exchange is clear: hostilities are at an end, and further escalation will not be tolerated. Hopefully someday they will learn to settle their differences civilly, even sincerely. As Miller notes, however, it’s foolish to hold out for sincerity in the short term. If you have any doubts about that, consider the mother who told me that she does not make her son apologize unless he means it. I think it’s fair to anticipate that he will not learn to mean it on his own whenever proper manners dictate. Nor will he learn the importance of faking it when necessary, as remains indispensable well into adulthood. Marital spats would more frequently escalate to divorce if it weren’t for faked apologies. Public figures who make “offensive” remarks must master the form of apology as a way of acknowledging, if not fully embracing, the legitimacy of the offended parties’ perspective.

  Learning when and how to apologize is one chapter in the book of good manners. Like apology, politeness in general sacrifices truth for peace and comfort. Miller again astutely points out both the fakeness and the virtue of politeness:

  Politeness doesn’t need an excuse; fakery is openly admitted to lie at the structural core of the virtue. Politeness is immune to many forms of hypocrisy because a certain benign form of hypocrisy is precisely its virtue . . . at relatively little cost, it saves people from unnecessary pain in social encounters. (Faking It, p. 35)

  Saving people pain often deserves more importance than a concern for truth. If we strictly apply Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, according to which bullshit manifests an indifference to truth, it follows that bullshit constitutes the greater part of civility.

  Not all bullshit is motivated by delicate manners, however. Take advertising. We tend to tolerate bullshit advertising, and it isn’t out of politeness. One reason for our acceptance is entertainment value. For example, the advertisements during the Super Bowl famously receive as much attention as the game itself. And it’s not just bullshit advertising that pleases. The student newspaper at my university ran an editorial decrying communist professors on campus. The piece could hardly have been more silly, despite the serious intentions of the author. As I discovered in class discussions, many of the students were delighted by the piece because it was bullshit. They thought it was funny, and accordingly preferred it to a soberly argued treatment of a relevant topic.

  Like politeness, however, entertainment cannot be the full explanation of our tolerance of bullshit. Public relations draws on many of the same tricks as advertising, but frequently without the entertainment value. A deeper explanation of our tolerance for bullshit in advertising and public relations is our respect for the ends they serve. We understand the importance of making a buck, and don’t begrudge the professional the most effective means to do so. When a public relations consultant presents Exxon as a leader in protecting the environment, or a political hack spins a legislative failure as a successful compromise, they’re just doing their jobs. Were we in their place, we would want the same dispensation.

  And it turns out many of us are in their place. A huge proportion of the professions involve selling or representing something. It’s not always about greed and power, either. Even those whose efforts serve loftier goals than bare profit—like teachers, fund-raisers for charity, and military recruiters—would be hobbled if they eschewed bullshitting in favor of unembellished truth-telling. Furthermore, when faced with competition, to insist on truth when it doesn’t sell is not just naïve, it’s a losing strategy. To forego the use of bullshit is thus to settle for being a loser. We prefer winners to losers. And we don’t want to be losers ourselves by forbidding ourselves a winning gameplan.

  However much we respect effectiveness, we don’t allow any and all means to an end, even when the end is agreed on all sides to be a valuable one. We outlaw outright lying, even in advertising. How do we draw the line? Why do we sympathize with the liar’s victim, but not the bullshitter’s? Look at it this way: we can either sympathize with bullshitters or their victims. The bullshitters have a job to do and skillfully apply the most effective means to do so. The victims, in contrast, allow themselves to be mentally lazy and blinded by desire. They’re suckers. We may pity suckers, but we certainly don’t respect them. Our contempt for suckers reflects the judgment that anyone taken in
by a line of bullshit deserves their fate.

  Intolerable Bullshit

  Bullshit doesn’t always get a warm reception. That’s because indifference to truth frequently causes trouble. Think of the last time you “called bullshit.” It probably wasn’t about something you were prepared to tolerate. In ordinary use, the charge of bullshit most commonly comes up when we can’t be bothered to take something seriously, or when we’re treated unfairly.

  We often call bullshit when faced with something we regard as ridiculous, irrelevant, or misguided. We thereby declare an intention to ignore the speaker—to refuse to take his efforts at justification seriously. I can sadly provide an example in which I was the target of such an accusation. I presented a talk entitled “The Structure and Function of Bullshit” at a “philosophy slam,” which is an open discussion guided by a speaker who defends a controversial position against the crowd. These events take place in the back room of a coffeehouse and bar popular with the counter-cultural set. One of the attendees told me afterwards of a brief conversation he had with a few of the regulars who were outside for a smoke. They asked him what was going on inside. Without mentioning the topic, he told them it was a philosophy slam. Their response: “That’s bullshit.” Such uses of the term indicate an unwillingness to listen based on a disdainful expectation that nothing is to be gained from doing so.