Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Solving Frankfurt’s Puzzle, or, Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Bullshit

  Construing bullshit as an essentially pragmatic phenomenon, finally, allows us to solve Frankfurt’s puzzle. Overlooking this difference between semantics and pragmatics, in fact, creates Frankfurt’s puzzle. On his view, recall, the liar states something that he knows to be false and the bullshitter states something without caring whether it is true or false. Both the liar and the bullshitter, that is, sin against the semantics of truth. Yet, there appears no good reason for why we let one, but not the other, off the hook so easily.

  Once we recognize that the bullshitter does not sin against semantics, however, the puzzle disappears. For the liar and the bullshitter are now understood to be doing different things. The liar attempts to mislead us about truth, about how things really are, but the bullshitter attempts to manipulate us by cloaking the kinds of effects that he wants his speech and his enterprise to have. He sins, rather, against the pragmatics of language by making it appear that his speech is designed to have one kind of effect (such as advancing science education, or making your laundry cleaner) while his conscious aim is to bring about a different kind of effect (such as promoting evangelical Christianity, or making money for his client).

  Taking bullshit to be an essentially pragmatic, and not semantic, affair, we can see right away that we have many reasons for treating liars and lies differently from bullshitters and bullshit. For starters, lies can be dangerous in ways that bullshit usually is not because they can thwart our needs, sometimes our vital needs. When you have a bad cold, for example, and you cannot tell whether the coffee-milk at work has soured, you need to ask someone about it and you need them to tell you the truth. If they lie it will ruin your coffee, if not your morning.

  Bullshit, on the other hand, engages us differently. Instead of responding to our own needs and concerns, it seeks to create needs or perceptions with which it can manipulate us. The difference is important, for it explains why we can ignore bullshit safely but lies only at our peril. Without a gullible, believing audience, after all, bullshit can have no effect. So, when that guy in the office comes round to chat about Darwin being completely wrong and biology being due for a scientific revolution that will finally admit supernatural forces in science, you are likely to respond with all the indifference his appeal deserves: “Sure, Darwin. Whatever. Hey, do you happen to know if the milk in the refrigerator is still good today?”

  This is not to say, however, that we can be indifferent about bullshit because bullshit is indifferent to truth. Rather, we can be indifferent to it precisely because we are aware of its attempt to pragmatically manipulate truth (or truths) and make one kind of appeal or engagement appear to be a very different kind of engagement. So understood, the question this bullshit presents to us is not whether this bullshit is true, false or respectful of the distinction, but whether or not it will succeed in its pragmatic attempt to disguise one kind of engagement as another. Will it continue to enlist bullshit-believing supporters and advocates?

  This leads to a second, moral reason for why we go easier on bullshit and bullshitters. Unlike the liar, who deliberately obscures what he takes to be true, bullshitters may often be honest and sincere. The common expression that a person “believes his own bullshit” is of some use here, the believing bullshitter having no appreciation for the manner in which bullshit’s component parts have been fashioned to fit together. Philip Johnson, for example, is probably not a sincere bullshitter in so far as he speaks about the different parts of his agenda for the ID movement in isolation from each other, using different language and different rhetorical styles for the appropriate audiences. But those who are lured to ID by its talking-points (such as the claim that biology is wracked by “controversy” over the adequacy of evolutionary theory) may have no idea that their impressions rest on strategizing, wordsmithing, issue-framing, and public relations. So, when your annoying co-worker comes by with his daily update about the immanent collapse of Darwinism, you may even begin to feel sorry for him. He’s been duped, taken-in. He is not even an active bullshitter, for he is merely passing along the bullshit that he himself fell for. There, but for the grace of some critical thinking, go I.

  In some circumstances, we may even sympathize with active, deliberate bullshitters. Shortly after Judge Jones’s ruling that ID is concealed creationism, for example, ID organizer Stephen Meyer publicly defied this ruling by asserting the opposite: “Contrary to media reports,” he wrote, “intelligent design is not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins—one that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.”30 Artists and playwrights know that this kind of supreme confidence fascinates us. Here, we are not far from the boundless, American optimism shared by Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Al Pacino’s bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon, and the positive-thinking salesmen in David Mamet’s Glengary Glen Ross, ever-sure that things are looking up for them, that their big deal is just a phone call away—but, of course, only if they play it just right. In ID’s case, this optimism would seem to lie behind its knack for successive reinvention, with “Intelligent Design” rescuing the failed creation-science movement, and now (it appears) a new program, “Critical Analysis of Evolution,” waiting in the wings to rescue the faltering ID campaign.31 With just the right language, and just the right kind of public relations campaign, creationists seem to think, they will eventually take the world by storm. Until they do, however, failures will always be viewed as minor setbacks and attributed to misunderstandings, inaccurate “media reports,” and anything but the fundamental incoherence of the plan or the dubious quality of the product in question. Here, the bullshitter is concerned about truth in a slightly different way: he clings to the bullshit he originally created to deceive others in a bid to avoid the bitter truth of his own failure or defeat.

  Finally, we tolerate bullshit because it indirectly expresses basic cultural values that we admire and uphold. That tolerance does not extend to bullshit’s insincerity, of course, but it does extend to the myriad beliefs, practices, and discourses that serve as bullshit’s raw materials. Were it not for the relentless efforts of ID’s devotees to commandeer high school biology classes, for example, most scientists, educators, and philosophers would not even take pains to criticize the movement or its claims. Like the many cultures and subcultures that dot the modern landscape, ID-advocates are free to cultivate their own understandings about “how things really are,” and, in the United States, at least, they enjoy constitutional and civil protections to speak their minds. We may regret that they promote their own agendas duplicitously and at the expense of other people’s concerns and practices, but we can hardly regret this pluralism and variety itself.

  The Case for Purism about Bullshit

  So, if bullshit taps into our sympathies for others who have been taken in, and reflects the myriad beliefs and agendas that make modern life go, you might think that our culture is knee-deep in it. You’d get the same impression from the common use of the word ‘bullshit’. Yet that impression would be wrong. One implication of this pragmatic definition of bullshit is that there’s really not quite that much of it about. It has a specific pragmatic structure, does not come into being by accident, and is certainly not very effective unless it is crafted with good measures of creativity and pragmatic intelligence in the use of language. All that is obscured, however, by our casual use of “Bullshit!” or “That’s just bullshit” to express disagreement, disapproval, or disappointment about, more or less, anything at all.

  But if you look at things from any bullshitter’s point of view, all this vagueness and misidentification of bullshit is a good thing. The less discerning we are about bullshit, the less able we are to identify the real thing when it comes along. So, when your significant other announces that your relationship is over, for instance, you should not say “that’s bullshit!” It’s not. Yes, saying “Gee, that’s very bad news for me
. I’m sorry to learn of it” doesn’t seem appropriate to the occasion. But bad news is not bullshit. Nor is a White House official’s claim that the citizens of some oil-rich nation, but for its controlling dictator, are eager to embrace Western-style democracy and economic markets. These are just announcements which—semantics, again—may be true or false, credible or incredible, clear or unclear. They are not bullshit.

  Bullshit, instead, is your significant other’s effort to part ways through very different means—such as conversations about feeling misunderstood, or smothered, or something feeling “not right”—that just might lead to a mutual, blame-free breakup. Bullshit, instead, is being informed that this dictator possesses nuclear weapons and soon plans to use them on allies and neighboring nations. Indeed, I suspect it will only be possible to understand the seemingly magical power of language to persuade and manipulate individual and popular opinion when we begin to appreciate bullshit as a specific and precise creation, like a poem or symphony with multiple, interconnected layers of meaning that are intelligently designed and artfully orchestrated.32

  4

  Bullshit and the Foibles of the Human Mind, or: What the Masters of the Dark Arts Know

  KENNETH A. TAYLOR

  Public discourse in our times is in many ways debased. It contains a depressing stew of bullshit, propaganda, spin, and outright lies. The sources of these debasements are many. Those who seek to distract, manipulate, scam or mislead have full and easy access to the instruments of mass representation, communication and persuasion, while those who aim merely to speak the truth, no matter how discomforting or inconvenient, or to advocate for hard, but necessary choices struggle to be heard.

  Political discourse is the outstanding example. Politicians and their handlers typically subject us to an unrelenting stream of manipulative, mendacious misinformation, designed to mobilize the angry and dishearten the sober. We are seldom treated as democracy’s primary and essential stakeholders, hardly ever treated to an honest, systematic and fair-minded exploration of the issues that face us, the cost and benefits of the available alternatives, or the real potential winners and losers of our policy choices. And politics is by no means the only contributor to the debasement of the public sphere. We are enticed by the hypnotic techniques of contemporary marketing into ever more buying and consumption, with hardly a concern for the downside costs of that consumption. Night after night on the so-called news, we are numbed by stories that momentarily titillate or shock, but seldom offer meat for sober reflection or lasting enlightenment.

  It would be easy to lay blame for the debased state of public discourse in our times squarely and solely on the shoulders of those who purvey this endless stream of propaganda, bullshit, spin and outright lies. Certainly, in these times, the production of bullshit, propaganda, and spin have been exquisitely honed into high, if dark, arts.33 Nor is it altogether surprising that the bullshitting arts, as I will call the whole lot, should have reached such exalted heights. Given a putatively open public square, in which competing interests must freely contend for control of the means of shared representation and persuasion, the bullshitting arts could not dominate without being highly developed, insidious and infectious.

  In a totalitarian state, by contrast, these arts can afford to remain crude and underdeveloped. Such a state exercises exclusive control over the means of public representation and persuasion. And it reserves onto itself the right to bludgeon citizens into at least the pretense of belief when official bullshit and its cousins fail to persuade of their own powers. Where the bullshitting arts are not backed by the power to bludgeon, they must stand entirely on their own and win dominance over the means of public representation and persuasion through their own art and artifice. Though one might antecedently have hoped that in an open marketplace of ideas, good discourse would spontaneously drive out bad, the purveyors of bullshit have proven themselves more than adequate to the seemingly daunting task of dominating large swaths of the marketplace. Over the air, on the printed page, in public debate, even in the lecture halls of the academy, bullshit confronts us at every turn.34

  But the purveyors of bullshit, propaganda, spin and the outright lie cannot sell what we do not buy. So the fault for the pervasiveness of bullshit must lie partly within ourselves. The human mind is a powerful instrument, one of natural selection’s most amazing products. It’s the creator of art, science, and philosophy. It has spawned complex forms of social life and a dizzying variety of cultural formations. Yet, for all its astounding cognitive and cultural achievements, that very same mind not only produces, but is regularly taken in by bullshit, propaganda, spin, and the outright lie. Our susceptibility to these is, I shall argue, deeply rooted in the very architecture of the human mind. The human mind is afflicted with certain built-in architectural foibles and limits that render it permanently susceptible to a host of manipulations. Wherever there are humans cogniz-ing, there is bound to be a niche for the bullshit artist, for purveyors of easy and comforting falsehoods or half-truths.

  To be sure, no one self-consciously and explicitly says to herself, “That is pure bullshit, but I will take it at face value, nonetheless.” Like its cousins, the outright lie or the self-serving spin, bullshit works best when we don’t recognize it or acknowledge it for what it is. It’s most effective when we are blind to its effects. This is not to deny that we sometimes do willingly, if not quite knowingly or consciously, co-operate with the bullshit artist, the spinner, or even the liar. Allowing oneself to be taken in by a misrepresentation, but not quite consciously so, is, perhaps, an effective means of self-deception, one requiring less torturous mental gymnastics than the wholly self-driven variety. But even granting our propensity to believe the comforting falsehood over the discomforting truth, it is not altogether easy to explain why there is so very much bullshit and other forms of misrepresentation around, why we are so often taken in by it, and why we find it so hard to distinguish bullshit from its contraries. I address the bulk of this essay to these questions and focus on just a few of the many foibles of the human mind that render it liable to be taken in by bullshit and other forms of misrepresentation.

  Some Cognitive Foibles of the Human Mind

  In recent decades, cognitive and evolutionary psychologists have logged a depressing catalog of the foibles of the human mind. For all our amazing cognitive achievements as a species, human cognition turns out to be a bewitching stew of the good and the bad. We are subject to confirmation bias, prone to self-deception, and bad at many and diverse forms of reasoning—including statistical reasoning, reasoning about conditionals, and the assessment of risks and rewards.

  Consider the run-up to the war in Iraq. Many putatively authoritative voices in the administration and the media told us repeatedly that we would be welcomed as liberators, that stockpiles of WMD were present in Iraq, that Iraq bore some vague connection to 9/11, that the war would be quick, cheap, and largely financed by Iraqi oil. Far off center stage, a few dissenting voices could be heard whispering that none of it was so. By and large, the public ignored those voices and bought the tale they were told by the putatively more authoritative voices shouting from center stage. I am not at present concerned with what led to widespread acceptance of the initial tale in the first place, but rather with the persistence of belief in that tale long after an ever-increasing body of evidence spoke decisively against it. Though belief in the wisdom of the war is at this writing far less widespread than it once was, there is no doubt that for a long while certain falsehoods held a vice-grip on the minds of many in ways that rendered those beliefs at least temporarily impervious to any subsequent disconfirming evidence.

  This vice-grip reflects what social psychologists call confirmation bias—the tendency to notice and seek out things that confirm one’s beliefs, and to ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of things that would disconfirm one’s beliefs.35 Confirmation bias is not a merely occasional affliction of the human mind. It’s deeply ingrained and endemic to
it. Confirmation bias helps to explain the imperviousness of already adopted beliefs to contravening evidence and it also helps to explain our tendency to overestimate our own epistemic reliability. If one believes some proposition, then one typically will also believe that one has good reason for believing that very proposition. We tend, that is, not to believe that our beliefs are ungrounded or ill-formed. And we tend to reject not just evidence inconsistent with already adopted beliefs, but also evidence that would tend to challenge our own epistemic reliability or authority. So if one believes Bush’s rationale for the Iraq war, then one will tend also to believe that it is perfectly reasonable to believe Bush’s rationale, that one was not being duped or deceived into believing that rationale, and that any reasonable person would share one’s belief. Such confidence, even when undeserved, will lead one to reject not just evidence suggesting that what Bush said was false, but any evidence suggesting that one was foolhardy or in some ways irrational in accepting that rationale. By the lights of the true believer, the person who rejects Bush’s rationale for the war is not just mistaken but irrational, or in some way self-deceived. It is not the believer who is a dupe or a fool, but the unbeliever. But the deeper point is that any evidence that the skeptic might muster to try to convince the true believer otherwise is, in effect, antecedently discounted before the argument ever begins.