“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us.”
– Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”
Dictionary Definitions of ‘Bullshit’
(1) OED entry on this term (first published in 1972, not fully updated since then; accessed Sept.26, 2018)
- As noun: “Rubbish; nonsense”; = bull, as “Trivial, insincere, or untruthful talk or writing; nonsense.”
- As verb: “to talk nonsense (to); … to bluff one’s way through(something) by talking nonsense.”
(2) Google definition (accessed Sept.26, 2018)
- As noun: “stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense.”
- As verb: “talk nonsense to (someone), typically to be misleading or deceptive.”
(3) The Free Dictionary’s entry, an online dictionary and encyclopedia that collects content from a variety of sources, includes these:
- As noun: “Foolish,deceitful, or boastful language”; “Something worthless, deceptive, or insincere”; “Insolent talk”
- As verb: “To speak foolishly or insolently”; “To engage in idle conversation”; “To attempt to mislead or deceive by talking ”
Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit” (1986/2005)[1]
Frankfurt begins his essay with the following caveat about what he aims to accomplish by offering a “tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis”: it’s not meant to be an account of the necessary and sufficient, or constitutive, conditions of bullshit (any purported account of this sort is bound to be “somewhat arbitrary”), but “to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive.” More specifically, Frankfurt’s goal is “to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not.”
(1) Bullshit ≠ lie (rather, bullshitting is closer to bluffing), in terms of the speaker’s “misrepresentational intent”
- Both are “modes of misrepresentation or deception.”
- The defining feature of a lie is falsity. Accordingly, the liar is “inescapably concerned with truth-values.” To tell a lie, the liar necessarily “submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth.”
- By contrast, “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony” or “fake.” Although bullshit is “produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false.” In other words, by “faking things,” the bullshitter may still get them right.
- Bullshit and lie involve different kinds of ingenuity: to invent an “effective lie,” the liar must “think he knows what is true,” “design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth,” and deliberate how to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point as though with analytical precision; the “bullshit artist,” by contrast, has a greater leeway and a different mode of “creativity.”
- The liar and the bullshitter try to hide different facts about themselves: for the liar, it’s the fact that “he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false”; for the bullshitter, it’s the fact that “the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him” and that “his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it.”
- People have different reactive attitudes toward bullshit and lie. People tend to be “more tolerant of bullshit than of lies.” If lies often evoke a “sense of violation or outrage,” people are more likely to turn away from bullshit “with an impatient or irritated shrug.”
(2) Why “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are”: it ignores the authority of the truth and the demands of truth-telling altogether.
“[T]elling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.”
(3) Why there is much “proliferation of bullshit” today
- “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” This is especially common in public life.
- There is also “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 also has “deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.”
“These ‘anti-realist’ doctrines [e.g. postmodernism] undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, … sincerity itself is bullshit.”
Frankfurt touches on the above points in this interview:
Here is Jon Stewart interviewing Frankfurt when “On Bullshit” was published as a book in 2005.
CRITICAL RESPONSES
G.A. Cohen published a now well-known essay, “Deeper into Bullshit,” in the anthology Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt (edited by Sarah Buss & Lee Overton, 2002; with Frankfurt’s “Reply to G. A. Cohen” included in the same anthology; reviewed here). Cohen calls out a different kind of bullshit, as found in obscure academic writings. It’s characterized by “unclarifiable unclarity” and disregard for MEANING (as opposed to the disregard for TRUTH that marks the sort of bullshit singled out in Frankfurt’s essay). Here is a summary of the key differences between the two kinds of BS:
| Kinds of BS | Context of utterance | Primary locus | Essential markers |
| Frankfurt’s | Everyday life | Activity/process | Indifference to truth |
| Cohen’s | The academy | Output/product | Unclarifiability; indifference to meaning |
Laura Penny supplies an abundance of cases/examples—mostly made in US—to substantiate Frankfurt’s observation of the proliferation of bullshit in her book Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit (2010), succinctly reviewed here)
Jim Holt discusses Cohen’s and Penny’s (among other) responses to Frankfurt’s account in “Say Anything—Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault” (The New Yorker, August 22, 2005 issue).
According to Gary Hardcastle and George Reisch, editors of Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time (2006), Frankfurt’s essay inspired “bullshitmania.”
The philosophical issues—especially those pertaining to philosophy of language (particularly pragmatics)—continue to inspire a whole range of analytical-philosophical responses, as are referenced in Stokke & Fallis’s “Bullshitting, Lying, and Indifference toward Truth” (Ergo, 2017).[2]
Meanwhile, some are going beyond the analytical-philosophical debates to practical matters like ethics of advertising, as Andrew Johnson does in “A New Take on Deceptive Advertising: Beyond Frankfurt’s Analysis of ‘BS’” (2010).
And, finally, Frankfurt’s warning from 30-plus years ago, “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies,” seems so prescient in our times, which some call “post-truth” era. This connection is made explicit in a May 2017 piece from The Guardian, which uses Frankfurt’s phrase in its title.
BULLSHIT ARTIST—who fits the bill?
A central contention between Frankfurt and his critics on bullshitting is whether it can be as sharply differentiated from lying as he thought or whether they rather overlap in significant ways. Maybe there is no clear demarcation between lying and bullshitting that applies to all cases in which we want to call out somebody as a liar, a bullshitter, or both. Maybe the line shifts in accordance with how we perceive what’s at stake and what kind of blame we would like to put on those who perform the acts of lying/bullshitting. Consider the following cases, and see what you think.
(1) John Oliver calling out Dr. Oz: is this guy lying or bullshitting?
(2) John Oliver on Trump vs. Truth: (dangerously) motivated disregard for truth, an incompetent bluffer, a master manipulator, or a compulsive liar?
(3) Fareed Zakaria: Trump is a B.S. artist (by Frankfurt’s definition)
(4) Vox: Kellyanne Conway’s interview tricks, explained
WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
Frankfurt, recognizing that the phenomenon of bullshitting is insidious in a way that lies may not be, is concerned about our ability to counter that effectively. Not professing to have any surefire remedy to offer himself, he suggests that one response could be the satirical kind offered by comedians like Jon Stewart (Frankfurt is not sure how effective it is):
Here is the “Jon Stewart on Crossfire” (2004) that Frankfurt is referring to, which was the reason why the show Crossfire ended:
Here is a patient video illustration of How to Deal with Bullshit in a proactive way:
Here is a nice blogpost that—after depicting the messy game of our times that involves bullshit artists (such as Trump), propagandists (on both ends of the political spectrum), truth seekers (professional fact-checkers), and the confused mass (most of us if we are not thinking critically)—suggests a list of things that we can all do for a calm and productive response. The last two items on the list are worth singling out in connection with our class: first, do thorough and carefully sourced—using a variety of sources—research, to get a maximally informed idea of the whole picture; second, engage real people in conversation, especially those whose views seem very different from yours.
In that connection, here is a lecture from the popular course “On Bullshit,” where the instructor, after comparing Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s account of BS, ends with three principles for calling BS: treat others with respect; focus on claims, not people; and allow for diverging views.
[1] It first appeared as an essay in 1986 (Raritan 6: 81-100). It was then published as a little book in 2005. Here is one critical review of the book.
[2] This article involves a lot of references to Gricean pragmatics, especially the notion of conversational implicature. The following lecture by Professor Karen Lewis gives a very clear presentation of the relevant notions: