Faversham Stoa is a philosophy discussion group. We meet on the 3rd Tuesday of every month from 7.30 to 9.30pm in the Bullshit
“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”.
In general conversation bullshit refers to anything that one judges is nonsense, stupid, worthless or deceptive. Exemplifying this approach Penn and Teller, the magicians, have a long running TV programme in the USA called Bullshit which is engaged in debunking false claims of healers, UFOlogist and psychic phenomena. However, the Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, was not satisfied with this rather loose use of the term and wanted to pin down the essence of bullshit a bit more scientifically and wrote about it in his 1986 paper entitled 'On Bullshit'. This was re-released as a book in 2005 and it became a best seller. (I suspect it was mainly bought as a present for co-workers and bosses).
Unfortunately, the book is not quite as witty as the title might suggest. In fact it is an attempt at a very serious explication of what Frankfurt thinks is a very common and growing phenomenon in modern society:
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. In other words, we have no theory.
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth.
The questions that we will be setting out to answer in our session are:
- Is there more bullshit around now than in previous generations?
- If the is an increase in bullshit, how do we account for it?
- Why are we more forgiving of the bullshitter than the liar, given that the bullshitter has less respect for the truth than the liar?
- Is bullshit having a morally corrosive effect on society today?
We will also looking at various examples of bullshit in a number of domains including:
- Advertising
- Public relations
- Political propaganda
- Education
- Love, sex and romance
- News media
- Technology
- Business
- Art
- Medicine
These will be illustrated by a number of video clip which, if they fail to illuminated at least will give you a laugh!
Pure Bullshit
- Say Anything (pdf - 9 pages)
- An excellent review of Harry Frankfurt's book/paper 'On Bullshit' and a good introduction to the topic. Read this even if you don't read anything else.
- Interview with Harry Frankfurt on Bullshit (video clip - 5.5 mins)
- Longer interview with Frankfurt on Bullshit - Part 1 (video clip - 6 mins)
- Part 2 of the interview (video clip - 6 mins)
- On Bullshit (pdf format - 16 pages)
- This is the text of the original article by Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt in pdf format which you can download and print. It was first published in 1986 in an academic journal but later published in book form in 2005 when it became a bestseller. My suspicion is that it was mainly bought as presents for colleagues and bosses providing an opportunity to imply what you really thought of your boss/co-worker's while appearing to be passing it off as a joke. The ability to expand a 16 page paper into an 80 page hardback book may itself be construed as a kind of bullshit. Unfortunately, the book, while enlightening, is not perhaps as witty as the subject matter would suggest.
- The Prevalence of Humbug
- An article by Max Black that pre-dates Franfurt's paper and is referenced by him.
- Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity
- A review of Frankfurt's 'On Bullshit'
- Defining Bullshit
- A review of Frankfurt's 'On Bullshit' from Slate magazine
- Bullshit entry in Rational Wiki
- Confabulation
- Confabulation is compulsive bullshitting causes by a medical condition. It can be considered 'honest lying', but is distinct from lying because there is typically no intent to deceive and the individual is unaware that their information is false. Although patients can present blatantly false information ('fantastic confabulation'), confabulatory information can also be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal. Individuals who confabulate are generally very confident about their recollections, despite evidence contradicting its truthfulness. However, because it is involuntary it is questionable whether it should be regarded as bullshit.
The paradigm-case bullshitter
- The incredible bullshitting man
- This is a sketch from the BBC comedy series Smith and Jones (broadcast 1984 to 1998) starring Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. The paradigm case bullshitter is the guy you meet down the pub who is full of improbable stories; stories told to impress the listener and to get attention. Thed stories tend to be focussed on himself and are not offered for discussion. The bullshitter is a performer. The response of the audience is everything to him (and its usually a 'him') and is his reward. The stories are told because the bullshitter is ignorant. He doesnt know much an has to fill the vaccuum in his knowledge by piecing together fragments of information he has scattered around his mid. It doesnt matter whether they are true, false or exagerated; the effect is all.
Synonymns for Bullshit and related concepts
There are a number of synonyms for Bullshit and concepts closely related that we would do well to reflect on while we are thinking about Bullshit. For instance:
- Bull
- Horseshit
- Balderdash
- Claptrap
- Hokum
- Drivel
- Buncombe
- Imposture
- Quackery
- Spin
- Sophistry
Here are some articles covering similar and related concepts:
- Humbug
- Frankfurt thinks that humbug and bullshit are pretty much the same. However, the humbug may have an awareness that what they are doing is deliberately disceptive, while the bulshitter doesn't care.
- Spin
- Spin may be thought of as identical with PR. Is that fair? The aim of spin is good presentation regardless of truth so we might think of it as a species of bullshit.
- Hypocrisy
- Hypocrisy is deliberately passing oneself off as virtous while covertly practising vice and condemning it in others. While hypocrisy no doubt involves bullshit I'm not sure it's fair to say that all bullshit is hypocritical. Some bullshit is quite playful.
- Sophism
- The Sophists were a group of philosopher-teachers in ancient Greece who were perhaps the ancient ancestors of our modern spin-doctors and bullshitters. They were reputed
- Rhetoric
- In everyday speech the word rhetoric has almost become interchangeable with bullshit (in polite circles). This is somewhat unfair for while rhetoric covers the art of persuasion it also studies good style in speech and writing. So while all bullshitters may be said to be rhetoreticians at some level, not all rheteric is inevitably bullshit.
Bullshit in politcs
Here are a couple of video clips that illustrate bullshit in politics:
- Sara Palin Appears to endorse Hamas in a TV interview (6 mins)
- Sarah Palin is asked about the recent election of Hamas in the Gaze strip (2007). What do you do when a democratic election results in people you just don't want to do business with? It is clear she doesnt know what Hamas is or where the Gaza strip is. She just picks up some key words in the question and weaves an answer round those words. Haven't we all done this in exam questions at some time in our lives?
- Poll: Bullshit is most important issue for 2008 voters (2.5 mins)
- A poll shows that bullshit is the deciding factor in most elections.
Bullshit in the media
- Six Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact
- Breaking news: some bullshit happening somewhere (video clip - 2.5 mins)
- With the advent of 24 hour news there is a great temptation of fill the time with inconsequential and distracting trivia. This clip shows how its done.
- Bullshit food programmes on TV (video clip - 2.5 mins)
- Celebrity chef Ted Allen cooks his favorite pretentious foodie bullshit meal
Bullshit technology
- In the know: should the nation's unemployed be buying new apple computers?
- The Apple Mac is vital to the needs of the unemployed. It is a 'must' in creative fields, and you can use it for teaching yourself graphic design to make a few bucks while waiting for a proper job to turn up.
Bullshit in Business and Advertising
- Bullshit Bingo (clip - 30 secs)
- 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate
- Web Economy Bullshit Generator
- Absurd business phrases and what they mean (4 mins)
- How to spot business bullshit
- Thank You for Smoking
- A 2005 black comedy film written based on the 1994 satirical novel of the same name by Christopher Buckley. The story follows the bullshitting activities of Big Tobacco's chief spokesman, Nick Naylor, who lobbies on behalf of cigarettes using heavy spin tactics while also trying to remain a role model for his 12-year-old son.
- Brand authenticity
Bullshit in Education
- The Doctor Fox experiment
- An on-line movie of the Dr Fox experiment (video clip - 6 mins)
- Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology
Bullshit in Philosopy
At the end of his paper 'On Bullshit' Frankfurt blames some of the rise in the level of bullshit in the modern world onto a corrosive scepticism. Postmodernism is probably the main, but not sole culprit of this scepticism:
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit 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 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. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
RationalWiki has a nice, succinct article on Postmodernism; there is a page on this site relating to a previous discussion of pomo philosophy but for a really pithy insight into pomo philosophy here is a simple, pictorial account (not much reading required).
Bullshit in the Arts
Books on Bullshit
Penny, Laura (2005). Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit. Random House. ISBN 1-4000-8103-3. — Halifax academic Laura Penny's study of the phenomenon of bullshit and its impact on modern society.
Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12294-6. — Harry Frankfurt's detailed analysis of the concept of bullshit.
Kotzee, Ben. Our Vision and our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief. Cape Town, South Africa: Private Bag, 2007. 166. Press
