One of the most tedious, joyless reading experiences I've ever had. The rather bold title hints at the possibility of a sense of humour, at an academic exploration with tongue firmly in cheek, and maybe a little righteous anger thrown in. It's just a tedious formal exercise that adds to the world of bullshit more than it explains it.

Re-read this today. Quick read and so relevant to our political world today.

An inquiry into the nature of BS, elegantly written, and probably of value to anyone who may wish to understand the proliferation of BS in our information/communication saturated day and age. Not sure if this gives the reader more information on how to tell if one is being handed a line of BS (as opposed to lying) - that would depend on having knowledge of the topic. It is useful in explaining what BS is, how it is used, and may be useful in demonstrating how wide-spread it is, and to be on the lookout for it. There is no way to stop it, but it is very important, maybe vital, to be able to tell it apart from the truth.

This book was a crock of bull. It's basically a definition of bullshit and other euphemisms such as "humbug" and...don't we already have a dictionary? I don't need a tiny dictionary written for just one word.

This small treatise is illuminating and humorous. The author here examines the concept of " Bullshit “ and tries to differentiate bullshit from lies, where the former’s essence being indifference to what things really are and, the latter is concerned with the truth-values of the utterance he makes to deliberately promulgate falsehood. He also explores the concept and definition of humbug, bull session, buff, hot air and so on and compares them to bullshit. To pick out one example, the resemblance being the disconnection of a person’s beliefs from his statement in bull session and of a person’s statement which is unconnected to a concern with truth, not concerned with the truth-value of what one says, in bullshit.

To be more specific, telling a lie involves a deliberate attitude to produce falsehoods to deceive us or to conceal us from truth. In such attitude one is dealing or concerned with the truth-values of the statements. On the other hand, bullshit is not concerned with the truth-values and it’s a way to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

"To speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.”

I am or I could also be producing bullshits here. Given that, to have opinions about everything is to produce bullshit. The anti-realist notion that the objective world is incomprehensible and the withdrawal from the representation of the real world to representation of oneself is bullshit. Since being true to oneself is ignorant and dangerous unless one cares to consider the facts, of the statements he makes or of his state of mind being true to facts, or else you are just producing bullshit.

"Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”

Of course this was a little too philosophical for me at some points (the author is a professor of philosophy), and it lacked examples, but the root argument is that bullshit is pretty much an antipathic pseudo-lie.

This slim volume was actually quite helpful, as far as it went. Which was not very far.

Well, the title is apt, since that's all this "book" is. All he does is quote other people, have long rambling rants that keep repeating themselves, and say how he doesn't actually know much but "so-and-so-says." The only sections I highlighted were sentences that had so many $5 words that I had to laugh out loud. Someone had way too much fun in their thesaurus is all I can say. What a pompous book.

Normally? Lame. When I’m trying to finish my Goodreads goal? Incredible.

3,5 :)

bardzo ciekawy wykład rozkładający na czynniki pierwsze tytułowe wciskanie kitu, rozróżnienie go od kłamstwa, blefowania i wszelkich innych czynności werbalnych ocierających się o mówienie nieprawdy. Przy tym popis lingwistyczny i intelektualny lekko podany. Smaczne.

Eg Theory Book review

On Frankfurt’s Truth and Bullshit

I want to briefly summarize my reading of Frankfurt’s position. And then I’ll focus on a particular shortcoming: I don’t think Frankfurt focuses enough on how and what for Truth is used in practice. From the perspective of their relationship to investigation and inquiry, Truth and Bullshit start to seem much less distinct than Frankfurt makes them. And both start to look like the negative force — although in the case of Truth: sometimes a necessary negative.

First, I am not sure if these two works should really count as books; they are basically 20 page essays reformatted with big font, wide margins, and small pages to make cute booklets.

However, since I picked them up at Barnes & Nobles as books, I thought that I would classify them as such.

The former was originally published as an essay in 1986 and after its repackaging as a book it reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

This motivated the latter as a follow up.

Frankfurt observes that our life is full of bullshit, and sets out to provide an analysis and definition of the phenomena.

He summarizes his finding at the start of the second book: “bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all.”

In this deception, they have a commonality with liars, but “what they care about primarily… is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false.”

This indifference is not shared by the liar who must keep an eye on the truth in order to mislead you.

As such, Frankfurt believes that the bullshitter is more dangerous to society than the liar.

He avoids pinning down exactly what he means by truth, suggesting that the common sense notion — by which, at my most generous reading, I assume he means something like Sellars’ manifest image — will do.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t only see truth as important but follows Spinoza to the conclusion that anybody who values their life must also (maybe unknowingly) love truth.

"Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual information. They cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs. To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance."

The above statement is certainly effective in manipulating me to believe in the value of truth.

However, it is also sufficiently vague as to make it impossible to test whether what Frankfurt says is true or whether it is false.

Certainly the adaptive nature of positive illusions or our work on religion and the social interface theory might hint toward falsehood.

But a sufficiently slippery definition of truth can hint truth.

The real issue is that Frankfurt presents a straw-man of people who deflate or question capital-T ‘Truth’ as an organizing principle.

The whole point of pragmatic approaches to the question is to eliminate Truth as a category in favour of that with lets us avoid error and provide flourishing.

As such, they can agree with Frankfurt’s claim above without attributing it to ‘Truth’. In fact, they might point to very useful and cohesion enhancing beliefs that would not be Truth for Frankfurt.

If we are to think about Truth then I think we need to think about how Truth is used in practice.
In the real world.

From my experience, it isn’t static Truth that enables advances or lets us escape error and ignorance.

Rather, it is dynamic Investigation. Truth’s job, instead, is to end investigation and inquiry. To say “this case is done, let’s move on”.

Sometimes this is an important thing to do. Not everything needs to be debated. Not everything needs to be investigated. And not everything needs to be questioned. There have to be priorities.

And in this regard Truth can be useful.

..........

I think this also lets us better understand bullshit.

One of the practical uses of bullshit is usually the same as the practical use of Truth: stop investigation and inquiry.

Except whereas in using Truth as our stop requires some due diligence and wondering about if the point in question is a reasonable place to stop.

And sometime even gives us a means to potentially resume investigation later. Bullshit lets us avoid this.

But both end investigation.

..........

A tempting dissimilarity between Truth and Bullshit’s relationship to Investigation might be their role in motivating investigation.

A common position for Truth, and one that Frankfurt takes throughout, is that a desire for Truth can motivate us to investigate.

So from my anti-Frankfurt perspective: even if Truth itself is a — at times desirable and necessary — negative, it’s motivation role is a positive.

But I don’t think this is that different from Bullshit.

At least from the garden-hose of misinformation kind of bullshit.
From the merchants of doubt kind of bullshit.

One of the safety mechanisms built into our notion of Truth is that if we get two conflicting ‘truths’ then we should restart investigation to resolve the contradiction.

This is what bullshit can capitalize on if instead of stopping investigation, it wants to start it.

By throwing enough disinformation at us, it becomes difficult to know what to believe.

This can prompt us to investigate. However, since we are so conditioned on truth and mostly bad at actually carrying out investigations, this often ends up with us just arbitrarily picking the most comfortable — or most repeated or easily accessible — set of propositions as our static set.

In the end, I don’t think the line between Bullshit and Truth is nearly as clear cut as Frankfurt makes it.

In particular, if we focus on the uses to which we put both concepts. And without focusing on this practical aspect, I think that Frankfurt fails to engage with the more interesting challenges to capital-T ‘Truth’.

But these are my recollections from a pair of books I read 4 years ago. So I might have forgotten some of the nuance of Frankfurt’s position.

There is a distinction between a person who tells a lie and a liar. The former is one who tells a lie unwillingly, while the liar loves to lie and passes his time in the joy of lying. . . . The latter takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.