On Bullshit

On Bullshit is Bullshit

The author essentially tries to do two things: define "bullshit" and compare bullshit to lying. He doesn't do either particularly well. There's no real insight here, and it's not written in a particularly engaging way. This little book made the New York Times Bestseller List, despite having nothing to say. I can't help but think the author bullshitted us.

tSo I picked up On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt at the thrift store on Friday and it is real philosophical reflection from a retired professor of moral philosophy at Princeton (printed by Princeton University Press). It is a brief and rambling little book and it would not rate higher than a three except for the conclusion to the book which I quote extensively from below.
tFrankfurt asserts, quite reasonably, that bullshit is widespread in our society. He then goes on to differentiate between lying and bullshit. For Frankfurt, the former retains a distinction between truth and falsehood, but chooses to be false. The latter blurs that distinction, with a certain willful carelessness. He relates a story where Wittgenstein chides a friend for making a thoughtless figure of speech, "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." (24) For Wittgenstein, his friend's fault "is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying." (32) This is the heart of the distinction between lying and bullshit for Frankfurt, "That is why she cannot be regarded as lying: for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a propostion that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (33-34)
tFor Frankfurt liars need the truth. "Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus." (51) "It "requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true." (52) The bullshiter has much more freedom because he is not constrained by any definitions of the truth. While both represent falsity to us, the liar does so deliberately, while the one passing bullshit has never cared for truth or falsity in the first place.
tHe ends with these words:
"Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to acount for the fact that it is currently so great.t
tBullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a persons's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from 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. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehensions of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.
tThe contemporary proliferation of bullshit has deeper sources, in various forms of scepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possiblility of knowing how things truly are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligility 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 thought 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.
tBut it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinancy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Morever, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. 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 natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit." (62-67)

On Bullshit is an essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Originally published in the journal Raritan in 1986, the essay was republished as a separate volume in 2005 and became a nonfiction bestseller, spending twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.



Wiki blurbs - In the essay, Frankfurt sketches a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications. In particular, Frankfurt distinguishes bullshitting from lying; while the liar deliberately makes false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth. Bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences. While liars need to know the truth, the better to conceal it, the bullshitter, interested solely in advancing his own agenda, has no use for the truth. Following from this, Frankfurt claims that "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."





My opinion is that this is full of hot air and vapour - much bullshit on the subject of bullshit!



http://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-...

Short & sweet. Opens with the premise that “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes our share” (1). This is reminiscent of Sloterdijk’s notion of enlightened false consciousness:

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

Critique of Cynical Reason at 5. Works through definitional material, much of it comparative with related terms (‘humbug,’ ‘hot air,’ &c.) as well as dishonesty proper. It is RSB’s viramsata insofar as “the realms of advertising and or public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” (22).

An anecdote of surly Wittgenstein taking issue with an improperly deployed simile leads to the inference that bullshit may be a form of discourse “unconnected to a concern with the truth” (30), as opposed to knowing misrepresentation. That is, Wittgenstein was troubled by “a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes” (32). It is a matter of “enjoying a certain irresponsibility” (37), which implies a sort of ethical analysis.

BS is likened to “bluff” (46), and then the argument contends that “although it is produced without concern for the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong” (48). The liar by contrast “is unmistakenly concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true” (51), which is Kant’s antecedent position of choice, as I recall it. For the bullshitter, “the truth-values of his statements are of no central importance” (55)—it is the rhetorical performance that matters. Anyway, Fareed Zakaria thought this text applied very much to Trump back before the awful election. No doubt there.

Philosophical talk about bullshit! I read and read, with an expectation that the author would be want to change the subject or turn it to metaphorical or political points, but he doesn't....
He still talks and bluffs and analyses the bullshit, till the essay is ended with amazing result of dismantling and taking apart the literal word of bullshit and it's meaning.
Is that sound bullshit to you?

Pretentious, tedious word play with a topic and title to guarantee more book sales than a bound essay would ever accrue on its own merits. Having been sprung from doing time in academia my tolerance for this type of entitled, 'more-intellectual-than-thou' pomposity has grown thin enough that I skimmed the last half of the essay and even that felt like too much attention.

Frankfurt's cleverness is drowned by his intellectual masturbation, he created a work more of bullshit that on bullshit: one wonders if that was the point? To take a scalpel to another writer's musing on 'humbug' but ignore exaggeration and deflection as illustrated by the 45th president of the US entirely seems to point to either his own self-delusion or that this essay is, in fact, a deliberate act of bullshit itself.

Regardless of intent, Frankfurt says nothing new and nothing not better and far more concisely (and amusingly) conveyed in stand-up comedy, decades ago, by the likes of George Carlin and Robin Williams.

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.

Fun little philosophical investigation on what bullshit is. I imagine Frankfurt had fun writing this one.