The title is no irony, it's what it says it is. BS. It's one long mental wank lecture by a college professor of the word and its meanings in every possible boring, mildly-interesting, wow, I didn't know that, kind of way. It's intellectual humour done not to amuse an audience as its first aim but because the professor is amusing himself that he can do this sort of thing, and well.

All this sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but you know when it comes to stars I'm wavering between 1.5 and a 4.5, I can't decide. You can read the paragraph above in a slightly negative tone of voice and then it also reads in an ironic kind of way that I kind of admire the professor and had also quite enjoyed both his work and why he did it. I just can't decide so three stars it is.

What is bullshit? The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt lies here some good foundations to a better understanding of bullshit -so widespread nowadays yet, surprisingly, poorly understood because not properly defined or theorised. Such a short philosophical essay is thus necessary; it's also punchy and very pertinent. Indeed, framing bullshit as something very precise and peculiar (that is, different from bluff or lies in its key relationship to truth) the definition offered by the author encompasses not only bullshit per se but, also gives an hint towards the reason for bullshitters to think the way they do and, the impact not only on the gullible but society at large. I insist on 'gives an hint' because, sadly, Frankfurt just flies over his topic without going deeper than I think he should. Nonetheless, it's punchy enough for examples to spring in the mind while reading his concerns. Indeed, from alternative medicine to conspiracy theories and antievolutionary stances, what is the future of a society where, a complete lack of concern with truth (e.g. to the point of affecting one's whole way of thinking to suit the bullshit being entertained) is accepted, tolerated and spread even by our 'elites' (medias, politicians etc.)? A tiny little book, but a great food for thoughts.

The author, as an analytic philosopher, distinguishes between bullshit and lies. He holds that telling lies presupposes knowing what is false and what is true. In other words, the liar is cognizant of what he is hiding, namely the truth. On the other hand, bullshit is characterized by a lack of concern or respect for truth. The bullshitter does not care whether what he/she is saying is true or false. Truth or falsity is of no importance for him/her. This lack of care for truth, the author argues, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.

It seems to me what constitutes bullshit is an instrumental use of language in the attempt to get what you want or get rid of what you don't like without paying attention to the truth or falsity of what you say. Suppose that somebody's behavior is annoying you. Then you use whatever words that come to your mind to stop him. Here the truth or falsity of your words is of no import to you. What matters instead is to get what you want. Another example is advertisement which is, in many ways, bullshit par excellence. The aim of the advertiser is to convince other people to buy what he/she is advertising. What he/she says doesn't necessarily need to be false. But it is still bullshit because there is no concern for truth.

Given the ubiquity of bullshit in our world, it seems we ought to have a thorough understanding of it. This, in part, requires giving primacy to truth as the highest value. This is why I'm going to read Harry Frankfurt's book "On Truth."

Even without knowing the author, I can identify the author is a highly educated person. But please don't be intimidated by author's career in academic. Just read this book alone we can have a glimpse of author's mind. The descriptions are so pristine and sharp reflects author's mind, for example you will learn to distinct between bullshit and lie. But then the average rating of this book when I read it is pretty low (3.50) and some reviewers cannot determine to like it or not, so I wonder why.

I want to propose a hypothesis: the readers (unconsciously) feel the book has a lot of nonsense. Yes, the book that discussing about bullshit is dragging the readers with a lot of hot-air tenses/paragraphs. This book has both qualities: an enlightening work with a lot of bullshits. Some people rate based on the nonsense content what do you expect for the majority of this book, full illuminating knowledge in each tense? , some people rate based on the knowledge gems in the book.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I imagine the author enjoyed and had fun writing this book.

ADDITION: I choose this book as the most fun read for year 2016.

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.

Yes, the subject is a funny word. But the text is dry, and the substance is suspect. Frankfurt spends most of his (admirably few) pages examining causes for bullshitting, in very dry and highly speculative fashion. While it is interesting to read exactly how "bullshit" is different from "nonsense," "lies," and "deception," the term can be used to mean just those things. Like other popular swears, it's a broad word. Frankfurt is more interested in a phenomenon that he believes can only be described under this word, though, which hurts a treatise that ought to encapsulate the word entirely. This book could easily be used to condemn all art and human emotion as "bullshit," and while that might make you or Mr. Frankfurt feel clever, it's not useful. His speculation on precisely what makes people bullshit is useful, though it misses the gravity of the biggest cause: that people don't care.

Everyone lies, for many psychological reasons , it’s just a question of how, when and why , in this book Harry G. Frankfurt demonstrates, through argument and example, the difference between  lying  and  bullshit, A liar is the one who knows the truth but tell something else, A bullshitter "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up to suit his purpose." This is a perfect description of politicians

While liars say things they know are untrue, bullshitters say whatever they think will work best and have no interest in whether their statements are true or not.



"Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about".

you know what they say “dance like nobody's watching” I feel like bullshitters/Liars and especially politicians hear this “lie like no one is fact-checking you” and the perfect example of pathological liar is Donald trump !

A sincere three-star rating for not once mentioning an actual bull.

پیش از این هم کتاب های فلسفی ترجمه شده خوانده بودم اما این یکی اندکی ثقیل تر بود برای فهم
نمیتوانم بطور قطع بگویم که کار مترجم خوب نبوده پس برای جلوگیری از زدن حرف مفت با توجه به سرشت گذرای انسان قضاوت را به خودتان واگذار میکنم

This is a book that presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication. The author argues that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth, and that bullshitters are more dangerous than liars because they don't care about the truth at all.

Best of all, the book itself is a masterful example of bullshit. It is not a book that will teach you anything about bullshit, but rather show you how much bullshit there is in the world of philosophy. It deliberately violates the author's own standards of clarity, rigor, and honesty. He does not offer any practical advice or solutions on how to deal with bullshit, or how to avoid becoming a bullshitter oneself. In the process, he contradicts himself, he repeats himself, he bores himself, but it is still enjoyable.

Book, you better be glad you are short and I borrowed you from the library, because how do people spend money on you?

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.