Bullshit as a Call to Open-Mindedness
Bullshit detectors take comfort in the fact that the time required to master a body of knowledge virtually guarantees the initiate’s loyalty to its corresponding practices and central dogmas. Moreover, the overarching discipline may have been crafted over the years to render as difficult as possible the contrary “truth” a bullshitter might wish to advance. In Thomas Kuhn’s hands, this tendency was enshrined as “normal science.” According to Kuhn, a radical alternative to the scientific orthodoxy must await the self-destruction of the dominant paradigm, which may take a very long time, as ill-defined conceptual objections (a.k.a. bullshit) struggle against the paradigm’s made-to-order empirical successes. Equally, the self-transformation from potential critic to compliant subject is a matter of reducing what social psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”: How could all that scientific training effort have been in vain, especially once it has resulted in a secure social identity and (perhaps less secure) means of employment? The mathematician Blaise Pascal’s famous wager is a very general version of this line of thought: We should bet our lives on God’s existence by adopting a Christian lifestyle that would then make us receptive to any signs of divine presence, should they ever appear. As in science, so too in religion: Discovery favors the prepared mind.
But what if it were made easier to assert and challenge knowledge claims without having to undergo the personal transformation required of, say, doctoral training? In the absence of such institutionalized immunity to bullshit, the result would be a Sophist’s paradise. Truth would be decided on the day by whoever happens to have the stronger argument or survives some mutually agreed test. Never mind prior track records or prima facie plausibility: Show me here and now. The scientific method was developed largely in this frame of mind, one deeply distrustful of all forms of authority, be it based on a canonical text or some canonical representation of collective experience. This distrust fed on the frequently observed failure of authoritative statements to accord with what one’s spontaneously thinks, feels, or experiences.
The signature moment in the Western tradition for this sentiment, which made the hearer’s conscience—and not the speaker’s sincerity—the final court of appeal, was the guilt that Martin Luther continued to feel even after having been exonerated of sin in the Catholic sacrament of Penance. This provoked a more wide-ranging questioning of Catholicism’s royal road of ritual to divine salvation. The result was Protestantism’s greater tolerance for bullshit, with the understanding that everyone skates on thin ice in this life. The phrase “playing it by ear” captures well the inevitably improvisational character of attending to conscience as a guide to truth. In the end, there is only one bullshit detector: God. Accept no substitutes.
The bullshit detector believes not only that there is a truth but also that her own access to it is sufficiently reliable and general to serve as a standard by which others may be held accountable. Protestants appeared prepared to accept the former but not the latter condition, which is why dissenters were encouraged—or perhaps ostracized—to establish their own ministries. The Sophists appeared to deny the former and possibly the latter condition as well. Both Protestants and Sophists are prime candidates for the spread of bullshit because they concede that we may normally address reality in terms it does not recognize—or at least does not require it to yield straight “yes-or-no,” “true-or-false” answers. In that case, we must make up the difference between the obliqueness of our inquiries and the obtuseness of reality’s responses. That “difference” is fairly seen as bullshit. When crystallized as a philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, this attitude is known as antirealism. Its opposite number, the background philosophy of bullshit detectors, is realism.
The difference in the spirit of the two philosophies is captured as follows: Do you believe that everything you say and hear is bullshit unless you have some way of showing whether it is true or false; or rather, that everything said and heard is simply true or false, unless it is revealed to be bullshit? The former is the antirealist, the latter the realist, response. Seen in those terms, we might say that the antirealist regards reality as inherently risky and always under construction (Caveat credor!189), whereas the realist treats reality as, on the whole, stable and orderly—except for the reprobates who try to circumvent the system by producing bullshit. In this respect, On Bullshit may be usefully read as an ad hominem attack on antirealists. Frankfurt himself makes passing reference to this interpretation near the end of the essay (pp. 64–65). Yet, he appears happy to promote the vulgar image of antirealism as intellectually, and perhaps morally, slipshod, instead of treating it as the philosophically honorable position that it is.
A case in point is Frankfurt’s presentation of Wittgenstein as one of history’s great bullshit detectors (pp. 24–34). He offers a telling anecdote in which the Viennese philosopher objects to Fania Pascal’s self-description as feeling like a dog that has been run over. Wittgenstein reportedly told Pascal that she misused language by capitalizing on the hearer’s easy conflation of a literal falsehood with a genuine condition, which is made possible by the hearer’s default anthropocentric bias. Wittgenstein’s objection boils down to claiming that, outside clearly marked poetic contexts, our intellectual end never suffices alone to justify our linguistic means. Frankfurt treats this point as a timeless truth about how language structures reality. Yet, it would be quite easy, especially recalling that this “truth” was uttered seventy years ago, to conclude that Wittgenstein’s irritation betrays a spectacular lack of imagination in the guise of scrupulousness.
Wittgenstein’s harsh judgment presupposes that humans lack any real access to canine psychology, which renders any appeal to dogs purely fanciful. For him, this lack of access is an established fact inscribed in a literal use of language, not an open question answers to which a figurative use of language might offer clues for further investigation. Nevertheless, scientists informed by the Neo-Darwinian synthesis—which was being forged just at the time of Wittgenstein’s pronouncement—have quite arguably narrowed the gap between the mental lives of humans and animals in research associated with “evolutionary psychology.” As this research makes more headway, what Wittgenstein confidently declared to be bullshit in his day may tomorrow appear as having been a prescient truth. But anyone holding such a fluid view of verifiability would derive scant comfort from either Wittgenstein or Frankfurt, who act as if English linguistic intuitions, circa 1935, should count indefinitely as demonstrable truths.
Wittgenstein: Ultimate Bullshit Detector—or Bullshitter?
Some philosophers given to bullshit detection are so used to treating any Wittgensteinian utterance as a profundity that it never occurs to them that Wittgenstein may have been himself a grandmaster of bullshit. The great bullshit detectors whom I originally invoked, Nietzsche and Mencken, made themselves vulnerable to critics by speaking from their own self-authorizing standpoint, which supposedly afforded a clear vista for distinguishing bullshit from its opposite. In contrast, Wittgenstein adopts the classic bullshitter’s technique of ventriloquism, speaking through the authority of someone or something else in order to be spared the full brunt of criticism.
I use “adopts” advisedly, since the deliberateness of Wittgenstein’s rhetoric remains unclear. What was he trying to do: To speak modestly without ever having quite controlled his spontaneously haughty manner, or to exercise his self-regarding superiority as gently as possible so as not to frighten the benighted? Either way, Wittgenstein became—for a certain kind of philosopher—the standard-bearer of linguistic rectitude, where “language” is treated as a proxy for reality itself.
To the bullshitter, this description also fits someone whose strong personality cowed the impressionable into distrusting their own thought processes. As with most successful bullshit, the trick is revealed only after it has had the desired effect and the frame of reference has changed. Thus, Wittgenstein’s precious concern about Pasca
l’s account of her state of health should strike, at least some readers today, as akin to a priest’s fretting over a parishioner’s confession of impure thoughts. In each case, the latter is struck by something that lies outside the box in which the former continues to think.
If Wittgenstein was a bullshitter, how did he manage to take in professed enemies of bullshit like Frankfurt? One clue is that most bullshit is forward-looking, and Wittgenstein’s wasn’t. The bullshitter normally refers to things whose prima facie plausibility immunizes the hearer against checking their actual validity. The implication is that proof is simply “out there” waiting be found. But is there really such proof? Here the bullshitter is in a race against time. A sufficient delay in checking sources has salvaged the competence and even promoted the prescience of many bullshitters. Such was the spirit of Paul Feyerabend’s notorious account of Galileo’s “discoveries,” which concluded that his Papal Inquisitors were originally justified in their skepticism, even though Galileo’s followers subsequently redeemed his epistemic promissory notes.190
In contrast, Wittgenstein’s unique brand of bullshit was backward-looking, always reminding hearers and readers of something they should already know but have perhaps temporarily forgotten. Since Wittgenstein usually confronted his interlocutors with mundane examples, it was relatively easy to convey this impression. The trick lay in immediately shifting context from the case at hand to what Oxford philosophers in the 1950s called a “paradigm case” that was presented as a self-evident standard of usage against which to judge the case at hand. That Wittgenstein, a non-native speaker of English, impressed one or two generations of Britain’s philosophical elite with just this mode of argumentation remains the envy of the aspiring bullshitter. Ernest Gellner, another émigré from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, ended up ostracized from the British philosophical establishment for offering a cutting diagnosis of this phenomenon as it was unfolding. He suggested that Wittgenstein’s success testified to his ability to feed off British class anxiety, which was most clearly marked in language use.191
Yet, after nearly a half-century, Gellner’s diagnosis is resisted, despite the palpable weakening of Wittgenstein’s posthumous grip on the philosophical imagination. One reason is that so many living philosophers still ride on Wittgenstein’s authority—if not his mannerisms—that to declare him a bullshitter would amount to career suicide. But a second reason is also operative, one that functions as an insurance policy against future debunkers. Wittgenstein is often portrayed, by himself and others, as mentally unbalanced. You might think that this would render his philosophical deliverances unreliable. On the contrary, Wittgenstein’s erratic disposition is offered as evidence for his spontaneously guileless nature—quite unlike the controlled and calculated character of bullshitters. Bullshit fails to stick to Wittgenstein because he is regarded as an idiot savant. In contrast, bullshit detectors aim their fire at those capable of making a strategic distinction in their own minds between the current state of evidence and the state of belief in which they would like to leave their interlocutors. We have seen this mentality before. It is best called by its classical name: “hypocrisy,” a word that derives from the masks actors wore in Greek dramas.
Bullshit as Deferred Epistemic Gratification
The bullshitter is the consummate hypocrite. This sounds damning if you imagine that on the masked side of the hypocrite’s mental divide is a clear sense of where the weight of evidence lies. But if you imagine instead that behind the hypocrite’s mask lurks deep uncertainty about the truth, then the outward image is a defiant, though possibly doomed, gesture to inject some order into an otherwise chaotic world. At this point, some readers might query the wisdom of portraying bullshitters as heroic Existentialists, bluffing their way out of the abyss. After all, on most matters, don’t we usually have a reasonably clear sense of which way the evidence points? If so, the only relevant decision is whether to admit, deny, or spin what one believes. However, as might be expected, the bullshitter’s take on evidence is not so straightforward. It is influenced by the sophistic principle that to control the moment of decision is to control its outcome. The first line of sophistry, then, is to call the question when the balance of arguments is to one’s advantage. But provided sufficient time, resources, and wit, the truth of any proposition could be demonstrated—or so the sophists presumed. The problem is that we are rarely afforded these luxuries, and so there is a strong temptation simply to declare for what strikes us now as most evident.
Bullshitters stress the impressionistic character of this decision, since contrary to promiscuous appeals to “reliability” in both philosophical and public discourse, we are usually in no position to assess the actual track records of those who would lay claim to our beliefs. We might be able to access a partial record or, more likely, recall our personal experience, as colored by the vagaries of memory. Perhaps this is why epistemol-ogists have increasingly leaned on the quasi-moral concept of “trust,” and affiliated theological notions of “witness” and “testimony,” to make up the difference between our genuine strength of feeling toward a proposition and the actual paucity of our evidence in its favor.192 Under the benign interpretation of the Scottish cleric Thomas Reid, the spark of the divine in the human (a.k.a. common sense) ensures that, in the main, humans are reliable sources of information. But under the more malign reading of those touched by the more heretical Kierkegaard, the prevalence of such concepts simply betrays our cowardice, as we delegate to others responsibility for beliefs we should take personally, admitting error when shown wrong but otherwise accepting modest credit for having expressed them.193 In either case, by papering over the gap between evidence and belief, reliability would appear to be a bullshit concept—a problem, of course, only for those like Frankfurt keen on eliminating bullshit.
It is possible to detect the bullshit in the bullshit detectors by setting up an analogy between the epistemic economy of evidence and the moral economy of sensation. Evidence for what is true and false is typically described in the same terms of “compelling experience” as sensations of pleasure and pain. But why should we be so easily moved by evidence in spheres of knowing, when most philosophers would not have us automatically succumb to sensation in spheres of acting? For example, Utilitarianism, the modern ethical theory most closely tied to a moral economy of sensations, explains welfare in terms of the deferment of immediate gratification in favor of a more substantial good projected in the long term. Thus, the redistribution of income afforded by taxation insures against our tendency to discount the value of our future selves or, for that matter, future generations. Similarly, the bullshitter’s imperviousness to the current weighting of the evidence may be understood as an attempt to forgo the opportunity costs associated with discounting what might turn out to be, in the fullness of time, a more promising line of inquiry. Analogous to taxation here would be an “affirmative action” strategy that would handicap better evidenced positions so as to give weaker ones a chance to develop. As Franklin might put it, the virtue exemplified in both the moral and the epistemic economies is prudence: the one saves for the future, whereas the other plays for time.194
The Scientific Method as a Search for the Justice in Bullshit
The natural conclusion to draw from these considerations so far is that bullshit abounds, not least among those keen on detecting and removing it. But must this be such a bad thing? The success of Francis Bacon’s invention of the scientific method suggests that it might not be so bad, as long as everyone admits upfront they are producing bullshit, and decisions about what is and is not bullshit are left to a third party. Bacon wrote as the top lawyer to England’s King James I in the early seventeenth century, a period we now describe as having been in great scientific and religious ferment, though the difference between these two sources of unrest was not so clear at the time. Bacon realized as much. Radical religious thinkers often proposed and occasionally proved knowledge claims of general scientific merit. Yet, they
typically insisted that only those sharing their religious commitments were fit to test and appreciate the validity of those claims. Bacon saw that the public interest was best served by devising a way to test the validity of knowledge claims without having to accept whatever controversial metaphysical assumptions might have motivated the claimants. This procedure—the scientific method—was modeled on a trial, indeed, of the sort conducted in the inquisitorial legal systems of Continental Europe, which Bacon admired.195
What distinguishes the inquisitorial from the accusatorial system traditionally favored in England is that the judge, as opposed to the plaintiff, frames the terms of the trial. This typically means that before a verdict is reached, the judge will have conducted his own investigation of, say, what counts as normal conduct in the relevant sphere of life, in order to determine whether the defendant is being held to an unreasonably high standard—or, equally, a reasonable standard that few people actually meet. Thus, it is not sufficient for the plaintiff to prove her case on its merits. In addition, it must be clear that the defendant is not being unfairly singled out for something that, for better or worse, is routinely tolerated. After all, the defendant may be guilty as charged but others are potentially guilty of much worse, in which case the judge must consider how—and whether—justice is served by making an example out of the defendant.
Bullshit and Philosophy Page 29