A notorious recent example of how a shift from an accusatorial to an inquisitorial perspective can significantly affect the disposition of a case is that of the political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, whose international best seller, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was brought before the Danish Research Council’s Committee on Scientific Dishonesty by an entrepreneur in alternative energy sources who held that Lomborg systematically distorted research findings in ways that undermined his business. (Lomborg’s basic message was that the future of the global environment is not nearly as desperate as most ecologists make it out to be.) The plaintiff received major foreign support from, among others, Scientific American magazine and E.O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology and latter-day champion of biodiversity. Lomborg was initially found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on appeal—indeed, the very purpose of the Committee on Scientific Dishonesty was called into question—because it appeared that Lomborg was unfairly targeted, given that in the field of environmental studies, the politicization of research is the norm not the exception. Lomborg was guilty of little more than having extrapolated from the relevant statistical data a much more optimistic ecological forecast than usual. But all such extrapolations are ultimately speculative and motivated to raise consciousness among research funders, policy makers, and the general public. In other words, no special legal action is necessary because these matters are already fairly aired and debated, leaving audiences to draw their own conclusions.196
The history of the Lomborg case beautifully illustrates how a legal proceeding can foster both the manufacture and removal of bullshit. The plaintiff held the defendant uniquely responsible for an event backed by the testimony of impressive experts, while the defendant professed his own purity of motive and questioned the politics of his accusers. Bullshit abounds here on both sides. In his inquisitorial role, the judge (in this case, a panel) was expected to devise a test that would conclusively decide between the two parties by virtue of incorporating their shared assumptions and eliminating the ones they contest. Transferred to the scientific realm, this is what Bacon called a “crucial experiment.” The great virtue of the crucial experiment, as extolled by the various intellectual movements that have traveled under the banner of “positivism,” is that it forces a clear distinction to be drawn between theory and method: A scientific society may be divided by theories but it is united in method. But there is also a political point about free expression close to the heart of democracy, what Karl Popper called the “open society”: Everyone can bullshit to their heart’s content, as long as there is agreement on how to clean up after it.
I stress “free expression” because, as Franklin would have been the first to observe, the relevant freedom includes freedom to say what one believes needs to be said, even if one does not quite believe it oneself. Some signature moments of public intellectual life have been defined in these terms. For example, when Émile Zola publicly accused the French War Office of framing Captain Dreyfus (J’Accuse!), he had no more evidence than the court that convicted Dreyfus of treason. He simply read between the lines and took a chance that there was more than met the eye. Zola turned out to be right, but it was only after the confession of the perpetrators that he discovered why. However, his pre-emptive declaration served to stimulate others to re-open the case, resulting in evidence that corroborated Zola’s claims, all the while he was exiled in London. Zola’s fate was not so different from Galileo’s, whose house arrest after the Inquisition prompted natural philosophers across Europe to take up his hypotheses, which were finally vindicated in Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
However, Bacon’s vision has been realized only imperfectly. In particular, his idea that theory and method should always be distinguished in each case has metamorphosed into the idea they should be distinguished the same way in all cases. Thus, in the positivist imagination, the inquiring judge whose discretion determines how the distinction is anchored in each case came to be replaced by a mechanical procedure that could be applied to all cases. To a large extent, this transition is traceable to the political failure of Bacon’s project. After all, Bacon envisaged a royally sanctioned science court, whereas the best a weakened English monarchy could manage after the Civil War was to charter a self-policing private body, the Royal Society of London, whose loyalty to the Crown was demonstrated by its appeal to “method” to exclude potentially controversial matters from the outset.197
One feature of the original Baconian model that remains today has often proved a thorn in the side of the legal system: a liberal policy toward the admission of expert witness testimony, much of which would be discounted as hearsay, if it came from the mouth of an ordinary witness.198 This pro-bullshit policy, derided by some as producing “junk science,” is in principle desirable, if only because even orthodox claims to reliable knowledge can rarely, if ever, be evidenced first hand. Such a policy positions the judge as an inquisitor empowered to set up an independent standard by which to detect bullshit in the case at hand. However, if the judge sees herself as no more than a referee between two adversaries, the typical position in Anglo-Saxon law, then the balance of arguments as defined in the terms raised by the plaintiff is likely to prevail. Of course, this does not mean that the plaintiff automatically wins her case, but if she happens to represent the dominant viewpoint on the contested issue, that certainly increases her chances. Thus, Bacon’s intention may be undermined in practice.
In conclusion, consider a case in point: the string of US court cases concerning the disposition of evolution and creation—and, more recently, Intelligent Design—in the high-school curriculum. A landmark ruling occurred in 1982, McLean v. Arkansas, in which the presiding judge appealed to a philosophical definition of science, as provided by Michael Ruse, to justify the exclusion of creationism from the science curriculum. This was the first time a judge did not simply defer to the weight of scientific experts but, realizing that the nature of science itself was at issue in the case, tried to arrive at a standard that was genuinely neutral to the contesting parties. What matters here is neither that the judge appealed to an oversimplified definition of science, nor that his reasoning reinforced the general pattern of court rulings against creationism. Rather, it is that he turned to a standard that even the creationists had to agree was reasonable. The judge managed to cut through the bullshit on both sides.
Unfortunately, his precedent has not stuck. In the recent case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, where I served as an expert witness, the judge’s ruling was based largely on a philosophically customized definition of science supplied by the plaintiffs with the blessing of the US National Academy of Sciences. The definition was “customized” in that the operative doctrine, “methodological naturalism,” while lacking a clear meaning within philosophy, was crafted specifically so as to exclude Intelligent Design theory and scientific creationism.199 While it is to be expected—and even encouraged—that adversaries make arguments that put their case in the best possible light, justice is served by acknowledging the bullshit on both sides and cutting through it in an equitable fashion. This aspect of the Baconian legacy, where science and law meet, is all too rarely realized in cases where the truth is deemed to rest witth the side whose bullshit is piled higher and deeper.
Our Distinguished Panel of Incomparable Geniuses
ANDREW ABERDEIN grew up in Liverpool, England, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in Logic and Metaphysics. He has served as Lecturer in Philosophy at Edinburgh and is currently Assistant Professor of Logic and Humanities at Florida Institute of Technology. His experience with bullshit dates to the day when, as a gullible child of about age five, he was taught in separate classes about both dinosaurs and the Garden of Eden. The cognitive dissonance propelled him into philosophy, and into this volume.
SARA BERNAL is from Ithaca, New York. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago and, by the time you read this, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She li
ves in St. Louis with her husband, son, and cat, and teaches at St. Louis University. In her spare time she performs regularly as a modern dancer. Her most memorable early exposures to bullshit coincided with early and frequent exposure to the work of Mel Brooks, whose stand-up philosopher Comicus (from History of the World, Part I) inspired her. More recently she finds herself fascinated by the way in which the exposure of some painful truth provokes people to spew extraordinary bullshit.
G.A. COHEN was educated at McGill and Oxford Universities where he obtained, respectively, the degrees of B.A. in Philosophy and Politics and B. Phil. in Philosophy in 1963. For twenty-two years he was a Lecturer and then a Reader in Philosophy at University College, London. In 1985 he became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Professor Cohen is the author of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978; expanded edition, 2000), History, Labour, and Freedom (1988), Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995), and If You’re an Egalitarian, How come You’re So Rich? (2000). Cohen has given lectures all over the world, including the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University in 1991 and the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in 1996. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. The bullshit that for a short while engulfed him, but from which he escaped, was French bullshit, and in particular, the bullshit of Althusser and the Althusserians.
HEATHER DOUGLAS earned her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. She has since lived in Tacoma, as the Phibbs Professor of Science and Ethics at the University of Puget Sound, and in Knoxville, as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. Her experience with bullshit began with intense discussions around the Douglas family dinner table. This early training in competitive discourse laid the foundations for an interest in both philosophy and bullshit. Being a “professional” philosopher these days, she keeps her sanity by discussing issues with her husband, Ted Richards, who is a great bullshit detector, and by hanging out with her large dogs, who are terrible bullshitters, being stunningly honest and forthright creatures. She also likes to grow plants, which do very well with large amounts of fertilizer.
MARK EVANS is currently Senior Lecturer in Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales, Swansea. He received his first degree (in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from Mansfield College, Oxford, and his doctorate—which was on what he still maintains to be a non-bullshitty concept of self-realization in political theory—from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His ire against bullshit was first aroused in the mid-1980s when some of his student contemporaries, looking forward to the wads of cash to be earned in business, started spouting management-bullshit speak. His decision to stay in academia was bolstered by the hope that he wouldn’t have to put up with such stuff in his working life. He is therefore mightily pissed off that it has now well and truly infected the running of universities, without it even being tinged with the kind of ironic tone that would show that the poor souls at the academic coal-face can’t possibly take it seriously.
STEVE FULLER is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, England. He was first exposed to bullshit when he took courses in analytic philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia University. There he ran across people who bluffly promoted the virtues of content-free forms of reasoning. Over the years, he has come to appreciate the subtle virtues of this most rigorous form of rhetoric, the bullshit that dares not speak its name: to wit, logic. He received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh, and through a career that has extended over a dozen books on issues relating to social epistemology, he is nowadays associated with science and technology studies, a field largely dedicated to demonstrating, if not celebrating, the bullshit behind what passes for authoritative knowledge in society these days.
GARY L. HARDCASTLE is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University in central Pennsylvania, where he teaches philosophy of science, logic, and, if he is asked nicely, introduction to philosophy. His research interests include the philosophy of science, epistemology, and the history of American philosophy in the twentieth century. He is the author of several articles in philosophy of science and the co-editor, with Alan Richardson, of Logical Empiricism in North America (2003) and, with George Reisch, of Monty Python and Philosophy (2005). Although he inhaled deeply the bullshit-rich culture and ethos of 1970s America, his most memorable encounter with bullshit is his father’s presentation of the teleological argument for God’s existence as they drove together through the utter wasteland of Youngstown, Ohio, in 1978.
SCOTT KIMBROUGH, Associate Professor of philosophy at Jacksonville University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in philosophy from Southwestern University. His experience growing up in Texas, among Texans who truly believe that their state is superior and greet the presentation of contrary evidence with an astonished blend of incredulity and contempt, convinced him that Frankfurt is wrong to deny that bullshit can be produced unintentionally. His wife Tonia, a professional editor who frequently informs him of how bad most philosophical writing is, has kept him sensitive to what Frankfurt calls “pretentious bullshit.”
HANS MAES received his PhD at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is now affiliated with the University of Kent, England, where he writes on issues in moral theory and aesthetics. He is happily married to Katrien Schaubroeck—no bullshit.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela to an American mother and a Czech father with a Venezuelan passport, VANESSA NEUMANN received her B.A. from Columbia University in Economics and Philosophy. After stints in corporate finance and diplomacy, she returned to Columbia University for her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in moral political philosophy under the tutelage of the John Rawls protégé, Thomas Pogge. Dr. Neumann is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of political philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York and sits on the advisory board of the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University.
She also works with political think tanks, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Preferring to spend her days mired in horseshit rather than bullshit, Dr. Neumann finds galloping across a field on horseback a highly effective strategy for dealing with the stresses of daily life.
CONSUELO PRETI earned a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and is now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of New Jersey. Her interests run to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind; she is the author of On Kripke and the co-author of On Fodor, both in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series. She enjoys surfing, yoga, and English bull terriers, and when asked about her most formative bullshit experiences she is too polite to mention her first department meeting (and many subsequent ones).
GEORGE A. REISCH holds the title (for eight years now) in the All-Chicagoland Summarize Otto Neurath Competition. He received a Ph.D. from the Chicago School of Communist Dance, where he created, produced, and performed in “Fregenstein: Begriffsschrift and the Music of ABBA,” to wide accolades. He is also the author of many things concerned with philosophy of science and its history, such as the book How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (2005). At parties, he impersonates Gary Hardcastle impersonating Ludwig Wittgenstein (call 800GoValidity for bookings). As for bullshit in popular culture, he thinks it all began with The Monkees.
ALAN RICHARDSON likes candlelit dinners, reading Reichenbach to children at the public library, and long walks on the beach in Vancouver, where he is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, and is the author, editor, and reader of many things with ‘logical empiricism’ in the title. He wrote Carnap’s Construction of the World (1997). This biographical blurb is his most recent encounter with bullshit, althou
gh his earliest political memory is that of going to a Nixon rally in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, in 1968, escorted by his father, who is, like his mother, a life-long Republican.
KATRIEN SCHAUBROECK is assistant at the Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven where she is writing a dissertation on Harry Frankfurt and the debate on practical reason. Her interests are in moral psychology, meta-ethics, and theories of practical reason.
KENNETH A. TAYLOR is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he thinks about questions at the intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind (with an occasional foray into the history of philosophy). He is the author of many papers in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, as well as Meaning and Truth: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (1998) and Reference and the Rational Mind (2003). With his colleague John Perry he hosts Philosophy Talk (www.philosophytalk.org), a weekly, one-hour radio series that brings the richness of philosophic thought to everyday subjects.
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