Bullshit and Philosophy
Page 33
26
Philip Johnson, “Is God Unconstitutional? The Established Religious Philosophy of America,” 1996 (www.arn.org/authors/johnson_articles.html).
27
Memorandum Opinion, December 20th, 2005, District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Document number 342, p. 43.
28
Rudolf Carnap, “Foundations of Logic and Mathematics,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1: 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. 4.
29
Cohen’s is “Deeper into Bullshit,” Chapter 8 in this volume.
30
“Not by Chance,” National Post of Canada (1st December, 2005).
31
Lesson plans for teaching “Critical Analysis of Evolution” in high schools can be found at the creationist Discovery Institute’s website, discovery.org.
32
Special thanks to Gary Hardcastle for reading several drafts of this essay and never bullshitting me about the problems he found.
33
I use the term ‘bullshit’ for a broader range of phenomena than Harry Frankfurt does. My focus here is less on one-on-one bullshit, and more on what we might call official, institutional bullshit.
34
There is by now a vast and varied literature, written from a variety of scientific or political perspectives, on techniques of mass persuasion and propaganda and on how and why it works on the human mind. For a few recent and classical examples see Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Freeman, 1992); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig, 2004 [1928]), and Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
35
The psychological literature on confirmation bias is vast. For early studies documenting this phenomenon, see P.C. Wason, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (1960); P.C. Wason, “Reasoning,” in B.M. Foss, ed., New Horizons in Psychology I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Among more recent studies see R.S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998).
36
Explaining why exactly we should be liable to confirmation bias at all is, of course, an entirely different matter. I will not try to give an answer here.
37
This example is adapted from a discussion in D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica (1979). Reprinted in Kahneman and Tversky, Choices, Values, and Frames (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
38
George Lakoff has recently diagnosed American political discourse as a war over frames. See his Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
39
See L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange,” in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) for an example of this approach.
40
I do not mean to suggest that impairment of social cognition is unique to personality disorders—impaired social cognition of various sorts is characteristic of autism, schizophrenia, and psychopathy, among others. But a personality disorder is, in the first instance, a certain kind of difficulty with navigating the social world.
41
See M.S. Gazzaniga, The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); and “The Split Brain in Man” Scientific American 217 (1967), pp. 24–29.
42
More specifically, the picture is flashed for an interval of less than one-quarter of a second. This ensures that there is no time to saccade, so we can be sure that the picture is shown to just one hemisphere.
43
V.S. See Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Morrow, 1998).
44
Frankfurt notes in passing that humbug, as glossed by Max Black—a precursor to his own notion of bullshit—“may be accomplished by words or by deeds” (pp. 10–11). But it is not clear that this is meant to be a feature of bullshit as he construes it.
45
You could start out with a clear awareness of p, but still succeed in distracting yourself from that painful truth, without actually unseating your belief; or you could in implicating the contrary of p get yourself to question your previous confidence in p.
46
R. Larsen and D. Buss, Personality Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), p. 608. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, 1994.
47
Thanks to Tom Oltmanns for pointing this out to me.
48
See Personality Psychology and also Theodore Millon, Seth Grossman, Carrie Millon, Sarah Meagher, and Rowena Ramnath, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, Second Edition (Hoboken: Wiley, 2004).
49
The two disorders are thought to lie on a continuum, known as schizotypy, with schizophrenia. There is some evidence for genetic links among the three. Schizotypals are thought to be closer to schizophrenics.
50
Thanks to Tom Oltmanns for this point.
51
The sub-types I refer to in the foregoing are not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-IV. I lean heavily here on Personality Disorders in Modern Life, where they are recognized.
52
Indeed, insofar as the “fanatic paranoid” is just paranoid, he is not a bullshitter; it is really his narcissist streak that contributes the bullshit.
53
This story does not, I’m sorry to say, cover the apparent near absence of bullshit from paranoid personality disorder.
54
Thanks to Philip Robbins for helping me distinguish these two.
55
Many thanks to Tasmin Astor-Jack, Gary Hardcastle, Tom Oltmanns, and especially Philip Robbins for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
56
Even false humility or self-abnegation is bullshit precisely to the extent that we are meant to value the speaker as humble via the act of uttering something falsely humble or self-abnegating. But more on performative bullshit below.
57
That is, if you did accuse me of lying, I would rebut the charge by reminding you of what you already know, namely, my intention. As George Reisch has stressed in Chapter 3 of this volume, there’s more to bullshit than semantics.
58
The most curious cases within the letter of reference genre are cases in which the sort of bullshit offered is outside what is acceptable, not by being over the top but by violating the genre conventions. If one reads in a letter of reference that “Mortimer is like a cool breeze on a warm summer evening,” one’s reaction is “What sort of bullshit is this?,” suggesting that at the minimum it is the wrong sort of bullshit.
59
For that their own bullshit must suffice.
60
If we are tempted to go for evolutionary explanations, we might analogize bullshit to altruism and try to copy evolutionary explanations of altruism. Bullshit as biological adaptation, however, seems extraordinarily unlikely. I do not doubt that somewhere someone is writing up “The Function of Bullshit in a Hunter-Gatherer Society,” however; such is the way of bullshit.
61
The name of the store is altered to preserve anonymity; the pledge was still up on 19th April, 2006.
62
This is from http://www.ubc.ca/about/mission.html.
63
But suppose all universities are equally good, says one of my undergraduate philosophy students who has taken logic. Well, then, there is no particular reason to sort
them into the very best and the also-rans.
64
My remarks on performative bullshit owe much to John Austin’s classic, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962).
65
Examples can be multiplied: Canada, as a nation, seems to engage in performative courtesy-bullshit, according to which the universal belief (or claim) among Canadians that they are courteous is taken as evidence that they have been courteous in any given case: “No, sir, I cannot have been rude to you; I am Canadian.”
66
I do not know whether Bush is utterly insincere, although the smirk would indicate that he is. Leaving Bush aside, the insincerity of the American media, both right and left, is palpable. Could anyone maintain sincere outrage, night in and night out, for years the way our friends on Fox News and its rivals do? It’s not possible.
67
Thanks to Judy Segal for comments on the earlier draft. Thanks to the editors for relevant inspiration and detailed comments on earlier, shittier drafts.
68
Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 86.
69
William G. Perry, Jr., “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology,” Harvard College: A Collection of Essays by Members of the Harvard Faculty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1967), pp. 754–765; my conception of bullshitting differs from Perry’s “bull,” however, in that the intention isn’t quite the same.
70
Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 1:44 (referenced by volume and paragraph number).
71
Collected Papers, 5.407.
72
See for example Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 189–191.
73
On Bullshit, pp. 33–36.
74
Though not in the present volume.—Eds.
75
This chapter appeared originally in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 321–339. For comments on an earlier draft, I thank Malcolm Anderson, Annette Barnes, Jerry Barnes, Sarah Buss, Paula Casal, John Davis, Jon Elster, Cécile Fabre, Diego Gambetta, Grahame Lock, Ian Maclean, David Miller, Alan Montefiore, Michael Otsuka, Lee Overton, Derek Parfit, Rodney Peffer, Mark Philp, Saul Smilansky, Alan Sokal, Hillel Steiner, Tracy Strong, and Arnold Zuboff.
76
As Diego Gambetta has pointed out to me, a mechanism merits mention that is different from the “sunk cost” one that figures above. You can be so happy that you’ve got something (after whatever amount of labour, or lack of it, you’ve expended) from someone who is reputed to be terrific that you overvalue it. In both mechanisms you misat-tribute the pleasure of getting something to the quality of the text you got it from.
77
His essay begins as follows: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share” (p. 1).
78
Frankfurt himself cites the OED, but mainly with respect to meanings and uses of the word ‘bull’: he touches on its definition of “bullshit” only in its use as a verb. I disagree with his discussion of the entries he cites, but it would be an imposition on the reader’s capacity to endure tedium to explain why.
79
Four differences between the kinds of bullshit that exercise Frankfurt and me are listed in footnote 26 below. The import of those differences will emerge in due course, but the reader will probably follow me better if he or she glances ahead now to footnote 26.
80
‘Trivial’ is very different from ‘insincere’, partly because it has weaker implications for the state of mind of the speaker or writer. I shall take 2 with the accent on ‘insincere’.
81
Frankfurt certainly believes that a person bullshits if he produces bullshit, since he thinks it a necessary condition of bullshit that it was produced with a bullshitting intention. He (in effect) raises the question whether that intention is also sufficient for bullshit at p. 9. But, although he doesn’t expressly pursue that question, his definition of ‘bullshit’ (pp. 33–34), and its elaboration (pp. 54ff), show that he holds the sufficiency view as well. It is because Frankfurt asserts sufficiency that he can say (pp. 47–48) that a piece of bullshit can be true.
82
See, further, the last two paragraphs of Section 4 below.
83
See, once again, the last two paragraphs of Section 4 below.
84
Does Frankfurt think that the phenomenon of “indifference to how things really are” is “vast and amorphous”? Surely not. Then what, again, is he asserting to be “vast and amorphous,” in his second preliminary remark, which I criticized two paragraphs back?
85
I suppose all lying is insincere talk, and I do not think all lying is bullshitting: at least to that extent, the OED-2 definition is too wide. But some lying is undoubtedly also bullshitting, so Frankfurt’s definition of activity-centred bullshit is too narrow.
86
Few liars care about nothing more than inducing false beliefs: that is the ultimate goal of only one of the eight types of liar distinguished by St. Augustine: see Frankfurt, p. 55.
87
See Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1965).
88
It is not, of course, the ultimate goal of that advertising, which is to cause (some of) its audience to buy what’s advertised.
89
Strictly, the orator’s oration is presented as an example of humbug, rather than bullshit. But it’s clear that Frankfurt would also say that he is a bullshitter, precisely in virtue of what makes him a purveyor of humbug, whatever difference between humbug and bullshit Frankfurt might want to affirm.
90
I do not think Frankfurt means to be stipulating otherwise: we are meant to agree with what he says about the orator on the basis of his initial, first-sentence of the passage, description of him. ‘Surely’, in the second sentence, would otherwise make no sense.
91
Although this is not, again (see the text to footnote 12 above), their ultimate goal.
92
See the final paragraph of this section.
93
Perhaps in contrast with Frankfurt’s sense, and certainly in contrast with what Frankfurt says about that sense (see pp. 47–48).
94
That question is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of this section.
95
For the record, I do not believe that Hegel was a bullshitter, and I am too ignorant of the work of Heidegger to say whether or not he was a bullshitter. But I agree with my late supervisor Gilbert Ryle that Heidegger was a shit. I once asked Ryle whether he had continued to study Heidegger after he had written a long review of Being and Time that was published in Mind. Ryle’s reply: “No, because when the Nazis came to power, Heidegger showed that he was a shit, from the heels up, and a shit from the heels up can’t do good philosophy.” (Experience has, alas, induced me to disagree with the stated Rylean generalization.)
96
This criterion of bullshit was devised by Professor Arthur J. Brown, to whom I am indebted.
97
In his wonderful spoof, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—which was published as a non-spoof in the thereby self-condemning Social Text 46–47 (Spring–Summer, 1996), pp. 217–252.
98
I am allowing that the unclarifiable may be productively suggestive, but I would not go as far as Fung Yu-lan does: “Aphorisms, allusions, and illustrations are . . . not articulate enough. Their insufficie
ncy in articulateness is compensated for, however, by their suggestiveness. Articulateness and suggestiveness are, of course, incompatible. The more an expression is articulate, the less it is suggestive - just as the more an expression is prosaic, the less it is poetic. The sayings and writings of the Chinese philosophers are so inarticulate that their suggestiveness is almost boundless” (A Short History of Chinese Philosophy [New York: Macmillan, 1960], p. 12).
99
Michael Otsuka comments insightfully on a familiar academic “case in which the two come apart: that is, in which someone is disposed to unclarifiable unclarity without aiming at it. Many academics (including perhaps an especially high proportion of graduate students) are disposed to produce the unclarifiable unclarity that is bullshit, not because they are aiming at unclarifiable unclarity, but rather because they are aiming at profundity. Their lucid utterances are manifestly unprofound, even to them. Their clarifiable unclear utterances can be rendered manifestly not profound through clarification. But their unclarifiably unclear utterances are unmanifestly not profound. Hence it is safe for them to think that they are profound. These utterances are not profound either because they are meaningful (in some subtle way, should there be one, that is consistent with their unclarifiable unclarity) but unprofound or because they are meaningless. They are unmanifestly not profound because it is hard to demonstrate that they are not profound, given their unclarifiability. By aiming at profundity, these academics tend to produce obscurity. But they do not aim at obscurity, not even as a means of generating profundity” (Private communication, 2nd September, 1999).
100
Let me now list some central differences between the two kinds of bullshit that I have distinguished:
101
Initially in the article referenced in footnote 23, and then more comprehensively in Intellectual Impostures, which he wrote with Jean Bricmont (London: Profile, 1998).
102
Consider this sentence from the work of Étienne Balibar: “This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history” (The Philosophy of Marx [New York: Verso, 1995]). If you read that sentence quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly, and you will then recognize it to be a wonderful paradigm of bullshit: yet I know Balibar to be an honest thinker.