It’s not very often you’ll have the
chance to read a book in less than half an hour and finish feeling that you’ve
learned more than might have been gained from hours poring over scholarly texts.
In choosing bullshit for an extended conceptual analysis philosopher Harry G.
Frankfurt has provided us with a gem of a book, one which will be an invaluable
guide to reading any material that is designed to persuade, convince, or cajole
us in to having particular beliefs. The book is small format: a mere67 pages,
nine by fourteen centimeters. But it punches above its weight when it comes to
impact factor.

"One of the most salient
features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit." (p. 1).

With this announcement Frankfurt not
only identifies his target as misleading argument, he states an intention to
attempt a conceptual sanitation of what is, after all, a dirty word. A clear
understanding of the nature of bullshit is not an end in itself, but a way of
spotting obfuscation, deliberate confusion, and misrepresentation. The reason
this is so difficult, contends Frankfurt, is that we have no theory of
bullshit. We are surrounded by it, but we simply don’t recognize it.

Frankfurt’s contribution is to
distinguish bullshit from lying, a task which he achieves with singular
clarity. The liar has an interest in the idea of truth. He acknowledges the
truth, but he doesn’t tell the truth. By lying, he at least accepts that there
is something that can be regarded as true. The bullshitter has no such regard. The
bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth of his statements, his sole concern is
to distract you from that, to confuse and confound. What the bullshitter has in
common with the liar is wanting you to believe he is telling the truth. But in Frankfurt’s
argument the bullshitter has a much broader focus.

"The mode of creativity (of
the bullshitter) …is more expansive, and independent with more spacious
opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play." (p. 52-3).

The bullshitter is involved in a
program of obfuscation, not merely the substitution of truth for lies.

Humbug is the nearest equivalent
concept to bullshit to have received serious analysis, in Max Black’s The
prevalence of humbug. Black’s analysis is considered wanting, but it
provides a useful platform for Frankfurt’s own work. There is also a discussion
of Augustine’s eight types of liars, only one of which, compulsive lying for
the sake of it, was acknowledged by Augustine to be ‘true lying’. Such a
commitment would, in Frankfurt’s view, disqualify the ‘pure liar’ from a claim
to status as a bulshitter, because the pure liar needs to acknowledge the truth
in order to tell lies. The bullshitter would have no such concern.

Why is there so much bullshit? asks
Frankfurt. His answer is that there may not be any more bullshit now than in
other periods. We have no real way of knowing. But the growth in
communications, and the increasing need for people to speak on subjects on
which they know nothing is prima facie grounds for believing that there is more
bullshit these days than there used to be.

In the final few pages Frankfurt
reveals what may have been an underlying motivation for paying so much
attention to bullshit. He laments the displacement of ‘correctness’ (a point of
view underwritten by a realist ontology) by ‘sincerity’ (the view that our
nature is a more reliable guide to truth than ‘facts’). Put this way it is
perhaps easy to agree with Frankfurt’s conclusion that ‘sincerity is bullshit’.
There are, of course, other much more respectable ways of disputing realist
ontology than the assertion of personal knowledge, but Frankfurt is prepared to
rest his case on a critique of those who claim for sincerity a position
formerly occupied by a belief in objectivity.

The value of Frankfurt’s book is
his careful analysis of ‘bullshit’, and the contrast he draws with lying. There
will likely be more debate over the application of his concept to wider
arguments in science, theory and philosophy.

 

© 2005
Tony O’Brien

 

Link: Publisher’s
website for book

 

Tony
O’Brien, M Phil., Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of
Auckland

Categories: Philosophical