Bullshit and Philosophy Part 1
On Bulls.h.i.tmania.
GEORGE A. REISCH and GARY L. HARDCASTLE.
It was just a book, after all-a book written by an Ivy League philosopher, Princeton's Harry G. Frankfurt, attempting to clarify a particular concept. That clarification would be achieved, moreover, in an ordinary way, at least for Ivy League philosophers. Philosophical authorities from the past would be cited, quoted, and interpreted; the flaws in their a.n.a.lyses pointed out; and suddenly a concept or term we thought we had understood would be revealed as in fact confused, vague, and murky. Then, at the work's intellectual crescendo, a new and clearer interpretation of the concept would emerge for other philosophers to consider and, eventually, tear apart once again. A day in the life of professional philosophy.
But this book was unusual. It was very small, even cute. Sitting on bookstore shelves and display tables, it could easily have been mistaken for a children's book, or a pocket-size collection of affirmations. The austere, cla.s.sical style of its cover and its t.i.tle might rather have suggested an ancient oration or a collection of lyric poems. But the words elegantly printed on the cover did not say "On Love," "On Poetics," or even, "On Truth (and its General Scarcity)." They said "On Bulls.h.i.t," and the public loved it.1 No other work by a living academic philosopher has been so well received. After twenty-six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, On Bulls.h.i.t is poised to sell more copies than any commercial philosophy book, ever. Yes, philosophically themed books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and G.o.del, Escher, Bach were hugely successful. But they were written for wide, popular audiences. On Bulls.h.i.t, in contrast, circulated for two decades exclusively among professional academic philosophers. Such experts in logic, conceptual a.n.a.lysis and (Frankfurt's specialty) moral theory usually have little interest in popular philosophical writings. All the more surprising, then, that on leaving the ivory tower for main street, On Bulls.h.i.t became such a hit.
Apropos for Today.
Why did it happen? One answer, easy and obvious, was suggested by comedian Jon Stewart, host of television's The Daily Show. Stewart interviewed Frankfurt after the book had become a bestseller. When Frankfurt explained his idea that, unlike the liar, "the bulls.h.i.tter doesn't really care whether what he says is true," the audience erupted in laughter and giggles. "I should warn you," Stewart said, leaning in to rea.s.sure his startled guest. "When they hear that word, it tickles them." "Especially coming from an Ivy League Professor," Frankfurt added.
True, that word does not often (or, really, ever) appear in the t.i.tle of academic treatises. But this book's appeal cannot be fully explained by its cover. Like a sweet little old lady giving someone the finger, the novelty of a minor obscenity quickly gets old. On Bulls.h.i.t is different. Even for those who may see the book as merely a joke, or a most appropriate gift for an annoying boss or co-worker, it is a joke that seems to have hit a cultural nerve.
As it turns out, Stewart also suggested a deeper, and better, answer. The book, he noted, is "very apropos for today." He did not elaborate; he just asked Frankfurt about its origin and joked about whether Frankfurt had his facts right or was just . . . never mind. Truth is, Stewart didn't need to explain why the book is apropos. There was, as the saying goes, an elephant in the room during that interview. It was the same elephant that haunted Frankfurt's other appearances on television and radio. On each occasion it lounged next to Frankfurt and his interviewer, waiting to be named, discussed, or at least acknowledged. Yet not even Stewart, who makes his living with clever, incisive parody of politics and its news coverage, mentioned explicitly why it is that On Bulls.h.i.t is "very apropos for today."
The elephant was, of course, a war. Like most others in United States' history, it sharply divided popular opinion. But this war was highly unusual, too. Its supporters as well as its critics came to agree that the official reasons for waging it, the ones put to the public, to Congress, and to the United States' allies, turned out to be . . . well, put it this way: the claims that once seemed to make the invasion of Iraq necessary and urgent-that Iraq possessed and planned to use nuclear and chemical weapons of ma.s.s destruction, that it had high-technology devices (such as remote controlled airplanes) for deploying those weapons, and that it was complicit in the attacks of September 11th, 2001-are now understood to be best described by that word.
That's why Stewart's audience seemed to shift uncomfortably in their seats as he and Frankfurt discussed bulls.h.i.t's indifference to truth and falsity, its hidden interest in manipulating belief and behavior, and the way one senses, as Frankfurt put it in his book, that the "bulls.h.i.tter is trying to get away with something." The audience had come to see Stewart and his writers skewer current political events, after all, so few would have missed the obvious referents-the absence of weapons of ma.s.s destruction in Iraq and the admission that sources for these claims were, in retrospect, not credible-that made the book so apropos. There is and will likely remain little agreement about who, exactly, got away with what, exactly, in the run-up to the war. But there is a widespread sense that United States citizens, soldiers, and allies have been taken in.2 These are troubling suspicions. They are unmentionable, if not unthinkable, for some, because they threaten cherished ideals about the political and moral integrity of the United States. That's why this elephant is difficult to acknowledge. One way to acknowledge it, though, is through the cushion of humor. Everyone in Stewart's audience had surely heard the joke that WMDs had finally been located: they were weapons of ma.s.s distraction, and they were stockpiled in Washington D.C. Others no doubt found a cushion in the small and inviting form of the book. It had just the right author-an Ivy League philosopher, expert in the kind of critical, balanced, and objective thinking that, as the invasion of Iraq drew near, seemed eclipsed by frightening memories of 9/11 and frightening talk of WMDs. And it struck a comforting tone-its cla.s.sical t.i.tle and book jacket portray bulls.h.i.t not as something alien, ma.s.sive, and menacing but rather as just one of the many human foibles that have puzzled thinkers and artists for centuries. Indeed, Frankfurt's philosophical detachment from contemporary events, necessitated in one respect by the essay's history, makes On Bulls.h.i.t apropos in an altogether different way. Call it bulls.h.i.t without tears. It allows readers to approach that elephant abstractly, generically, and as it recurs throughout the ages-without having to take up those disturbing questions that make the book so relevant in the first place.
The Year in Bulls.h.i.t.
When Stewart asked Frankfurt whether our culture occasionally cleans house by "truth-telling," or whether "it just keeps piling," Frankfurt thought carefully for a moment and scored another laugh with his audience-"I think it just keeps piling." Again, they knew what he meant. For in the wake of the missing WMDs, On Bulls.h.i.t appeared amidst an explosion of various kinds of fraud and deception. Some, such as ident.i.ty theft and eBay swindles, were enabled by new technologies of commerce, the Internet, and the demise of the photograph as a trustworthy doc.u.ment (see the neologism 'to photoshop'). Yet other kinds seem inexplicable without positing something like a cultural att.i.tude or climate in which truth has become-much as Frankfurt feared-less important than the demands of political, commercial, artistic, and even scientific success.
Evidence for this abounds in Laura Penny's Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bulls.h.i.t, which appeared on bookstore shelves shortly after On Bulls.h.i.t. Reflecting on years of headline scandals involving the Catholic Church, the mutual fund industry, and fallen corporate t.i.tans such as Enron and MCI, Penny observed that we live in an "era of unprecedented bulls.h.i.t production" (p. 1). What's especially striking is the sudden prominence of fraud within inst.i.tutions that have heretofore been very careful about what's fiction and what's not.
Like publishing. One of the more dramatic scandals surrounding truth and authenticity belonged to Oprah Winfrey and author James Frey, whose A Million Little Pieces Oprah recommended to her enormous, book-hungry audience as a true, inspirational story. After the book was exposed as largely fiction, Ms. Winfrey first defended the book (as nonetheless inspirational) but then dramatically retracted her support and scolded a remorseful, tearful Frey on national television for his betrayal of trust and truth. Within weeks, another celebrated novelist, J.T. Leroy, whose autobiographical writings detailed his rise from teen-age poverty and truck-stop prost.i.tution to New York-style literary success, took his whacks-once again-for peddling fictional stories as nonfiction memoirs. Unlike Frey, however, J.T. Leroy felt little remorse, or pain. In fact, he didn't exist. This fiction included the author himself, who turned out to be constructed by an aspiring female writer who for years posed successfully as the celebrated author's friend, confidant, and business agent. (When cameras were present, J.T. Leroy himself was impersonated by a boyish female friend wearing men's clothes and dark gla.s.ses.) The distinction between fiction and non-fiction has never been terribly popular in advertising circles. But professional advertising has at least always recognized the distinction between what is an advertis.e.m.e.nt and what is not an advertis.e.m.e.nt. Until recently, advertis.e.m.e.nts announce themselves on signs or billboards, and they remain confined between programming segments on radio or television-all of which helps us recognize them as advertis.e.m.e.nts. Two emerging trends, however, seem designed to blur this distinction and create advertis.e.m.e.nts that appear to be something else entirely. "Product placement" injects recognizable products or brands into movies or television shows, while "word of mouth advertising" takes the additional step of blurring the distinction between professional advertisers and ordinary citizens. On this model, individuals are compensated to "talk-up" specific products with others whom they may encounter in the course of ordinary life-at work, in the supermarket, at soccer practice, and so on. Here, advertising begins to seamlessly join ordinary life in ways that make it increasingly difficult to determine not only whether claims are true or false, but additionally whether a friend, colleague or family member is recommending a product because they honestly like it or because they are rewarded for recommending it.
Perhaps the most striking and surprising of bulls.h.i.t's successes are the inroads it has made into the worlds of science and scientific research. The philosopher Karl Popper held that science deserves respect precisely because it seeks to falsify its own claims-actively eliminating, so to speak, its own bulls.h.i.t. Yet that ideal seems to be fading behind headlines about scientific fraud and misconduct. Some of the more familiar examples: * Investigative panels determine that research purported to have established some result, taken as gospel by other labs, was fabricated.
* Pharmaceutical corporations generously fund scientific studies and publish only those that appear to doc.u.ment the safety of their products.
* Tenured university professors promote their religious convictions in the guise of scientific expertise.
* Political appointees at federal science agencies insert special wording in agency-publications designed to promote religious criticisms of established scientific knowledge.
There's nothing new in the appeal to science by individuals, corporations, or governments seeking to legitimate and advance their specific interests and plans. What is new is the notion that this is very easy to do-that legitimate scientific knowledge consists merely in whatever claims may be hyped through an effective public relations campaign, or published without controversy in a magazine or journal.
And then there's "that word." Though it has become as ordinary and common as these kinds of fraud and misrepresentation to which it usually refers, there remain some frontiers it has not yet conquered. While most academics (not those writing here, of course) shun its vulgarity, that politeness has not stopped the establishment of a new academic journal- Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication and Falsification-dedicated to a.n.a.lyzing and better understanding all such varieties of fraud and misrepresentation throughout modern culture. Others, if less polite, are more direct. The popular writer and radio commentator Al Franken has lately augmented the rules of his call-in quiz show "Spot the Weasel" with a new, fourth choice. Callers attempting to match wits with Franken and his guests can now identify recorded statements by politicians as either true, a lie, a weasel, or "BS." While Comedy Central's The Daily Show goes all the way with mentioning "bulls.h.i.t," the other major networks, as of this writing at least, continue to censor the word. Still, it's hard to miss. When Bright Eyes (aka Conor Oberst) sang "When the President Talks to G.o.d" on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, he asked, When the President talks to G.o.d.
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head.
When he kneels next to the presidential bed.
Does he ever smell his own [bleep]
When the President talks to G.o.d?
One could also ask whether these censors were effective. Did this audience, unlike Jon Stewart's, remain unaware that Oberst had again used "that word" to point to that elephant? The answer was at the end of Oberst's song, as he sang, "I doubt it. I doubt it."
It's this sense of despair and cynicism, finally, surrounding our era of bulls.h.i.t that most fundamentally explains the appeal of Frankfurt's book. No doubt, some of those who picked up On Bulls.h.i.t did so only for the novelty of reading an Ivy League philosophy professor expound on the topic. But for many that curiosity was connected to deeper worries about what lay ahead for a culture so knee-deep. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it when commenting on Ms. Winfrey's theatrical defense of truth, the scandal surrounding A Million Little Pieces was larger than the question of "whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes and n.o.ble." The genuine scandal is that "such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life." In an age of bulls.h.i.t, we all become politicians or white-collar criminals, able neither to confirm nor deny the veracity of what we see, or know, or think we know. "It's as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief," Rich suggested as he put his finger on the potentially enormous social and cultural costs of bulls.h.i.t's dominance (New York Times, 22nd January, 2006). For constant, nagging suspicions-that political leaders are consciously deceiving the public, that your favorite teacher is bent on partisan indoctrination, or that your family doctor, your senator, stockbroker, or product-recommending neighbor is in some corporation's pocket-would seem to be socially corrosive and destabilizing. The fear that simple, direct communication, free of hidden agendas and interests, is becoming impossible may have led many (including those television and radio producers who made Frankfurt a sudden celebrity) to seize Frankfurt as a popular guru with a prescient, prophetic warning-a Marshall McLuhan or Timothy Leary for the post-Enron, post-Iraq era. After all, the opening line of On Bulls.h.i.t, that "one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bulls.h.i.t," was written in 1985. Twenty years later, there's so much more.
The Dream of a Bulls.h.i.t-Free Culture.
If ours is a culture of bulls.h.i.t, then why was it that a philosopher took center stage as America's main bulls.h.i.t-a.n.a.lyzer? Why not a novelist or sociologist? We don't pretend to understand the vagaries of fashion and popular taste better than anyone else. But part of the answer, we think, is that Frankfurt is reviving a philosophical tradition. Philosophers have long sought to understand exactly how it is that certain statements or beliefs seem to deceive us, take us in, or make us not care very much whether they are true or false. Long before Frankfurt, that is, philosophers have been trying to determine exactly what bulls.h.i.t is and how it works its magic.
This may be a surprising claim. Philosophy itself, after all, is often regarded as part and parcel with the bulls.h.i.t of popular culture. The person who survives a personal tragedy by reflecting on the mysteries of the universe, someone might say, is "taking things philosophically." That's more polite and respectful, after all, than pointing out that she's distracting herself from unbearable loss or disappointment by almost absent-mindedly contemplating abstractions or pondering paradoxes-bulls.h.i.tting herself. A walk through the "philosophy" section at your local bookstore may confirm the impression that philosophers' interests are in that otherworldly arcana of the supernatural, the occult, and the "metaphysical."
Not so. Some of the most influential and enduring philosophy, dating back centuries, is devoted to identifying and understanding bulls.h.i.t. This is not so that it may be indulged in further, but so that we may liberate ourselves from its delusions and deceptions. The archetypal sage-in-a-toga Socrates, for example, is justly revered for dedicating his life to the search for persons who were truly wise, rather than interested merely in pa.s.sing on opinion, or hearsay, or beliefs of any sort bereft of evidence or simply good sense.
Twenty centuries later, the French polymath Rene Descartes started off the first of his six Meditations on First Philosophy with the rather brave recognition that so much of what he learned in the best French schools of the time was just plain false. "Some years ago I was struck," he wrote, "by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them."3 Descartes's remedy was a program of self-discipline that began with the rejection of those beliefs that fell short of certainty and, that completed, proceeded with the construction of a system of beliefs that was "stable and likely to last." It was a lonely, individualistic enterprise, but the very fact that Descartes recorded his progress in his Meditations reveals that it was something he believed others could, and ought, to do as well. It was, indeed, a common Enlightenment fantasy that everyone would follow along. The result would be a world with a lot less bulls.h.i.t, maybe none at all.
That vision was shared by the next century's David Hume (who otherwise shared precious little with Descartes, but it was enough). Hume held that all real knowledge took the form either of mathematics and similar "formal" sciences (which he termed "relations of ideas") or of natural science (for Hume, "matters of fact"), and he ended his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (a popularization, relatively speaking, of his two-volume A Treatise of Human Nature) with clear instructions for how to treat bits of speech that pretended to, but in fact did not, belong in either category: When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quant.i.ty or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.4 An Enlightenment call for book burning? Not quite. The books Hume would have us cast into the flames are books only in the most literal sense-they have pages, bindings, covers and words strung together into sentences and paragraphs. But they say nothing. Their offense, moreover, is that they are presented as though they do say something. That's the illusion, and it's perpetrated by the sophistry of printed words, pages, bindings, covers, blurbs, reviews, and the rest. Better to burn such sham books, such bulls.h.i.t, says Hume. Burn it all.
The Enlightenment pa.s.sion that carried Hume to the end of his Treatise continued to inspire in philosophers visions of a bulls.h.i.t-free world. You find them in the writings of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, though again you'd be hard-pressed to find much more in common among these philosophers or, for that matter, all the philosophers who have railed against bulls.h.i.t. The twentieth-century apotheosis of the anti-bulls.h.i.t crusade, however, is certainly the Vienna Circle, a collective of science and math-minded Germans and Austrians that shook a communal fist at the culture of their time and place, the intellectual free-for-all of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s (that culture, sadly, shook its much more powerful fist back, sending nearly all of the Circle flying to England and the United States by 1939). The Vienna Circle's preferred term for bulls.h.i.t was 'metaphysics', and so their 1929 manifesto, the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffa.s.sung ("Scientific World-Conception"), led off with the worry that "metaphysical and theologizing thought is again on the increase today, not only in life but in science."5 The "Scientific World-Conception" would be the antidote. It was an embrace of modern science and a scientific att.i.tude toward things, as well as the "new objectivity" (or neue Sachlichkeit) pursued by many artists, designers and architects in European culture.
The Vienna Circle's target was not the intellectual diversity that surrounded them but the putative parts of it that were presented (even accepted) as meaningful-indeed, profoundly meaningful-but in fact amounted to nothing. In 1932 the Circle's Rudolf Carnap criticized Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most prominent German-speaking philosopher of the time, on precisely these grounds.6 In his 1929 book What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger ruminated on the nature of Das Nichts (literally, "the nothing"), and inspired Carnap to figure out exactly what was wrong with such supposedly deep and insightful metaphysical inquiries. In statements like Heidegger's 'Das Nichts selbst nichtet' ("The nothing nothings"), Carnap concluded, there was only the appearance of a meaningful statement. Behind that appearance, there was Nichts, leading Carnap to suggest that metaphysicians were like "musicians without musical ability." Much as a tone deaf musician would likely misuse an instrument, metaphysicians misused language and presented things that could not be conveyed in words as though they could be. Carnap and others of the Circle argued and debated about just how dangerous this pa.s.sing off, this bulls.h.i.tting, was. But it was bulls.h.i.t all the same, and it met with a similar response: if one wanted to express an att.i.tude towards life, that's fine, but don't pa.s.s it off as science or something similar. Better to take up poetry, as Friedrich Nietzsche does, for example, in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (which Carnap cites, incidentally, with approval).
It's almost an intellectual tragedy that the Vienna Circle and its philosophical legacies, logical positivism and logical empiricism, came to be a.s.sociated with stodgy, dispa.s.sionate, irrelevant logic-chopping. That characterization occludes the Circle's rai-son d'etre, which was nothing less than the cultivation of a critical att.i.tude to concentrations of bulls.h.i.t in pseudoscience and philosophy that would, when taken up generally, reduce bulls.h.i.t in government, religion, the market, and everyday life. The Vienna Circle's members thought of themselves not simply as professional philosophers who happened to live and work in Vienna, but as the keepers of a tradition of liberal, Enlightenment thinking that had made Vienna the cradle of progressive housing programs, adult education, architecture, art and design. Oh, and progressive philosophy.
Which brings us back to Frankfurt's On Bulls.h.i.t. Perhaps by now it's clear that we see Frankfurt as the latest carrier of the anti-bulls.h.i.t torch in the Enlightenment Olympics, now several centuries running. In this light, the real significance of this bulls.h.i.tmania is that an age-old impulse within philosophy to establish itself as a cultural, and not just an academic, enterprise may finally have found the right formula and the right language. If so, the best explanation for the popular interest in On Bulls.h.i.t may have been that first one, about the novelty of the word itself. Indeed it may all come down to that word-understood not as a joke, but as a welcome point of connection between what goes on in philosophy seminar rooms and what goes on when the lights go out and philosophers join their fellow citizens in the marketplace, coffee shop, town hall, and voting booth.
How This Book Came to Be.
These are the considerations that led us to put together the collection of chapters that is Bulls.h.i.t and Philosophy. If it's true, as we suspect, that the popularity of Frankfurt's book signals a willingness among the public to see what philosophers have to say about bulls.h.i.t, then we ought, we thought, to a.s.semble some who were up to the task and tell them to let it rip. What that means, of course, will vary among our authors. That said, though, there are some things this book is not.
For example, the chapters that follow are not a guided tour through various varieties of bulls.h.i.t in modern culture. Nor does this book intend to equip you with a "bulls.h.i.t detector" that you might use to finally shut Uncle Ned up about the wisdom of tax cuts or the alien bodies the government is storing at Area 51. Nor do we offer a collection of indignant would-be radio commentators angling for a guest spot on Rush Limbaugh. What this book does, instead, is offer discussions, interpretations, and criticisms related to Frankfurt's essay and other philosophical work on bulls.h.i.t. Since On Bulls.h.i.t was originally written for academic philosophers, and our book is written for people intrigued by On Bulls.h.i.t but otherwise only tourists in the halls of philosophy, some chapters will help explain what philosophical essays like Frankfurt's aim to do and how they work. What does it mean, for example, to propose a "theory" of bulls.h.i.t, given that theories of this or that usually come from laboratories filled with test tubes and expensive instruments? What does it mean to articulate "the structure of a concept"-as Frankfurt intends to do for bulls.h.i.t?
In this regard, we could have called our book A Complete Idiot's Guide to Bulls.h.i.t. But we didn't. We're not complete idiots, and we have no desire to go to court for copyright infringement. More importantly, the success of On Bulls.h.i.t makes it plain that neither idiots nor Ivy League professors have a special claim to insights about bulls.h.i.t. If bulls.h.i.t is one of the defining marks of modern culture, then everyone has a stake in it, and everyone can benefit from thinking about it and understanding it. With this in mind, and recognizing that thought and understanding are the province of philosophers, we bring you Bulls.h.i.t and Philosophy.
Part I of Bulls.h.i.t and Philosophy, "To Shoot the Bull? Rethinking and Responding to Bulls.h.i.t," contains papers that say something about bulls.h.i.t itself-its causes, say, or its effects, or the reactions we have to it. One natural reaction to most forms of bulls.h.i.t, for example, accuses the bulls.h.i.tmania of our time (and books like this) of over-reaction. What's so bad about bulls.h.i.t?, one might ask.
Scott Kimbrough's "On Letting It Slide" takes up this question, noting that in many situations we gladly sacrifice our usual regard for truth for the sake of (among other things) the feelings of others, keeping the peace, or simply entertaining ourselves. Kimbrough reminds us that we let much (though not all) bulls.h.i.t slide, and perhaps we ought to.
For Conseulo Preti, avoiding bulls.h.i.t (a "menace," she argues, for which audience as much as manufacturer is to blame) might be a matter of emulating a life notably bulls.h.i.t-free; her "A Defense of Common Sense" offers the early twentieth-century a.n.a.lytic philosopher G.E. Moore as one such exemplary life.
George Reisch's "The Pragmatics of Bulls.h.i.t, Intelligently Designed" looks at bulls.h.i.t and pseudoscience to argue that bulls.h.i.t is not an indifference to truth, or meaning, as Frankfurt and Cohen suggest, but rather an attempt by the bulls.h.i.tter to run two conversations at once, one, as Reisch puts it, "concealed within or downplayed alongside the other." Reisch's approach, he claims, explains why we are often so tolerant of bulls.h.i.t.
But for Kenneth Taylor and Sara Bernal the interesting questions about bulls.h.i.t pertain less to its definition or our reaction to it than to the reasons for its ubiquity. Taylor's "Bulls.h.i.t and the Foibles of the Human Mind," for example, suggests that the inst.i.tutional bulls.h.i.t that surrounds us is abetted by mechanisms of reasoning deeply embedded in our shared cognitive architecture. Taylor's chapter ill.u.s.trates these well-established "foibles" of the human mind, but it also points the way to a culture less steeped in the bulls.h.i.t these foibles enable. We must, Taylor implores, marshal education to guard ourselves and our children against our own cognitive foibles, and we must deliver "the very means of public representation and persuasion" to a far wider and more diverse array of people. Sara Bernal, in contrast, is struck by a parallel between bulls.h.i.t and various pathologies of personality. In "Bulls.h.i.t and Personality" she argues that the extraordinary bulls.h.i.t of the disordered personality arises from an impaired social cognition and results, naturally, in hobbled social relations.
In "Performing Bulls.h.i.t and the Post-Sincere Condition," Alan Richardson unveils a variety of bulls.h.i.t yet unnoted in the chapters so far-"performative bulls.h.i.t," exemplified in Customer Service Pledges and Mission Statements. Responding to this bulls.h.i.t, Richardson suggests, is a matter either of producing "self-evident bulls.h.i.t that outperforms its covert compet.i.tors" (in the manner of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show) or of rethinking our inherited Enlightenment values.
Cornelis de Waal, on the other hand, sees bulls.h.i.t as a violation of a pragmatism-inspired "general epistemic imperative" to always "proceed upon the hope that there is a true answer to the questions we ask and act from a desire to find that answer." De Waal's "The Importance of Being Earnest: A Pragmatic Approach to Bulls.h.i.tting," thus argues that satisfying the imperative-avoiding bulls.h.i.t-is largely a matter of sharing the burden of inquiry with our community rather than shouldering it ourselves in the fashion of Descartes.
Part II, "The Bull by the Horns: Defining Bulls.h.i.t," contains four papers that, in one way or another, try to fix our target-that is, to define exactly what bulls.h.i.t is, so that we can more easily spot it, at least, and get rid of it, at best. Leading off this section is G.A. Cohen's cla.s.sic essay, "Deeper Into Bulls.h.i.t,"7 a direct response to Frankfurt's "On Bulls.h.i.t" (and the only chapter in this book not written especially for it). In "Deeper Into Bulls.h.i.t," Cohen suggests that Frankfurt's definition has missed the mark, or at least failed to attend to a kind of bulls.h.i.t char-acterizable not in terms of the intention of the person who produces it (per Frankfurt's approach) but in terms of its "unclarifiable unclarity." Many of this book's other chapters respond to Cohen's essay.8 The next three chapters shed light on this debate by bringing various other intellectual resources to the table. For Gary Hardcastle, the dinner guest is the anti-metaphysical thought of the Vienna Circle's Rudolf Carnap. Hardcastle's "The Unity of Bulls.h.i.t" argues that the anti-metaphysical program of Carnap and his fellow scientific philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s gives us a perspective that unites the sort of bulls.h.i.t identified by Frankfurt and Cohen.
Andrew Aberdein, by contrast, in his "Raising the Tone: Definition, Bulls.h.i.t, and the Definition of Bulls.h.i.t," calls upon Charles Stevenson's notion of a "persuasive definition" to help us place Frankfurt's definition of bulls.h.i.t in a wider context. Per his t.i.tle, Aberdein reaches back to the nineteenth century's Gottlob Frege to re-introduce the concept of tone into the debate about bulls.h.i.t.
And then, Hans Maes's and Katrien Schaubroeck's "Different Kinds and Aspects of Bulls.h.i.t" raises fundamental and critical questions for Frankfurt's definition of bulls.h.i.t (including questions about the moral status of bulls.h.i.t, but more on that below), considers Cohen's thoughts on bulls.h.i.t on this score, and raises the question of where pseudoscience belongs in the ever-lusher garden of bulls.h.i.t.
Though it has been enjoying its recent foray through literary and philosophical treatises under its own name, bulls.h.i.t lives and breaths in the world off the page. Our final section, then, is "It's All Around Us: Bulls.h.i.t in Politics, Science, Education, and the Law." In On Bulls.h.i.t, Frankfurt suggested that democracy, in demanding of everyone an opinion on everything, inadvertently promotes bulls.h.i.t. Mark Evans's chapter, "The Republic of Bulls.h.i.t, Or: Were Plato, Strauss and Those Guys Right All Along?" examines this suggestion among historically significant criticisms of democracy.
Similarly, Vanessa Neumann's "Political Bulls.h.i.t and the Stoic Story of the Self" provides a detailed account of the sort of bulls.h.i.t one is apt to find in international politics. She suggests that we can better understand and manage such bulls.h.i.t if we attend to Stoic theories of self and the role narrative plays in persons' lives.
In "Bulls.h.i.t at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems," Heather Douglas treats us to examples of bulls.h.i.t drawn from the skeptical side of the debate over global warming. She shows how incomplete information and, perhaps more significantly, mistaken understandings of scientific objectivity can serve the ends of bulls.h.i.t.
David Tietge is concerned to defend rhetoric, understood as the study of language and the role it plays in our lives, from its all-too-frequent a.s.sociation with bulls.h.i.t. His "Rhetoric Is Not Bulls.h.i.t" makes the case that a resuscitation of rhetoric in the college and even the high-school cla.s.sroom may be precisely the antidote to bulls.h.i.t. Finally, Bulls.h.i.t and Philosophy closes with an chapter from Steve Fuller, fresh from his role as an expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, et al., concerning the place of Intelligent Design in the ninth-grade public school cla.s.sroom. Fuller's wide-ranging chapter, "Just Bulls.h.i.t," draws upon a wealth of examples from popular culture, the history of science, and jurisprudence to call attention to the threat of bulls.h.i.t in anti-bulls.h.i.t programs themselves.
As we noted, Frankfurt's On Bulls.h.i.t did not initiate an interest among philosophers in bulls.h.i.t; that interest had been there for centuries, if not millennia. But the book's popularity did manage to remind philosophers and non-philosophers alike of academic philosophy's special relation to bulls.h.i.t. Our hope, of course, is not just that these chapters help others learn and think about bulls.h.i.t, but that they also remind philosophy itself that its links to popular culture are much closer and mutually rewarding that most of us realize. To borrow from a tale told here by Scott Kimbrough, there is something right in the common reaction-"that's bulls.h.i.t"-many have to academic philosophy. But that's not because philosophy produces it, it's because philosophy is one of our best defenses against it.
I.
To Shoot the Bull?
Rethinking and Responding to Bulls.h.i.t.
1.
On Letting It Slide.
SCOTT KIMBROUGH.
I have a very frank six-year-old daughter. Recently, upon seeing our house painter puffing away his break, she shouted that smoking is unhealthy-loudly enough to be heard through the closed window. Mortified, my wife and I immediately shushed her. She doesn't yet understand why anyone should be offended by an accurate point of information. But there are many offensive truths. William Ian Miller notes the danger of indiscreet truth-telling in his remarkable book, Faking It (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): Truth is not accepted as a defense in such cases; in fact, one of the chief themes of this book is that truth is an offense, seldom, if ever, a defense. (p.142) Miller's reminder that truth isn't always welcomed can help solve a puzzle posed by Harry Frankfurt in On Bulls.h.i.t: The problem of understanding why our att.i.tude toward bulls.h.i.t is generally more benign than our att.i.tude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (p. 50) Frankfurt raises this issue because he worries about the damaging consequences of a declining respect for truth. Bulls.h.i.tting, in his view, const.i.tutes a greater threat to truth than lying. For unlike bulls.h.i.tters, liars at least care what the truth is. Frankfurt defines bulls.h.i.t as a lack of concern for truth, writing that "indifference to how things really are . . . [is] the essence of bulls.h.i.t" (p.34). Consequently, if we really care about truth, Frankfurt reasons that we should condemn bulls.h.i.tters even more than liars. But of course that's not what happens: more often than not, we let bulls.h.i.t slide. Frankfurt wonders why this is the case, though he doesn't try to explain it himself. This essay takes up Frankfurt's unanswered question.
Tolerable Bulls.h.i.t.
a.s.sume Frankfurt's definition of bulls.h.i.t is correct: bulls.h.i.t results from a lack of concern for truth. Now put that definition together with Miller's insight that truth is not always our primary goal in conversation. It follows that much of what we say on a daily basis is bulls.h.i.t. But does it also follow that we should change our ways? Not always. Far from merely tolerating bulls.h.i.t, we often value it as an indispensable resource.
For example, Miller offers a trenchant a.n.a.lysis of the social point of apology. We teach our children to apologize by forcing them to say things they don't really mean. Truth, in this context, is the last thing we want. A true description of my son's state of mind after hitting his sister would go something like this: "I hurt her because I wanted to." In place of this accurate account, we teach him to say that he's sorry. Perhaps someday he'll mean it. In the meantime, he at least learns that hitting will not be tolerated. Plus, his sister gets to see him humbled for his wrongdoing. Miller explains the dynamic: Q: What is the substance of the satisfaction to the wronged person in an unfelt apology? A: The pain it costs the apologizer to give it.... Apology is a ritual, pure and simple, of humiliation. (Faking It, p. 88) In characterizing apology as a humiliation ritual, Miller by no means rejects or discourages it. Quite the contrary, he sees that injurers must pay for their wrongs or they will never learn to stop committing them. Like many other cases of moral instruction, the teaching of the art of apology sacrifices truth for more immediately worthy goals, including peace and character building.
Miller doesn't mention what coerced recitations he visits upon the child who receives the apology, but in my house the victim is forced to say she accepts the apology. She doesn't mean it, either. But the message of the exchange is clear: hostilities are at an end, and further escalation will not be tolerated. Hopefully someday they will learn to settle their differences civilly, even sincerely. As Miller notes, however, it's foolish to hold out for sincerity in the short term. If you have any doubts about that, consider the mother who told me that she does not make her son apologize unless he means it. I think it's fair to antic.i.p.ate that he will not learn to mean it on his own whenever proper manners dictate. Nor will he learn the importance of faking it when necessary, as remains indispensable well into adulthood. Marital spats would more frequently escalate to divorce if it weren't for faked apologies. Public figures who make "offensive" remarks must master the form of apology as a way of acknowledging, if not fully embracing, the legitimacy of the offended parties' perspective.
Learning when and how to apologize is one chapter in the book of good manners. Like apology, politeness in general sacrifices truth for peace and comfort. Miller again astutely points out both the fakeness and the virtue of politeness: Politeness doesn't need an excuse; fakery is openly admitted to lie at the structural core of the virtue. Politeness is immune to many forms of hypocrisy because a certain benign form of hypocrisy is precisely its virtue . . . at relatively little cost, it saves people from unnecessary pain in social encounters. (Faking It, p. 35) Saving people pain often deserves more importance than a concern for truth. If we strictly apply Frankfurt's definition of bulls.h.i.t, according to which bulls.h.i.t manifests an indifference to truth, it follows that bulls.h.i.t const.i.tutes the greater part of civility.
Not all bulls.h.i.t is motivated by delicate manners, however. Take advertising. We tend to tolerate bulls.h.i.t advertising, and it isn't out of politeness. One reason for our acceptance is entertainment value. For example, the advertis.e.m.e.nts during the Super Bowl famously receive as much attention as the game itself. And it's not just bulls.h.i.t advertising that pleases. The student newspaper at my university ran an editorial decrying communist professors on campus. The piece could hardly have been more silly, despite the serious intentions of the author. As I discovered in cla.s.s discussions, many of the students were delighted by the piece because it was bulls.h.i.t. They thought it was funny, and accordingly preferred it to a soberly argued treatment of a relevant topic.
Like politeness, however, entertainment cannot be the full explanation of our tolerance of bulls.h.i.t. Public relations draws on many of the same tricks as advertising, but frequently without the entertainment value. A deeper explanation of our tolerance for bulls.h.i.t in advertising and public relations is our respect for the ends they serve. We understand the importance of making a buck, and don't begrudge the professional the most effective means to do so. When a public relations consultant presents Exxon as a leader in protecting the environment, or a political hack spins a legislative failure as a successful compromise, they're just doing their jobs. Were we in their place, we would want the same dispensation.
And it turns out many of us are in their place. A huge proportion of the professions involve selling or representing something. It's not always about greed and power, either. Even those whose efforts serve loftier goals than bare profit-like teachers, fund-raisers for charity, and military recruiters-would be hobbled if they eschewed bulls.h.i.tting in favor of unembellished truth-telling. Furthermore, when faced with compet.i.tion, to insist on truth when it doesn't sell is not just naive, it's a losing strategy. To forego the use of bulls.h.i.t is thus to settle for being a loser. We prefer winners to losers. And we don't want to be losers ourselves by forbidding ourselves a winning gameplan.
However much we respect effectiveness, we don't allow any and all means to an end, even when the end is agreed on all sides to be a valuable one. We outlaw outright lying, even in advertising. How do we draw the line? Why do we sympathize with the liar's victim, but not the bulls.h.i.tter's? Look at it this way: we can either sympathize with bulls.h.i.tters or their victims. The bulls.h.i.tters have a job to do and skillfully apply the most effective means to do so. The victims, in contrast, allow themselves to be mentally lazy and blinded by desire. They're suckers. We may pity suckers, but we certainly don't respect them. Our contempt for suckers reflects the judgment that anyone taken in by a line of bulls.h.i.t deserves their fate.
Intolerable Bulls.h.i.t.
Bulls.h.i.t doesn't always get a warm reception. That's because indifference to truth frequently causes trouble. Think of the last time you "called bulls.h.i.t." It probably wasn't about something you were prepared to tolerate. In ordinary use, the charge of bulls.h.i.t most commonly comes up when we can't be bothered to take something seriously, or when we're treated unfairly.
We often call bulls.h.i.t when faced with something we regard as ridiculous, irrelevant, or misguided. We thereby declare an intention to ignore the speaker-to refuse to take his efforts at justification seriously. I can sadly provide an example in which I was the target of such an accusation. I presented a talk ent.i.tled "The Structure and Function of Bulls.h.i.t" at a "philosophy slam," which is an open discussion guided by a speaker who defends a controversial position against the crowd. These events take place in the back room of a coffeehouse and bar popular with the counter-cultural set. One of the attendees told me afterwards of a brief conversation he had with a few of the regulars who were outside for a smoke. They asked him what was going on inside. Without mentioning the topic, he told them it was a philosophy slam. Their response: "That's bulls.h.i.t." Such uses of the term indicate an unwillingness to listen based on a disdainful expectation that nothing is to be gained from doing so.
Disdain gives way to indignation when bad reasons affect more than just our patience. Because of its tenuous connection to truth, bulls.h.i.t makes a poor justification for important decisions. Bulls.h.i.t reasons are bad reasons, and we feel indignant when mistreated for bad reasons. Consider the song "Shut up" by The Black Eyed Peas. After a verse describing a typical happy courtship, the male singer recounts the decline of the relationship while the female singer provides the commentary: But then something got out of hand.
You started yelling when I was with friends, Even though I had legitimate reasons.
Bulls.h.i.t!
You know I have to make them dividends.
Bulls.h.i.t!
The girlfriend has a point. Her man is full of s.h.i.t and she knows it. (Incidentally, the terms "bulls.h.i.t" and "full of s.h.i.t" correlate: to say that someone is full of s.h.i.t is an informal (albeit circular) way to explain why what they say is bulls.h.i.t, and a warning to expect more of the same.) The problem, from her perspective, is that he's hiding his true motivations. If he truly loves her, she feels, he should want her to be with him. Even if there is some truth to his "legitimate reasons," he's ditching her when he could include her. She feels indignant because her boyfriend's effort to "explain" adds insult-the contemptuous judgment that he can manipulate her-to the injury of leaving her behind. She calls bulls.h.i.t to express her indignation, and to warn him that she won't stick around if such treatment continues.
Now imagine you get pa.s.sed over for a promotion at work. The boss tells you that your candidacy was given careful consideration, but they were looking for more of a proactive team-builder-someone to bring fresh ideas into the organization. But you can't help noticing that the less qualified person hired for the job came over from the company where the boss used to work. The boss's rationalization of the decision is bulls.h.i.t. The reasons she provided are not completely irrelevant to the task of justifying her decision, but they miss the mark badly both because they are not the real reasons for the decision and because, even if they were, you judge that they shouldn't be given as much weight as your more extensive experience and qualifications. Her reasoning has the form of rational argument, but it falls badly short of genuine justification. The case fits Frankfurt's definition because the boss's rationalization shows a lack of concern for the truth, in that the boss fails to communicate the true reasons for the decision. But the deeper problem here is that, even if the boss has sincerely convinced herself of the truth of her argument, the reasons given don't justify the decision. Maddeningly, however, there is nothing you can do about it. Except to say that it's bulls.h.i.t.
Political speech deals with issues that affect our lives in ways we have even less control over than our own promotion at work. George Orwell's work makes this problem a central theme. His novel Nineteen Eighty-Four imaginatively ill.u.s.trates the danger of unchecked bulls.h.i.t from government authority. He also addressed the problem in a non-fiction essay, "Politics and the English Language."9 In that essay, Orwell decries the decline of the English language, and blames politics for it. Political writing must be bad writing, he argues, because only bad writing could "justify" the actions of government: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on j.a.pan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. (p. 136) Orwell was referring to mid-twentieth-century times, but the situation has not improved. Our taste for euphemism continues to be fed with terms like "smart bomb," "collateral damage," "surgical strike," and "friendly fire," which are all euphemistic ways to talk about killing. A recent cable news segment ent.i.tled "Fighting Terror" showed an American fighter jet pulverizing an Iraqi hut. It struck me that "terror" was an odd description of a hut, and that nothing could be more terrifying than a dive-bombing fighter jet.
Why do we tolerate this kind of bulls.h.i.t? The reasons scouted in the previous section continue to have their weight: politeness makes us hesitant to puncture the poses of authority, inflated rhetoric makes for more entertaining news programming, and effective waging of war requires rhetorical posturing. History shows that these reasons often fall short of justifying our toleration. There are also less respectable reasons at work. Orwell offers one of them: [Modern writing] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. (p. 134) The same attraction underlies widespread acceptance of such writing. Absorbing and repeating what we hear is much easier than thinking about it. It's easier for media outlets to repeat government spin than to seek a more direct description of the kind Orwell favors. Plus, in a media market, consumers would probably not sustain a news program following Orwell's principles. Finally, if bulls.h.i.t is the language of power, as Orwell's a.n.a.lysis suggests, then to go along with bulls.h.i.t is to go along with power. Power can be very persuasive.
The problem is that the powerful do not always use their force of persuasion in ways that serve one's own values and interests. Thus the need for vigilance against bulls.h.i.t: to be effective in pursuing your own goals, you have to avoid being taken in by a line of bull that, upon examination, works against those goals. The danger here is the same whether you fall for the bulls.h.i.t of others or start believing your own. Consider the advertising case. An effective advertiser rigorously gathers demographic and psychographic data about potential customers, as well as studying compet.i.tors' products and tactics. If bulls.h.i.t works in a given ad, it's because of its effect on the customer, not on the advertiser. The advertiser should know why and how the ad works rather than buying the pitch himself or herself. The most effective bulls.h.i.tters know the truth, including the truth about when to bulls.h.i.t and when to give the straight s.h.i.t. The instrumental effectiveness of bulls.h.i.t thus presupposes and exploits the instrumental effectiveness of truth: to enjoy the benefits of bulls.h.i.tting without succ.u.mbing to the dangers of being bulls.h.i.tted, a lively concern for the truth must be constantly maintained.
Indeed, one of the biggest dangers of bulls.h.i.t in politics is that politicians will come to believe their own bulls.h.i.t. When they do, their policies often fail because public support alone does not make a policy work when implemented. The same is true at the individual level. Convincing yourself of the excellence of your plans does not suffice for success (notwithstanding the advice of motivational speakers). At this point, however, it's necessary to consider how it's even possible to believe one's own bulls.h.i.t. For bulls.h.i.t, as Frankfurt understands it, requires both a bulls.h.i.tter, who intentionally disregards the truth, and a potential dupe. How can a single person play both roles?
Bulls.h.i.t and Self-Deception.
The paradox of believing your own bulls.h.i.t parallels the paradox of self-deception. If a deceiver by definition knows that the belief he induces is false, it's hard to see how he can convince himself that the selfsame belief is true. Reflection on the parallel between self-deception and believing your own bulls.h.i.t sheds light on the debate between Cohen and Frankfurt about the nature of bulls.h.i.t. Indeed, one man's self-deception is another man's bulls.h.i.t.