Bullshit and Philosophy Part 3
Recall that bulls.h.i.t of both the types I've identified may be directed to others or to oneself. I'll lay out examples of other-directed bulls.h.i.t first, then move on to the self-directed variety.
Other-Bulls.h.i.tting. I'll start with the first type of bulls.h.i.t I identified, in which the bulls.h.i.tter contrives some indirect means of implicating, by word or deed, the contrary of the target truth that she would like to hide. The glib charm typical of the antisocial provides an especially dangerous example. Her charm tends to lead people to believe that she is a nice person, while she is in fact a dangerous, nasty piece of work. She does not come right out and say "I am not a nasty piece of work," of course; her charm is what leads her hapless victims to believe that, and to implicitly trust her. This makes it easier for her to take advantage of them.
The suicidal gestures of borderline personalities provide a second example. Consider the standard case, in which a suicide attempt is provoked by a real or imagined threat of abandonment by a romantic partner. With this maneuver, the borderline seeks to make her partner believe something like: my relationship with you in particular is so important to me that life without it is not worth living for me. The partner who believes that would presumably be less likely to leave. The truth is that, since borderlines often vacillate between idealizing a romantic partner and holding him in contempt, the person who is supposedly so important as to be utterly indispensable may be ridiculed and rejected shortly thereafter. And the relationship is not likely to last; the partner will likely soon be replaced with another, with whom the pattern will be repeated.
Histrionic personality disorder is marked by "shallow opinions." A typical histrionic may, for instance, declare a certain writer to be brilliant, despite having little knowledge of her work. Easy come, easy go: she'll relinquish the opinion before too long. In an unwary audience, such declarations might implant the belief that the histrionic is a deep thinker, while she is in fact the opposite.
The case of narcissism is a bit trickier than the others in the Erratic cl.u.s.ter, but a certain sub-type of the disorder, compensating narcissism, provides an ill.u.s.tration. While the pure narcissist has a genuinely high opinion of herself, this type seeks to conceal a core of low self-esteem with a charade of superiority. She will, for instance, tirelessly inflate and call attention to her own accomplishments, but unlike the pure narcissist she lacks the conviction that they amount to such a big deal. She depends on accolades from others to counteract her own self-doubt. Thus her charade of superiority, her demands for obeisance and special treatment, can be seen as indirectly implicating the contrary of the painful target truth: that she is not such a grand personage. She generally has some glimmering of her own modus operandi; this painful truth is something she tends to be dimly aware of.
As for bulls.h.i.t of the distracting variety, the s.e.xual provocativeness of the histrionic furnishes a clear ill.u.s.tration. By such means as revealing clothing, body language, eye-batting, veiled invitations, flattery, or coy double-entendres, the histrionic distracts attention from her own flaws. The t.i.tillation she achieves in this way serves to blind her audience to the fact that she is getting more than her rightful share of attention-more than she would get if her audience saw things clearly. Unfortunately for the histrionic, this sort of behavior can make her especially vulnerable to s.e.xual victimization.
Self-Bulls.h.i.tting. I'll begin, again, with the falsehood-implicating type, which in the case of self-bulls.h.i.tting is the less common variety. There is a type of paranoid known as a fanatic who is a close cousin of the compensating narcissist. They are described as having "run hard into reality," a collision which shatters their narcissistic self-image. They cope with the pain that results by retreating into fantasy: they portray themselves as superheroes pitted against an evil world. Their target, then, is the fact that they are not extraordinary. The fantasies they construct contain implicit denials of this fact. The construction of such a fantasy can also distract them from a from harsh reality; thus both types of bulls.h.i.t are perhaps combined in this instance.
The self-bulls.h.i.tter excels particularly at self-distraction. Two types of avoidant personalities supply ill.u.s.trations. The phobic species of avoidant combines "pure" avoidant with some dependent features. Being dependent, she invests her trust and her sense of self in some significant other, and lives in terror of the loss of that relationship. The phobic strategy is to displace her anxiety from its true object-the significant other, possible loss of same-to some concrete object or situation: the dog next door, elevators, drowning, what have you. This distracts her from her real problem.
The self-deserting avoidant deals with her intense social discomfort by retreating into fantasy. This allows her to escape from immediate discomfort, and when the strategy is deployed generally it allows her to escape herself, which she finds to be pathetically inadequate. Strangely, such avoidants are generally aware to some extent of using such tactics, and their use of fantasy gradually becomes less effective in shielding them from what they believe to be the painful truth of their inadequacy. Like the use of fantasy found in the fanatic paranoid, this one arguably combines both types of bulls.h.i.t.
Self-distracting is also popular with dependent personalities. For instance, in the interest of securing and maintaining a valued relationship, dependents of an accommodating sort contrive to distract themselves from any doubts or grievances they might have about the relationship, which would lead to inner conflict. So distracted, they are able to put a happy face on things, and avoid acknowledging the conflict.
Finally, one function of the obsessive-compulsive's preoccupation with details, rules, lists, and the like is to distract her from her own anxiety about big-picture issues that might be the source of legitimate concern. By immersing herself in details, she distracts from larger issues: the compa.s.s of her anxiety is only as big as the niggling little thing she's presently focused on. In this way she can lose the dangerous forest for the (relatively unthreatening) trees.
Patterns in Personality Bulls.h.i.t.
Here are some things to notice in this survey. I have identified an example of bulls.h.i.tting for eight of ten disorders-multiple examples, in some cases. The bulls.h.i.t-strategems I have described are, in most of the foregoing cases, defining characteristics of the personality disorder in question. That is, the glib charm of the antisocial, the provocativeness and shallow opinions of the histrionic, the obsessive-compulsive's devotion to rules and details, etc., are all what you might call first-rank symptoms of personality disorders, and if I am right they may be understood in terms of bulls.h.i.t. In the remaining cases the strategems identified are defining characteristics of one or more sub-types of the basic disorder.51 Thus, while "each of us contributes his share" (On Bulls.h.i.t, p. 1) to the collective bulls.h.i.t of our culture, as Frankfurt says, pathological personalities are notably reliable and generous in their contributions.
However, bulls.h.i.tting is notably absent from most of the Eccentric cl.u.s.ter. I can see no examples of either type, self- or other-directed, in the behavior of the schizoid or the schizotypal. 52 Happily, plausible explanations of this gap are not far to seek. First, in the case of the schizoid at least, there is a marked flatness of affect: she comes across as cold or emotionally absent. In all the cases of bulls.h.i.t I've just described, the bull-s.h.i.tter is motivated by a desire to avoid the pain she would feel upon meeting her target truth full in the face. If you lack the capacity to feel that sort of pain, then you have no motive for bulls.h.i.tting. Second, successful bulls.h.i.tting requires a certain level of "mindreading" facility: you need to have some capacity to predict what effects your words and deeds will have on the beliefs of your audience, and you need to choose words and deeds that will have the desired effect. Schizoids and schizotypals may lack the requisite mindreading facility: they may be too socially disengaged to bulls.h.i.t.53 Bulls.h.i.tting of others is most characteristic of the Erratic cl.u.s.ter, while self-bulls.h.i.tting is most characteristic of the Anxious cl.u.s.ter. The other-bulls.h.i.tting is more likely to be of the falsehood-implicating type, while the self-bulls.h.i.tting is more likely to be of the distracting type. This is not terribly surprising, since people don't like getting bulls.h.i.tted by others, and those in the Erratic cl.u.s.ter are easiest to dislike. That said, remember that a person with a personality disorder is afflicted; harmful and infuriating as her bulls.h.i.t may be, it is also a personal tragedy for her.
Perfect Partners: Bulls.h.i.t and Distorted Social Perceptions The paranoiac imagines threats and insults where there are none; the histrionic inhabits a world full of ardent admirers; the borderline sees abandonment on the horizon; the schizoid seems not to understand praise and blame. Each personality disorder is marked by some distortion or other abnormality in the perception of the intentions, desires, and feelings of others-of social reality. Now, if your perceptions are distorted or otherwise inaccurate, or very dim, then you will be farther from the truth than you would be if you saw things clearly. Meanwhile, the bulls.h.i.tter may put distance between herself and the truth intentionally, depending on how aware she is of her target and her interest in obscuring it. Thus impaired perceptions and bulls.h.i.t both serve to distance one from the truth. Since both are characteristic of personality disorders, it's natural to wonder whether these two ways of distancing oneself from the truth somehow reinforce each other. I think there is reinforcement in both directions.
Poor social perception can increase one's opportunities for relatively low-effort bulls.h.i.tting, as follows. Owing to distortions, gaps, and other problems with her perception, the disordered personality simply sees less of social reality than normal people do. Remember that on my story, the bulls.h.i.tter may be clearly aware of her target, dimly aware, or quite unaware, and all grades in between. Recall also that in the first case the bulls.h.i.tter is just like the liar in having a deceptive intention (though her method is different). Unless you are given to intentional deception, it is easier to bulls.h.i.t if you are not aware of your target than if you are. For if you are not aware of it, you can frame distractions and ways of implicating the contrary without feeling the sting of conscience that willful deception would ordinarily provoke. (That is, anyhow, what it would provoke in the case of other-bulls.h.i.tting. In the case of self-bulls.h.i.tting, awareness of your target would tend to provoke cognitive dissonance, since what you are trying to hide from yourself is staring you right in the face.) Among the parts of the social truth the disordered personality does not see are parts that are potentially painful and inconvenient-parts that she might have an interest in obscuring. So she has more "easy targets" than a normal person would.
In just the same way, it is easier to bulls.h.i.t about something you are only dimly aware of than something you are clearly aware of. In addition to just missing parts of social reality to a greater-than-average degree, and to systematically distorting remarks, actions and gestures, it is common for disordered personalities to perceive only dimly those parts of social reality that they do see-to have glimmerings of the truth. Two instances of bulls.h.i.t already discussed provide ill.u.s.trations: the compensating narcissist has some glimmering that she carries on a charade of superiority, and the self-deserting avoidant has some glimmering that she is escaping into fantasy.
If this story about facilitation is correct, then some substantial fraction of the bulls.h.i.t that is found in disordered personalities is causally downstream of their distorted social perception. Notice further that this is a two-way street: bulls.h.i.t-of the self-directed kind, at least-can worsen the impairment of social perception. For if you hide from yourself those parts of the social truth that you can see at first, your social perception gets even worse, in that you then simply see less of social reality.
The Threat Posed by Bulls.h.i.t.
My findings about bulls.h.i.t in personality disorders have some notable implications concerning the kind of threat bulls.h.i.t poses. First, bulls.h.i.t threatens good social relations.
I have claimed that pathological personalities are especially good bulls.h.i.tters, generally speaking. They are also known for their distorted perceptions of social reality-which, like bulls.h.i.tting, serve to distance them from the truth. Meanwhile, their relations with others are especially likely to be messed up in some systematic way: the antisocial exploits people, the borderline lurches wildly from one unstable relationship to the next, the dependent is a burden to those around her, the paranoiac imposes pathological jealousy on her partner, and so forth. Indeed, some such impaired social functioning is of the essence of personality pathology; what better criterion to use in deciding whether a personality is pathological?
The disordered personality's problems with the truth contribute greatly to her problems with people. Her bulls.h.i.tting, and the distorted perceptions that help it along, are surely key contributors to her messed-up social relations. This is just a bit of common sense. People do not like getting bulls.h.i.tted, so those who are given to bulls.h.i.tting others easily become personae non gratae; it can be very exasperating to deal with someone in the grips of self-directed bulls.h.i.t; and it is difficult to communicate with someone who is given to distorting what you say and do.
It's a plat.i.tude, though one that is forgotten all too often, that good, sound human relationships thrive on truthfulness. But this suggests a stronger principle: good relationships thrive on truth.54 If either party fails to see things clearly-basic, important things concerning who she is and what she wants, and the same basic facts about the other party-then the relationship is likely to flounder. This can result not only from deliberate deception, but also from the involuntary disconnection from the truth that poor perception brings. If either party wittingly or unwittingly hides some such important parts of the truth through bulls.h.i.t or outright lying, the relationship is gravely threatened.
Personality pathology is marked by lousy social relations, and the bulls.h.i.tting of the disordered personality helps explain why her relations with others are lousy. I promised at the outset that applying my notion of bulls.h.i.t to personality disorders could shed some light on how their core features can lead to social difficulties. I have now made good on that promise: impaired social cognition, a core feature of personality pathology, facilitates bulls.h.i.t, which-among other elements of the disordered personality's behavior-tends to ruin her social relations.
Among the most interesting and provocative claims about bulls.h.i.t that Frankfurt makes is that it is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. This is supposed to be because "through excessive indulgence in [bulls.h.i.tting], which involves making a.s.sertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost" (On Bulls.h.i.t, p. 60). Since I think the bulls.h.i.tter does pay attention to the truth-at some level, in any case-I cannot agree. Still, like Frankfurt I think bulls.h.i.t is an enemy of the truth in a way that lies are not-but a different sort of enemy than he described.
The threat I have in mind stems from the fact that bulls.h.i.tting can be unconscious while lying cannot. The habitual liar, like the habitual bulls.h.i.tter, gradually obscures more and more bits of the truth. But generally speaking, it is easier to make a habit of bulls.h.i.tting than of lying, because outright deception ordinarily provokes a sting of conscience. Where bulls.h.i.tting is less than fully conscious, this sting is less than fully sharp, and is therefore a weaker deterrent.
Bulls.h.i.t thus poses a sort of threat to the truth that lying does not pose, or does not pose to the same degree. This does not imply that the total threat it poses to the truth is greater than that posed by lying, for lying may pose threats to the truth that bulls.h.i.t does not pose. But these are questions about the comparative moral status of bulls.h.i.t and lies, and that is a topic for another day.55
6.
Performing Bulls.h.i.t and the Post-Sincere Condition.
ALAN RICHARDSON.
Mission Statement.
This essay, aspiring to be one of the world's best philosophy essays, will prepare readers to become exceptional theorists of bulls.h.i.t, promote the values of a rigorous and sustainable philosophical community, and be an example of outstanding research serving the people of British Columbia, Canada, and the world.
Harry Frankfurt's goal in On Bulls.h.i.t was "to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of [the] concept" of bulls.h.i.t (p. 2). But, he left many things for his followers to do. For one, he set aside the question of att.i.tude (theoretically if not practically)-that is, he expressed various att.i.tudes toward bulls.h.i.t even as he left unanswered the question of why our att.i.tude toward it differed from our att.i.tude toward lying.
Frankfurt left "as an exercise for the reader" 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" (p. 50). He also did not "consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bulls.h.i.t" (p. 2). This essay attends to these unconsidered points, since bulls.h.i.t's rhetorical purposes are exactly where its value lies and where we must seek to illuminate our att.i.tudes toward it. Bulls.h.i.t is, as we know, all well and good in its proper place. But it tends to transgress that place and crowd out other aspects of life.
s.h.i.tty Att.i.tudes: On the Use and Misuse of Bulls.h.i.t in Life.
Let's begin by using a charming anecdote of Frankfurt's to amend his own account of bulls.h.i.t. It is a story of Ludwig Wittgenstein as friend, offered by Fania Pascal (p. 24): I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." He was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog who has been run over feels like."
Frankfurt does not exhibit much patience with Wittgenstein's sour and unsympathetic response, but the anecdote does aid in his diagnosis of bulls.h.i.t as speech unconcerned with truth; Frankfurt finds Wittgenstein's annoyance to lie in Wittgenstein's sense that Pascal speaks in full knowledge that she does not know what she is talking about.
Fair enough. If Wittgenstein had been a cruder man, the conversation could have gone this way: FP: I feel just like a dog that has been run over.
LW: Bulls.h.i.t! You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like.
But, notice that Pascal, in the context of a discussion about her health, had to utter something about her physical discomfort for Wittgenstein to get upset in this way-simply uttering something she was not in a position to know ("I feel just like the oldest living inhabitant of the nearest planet to Alpha Centauri," for example) would not have induced such a response. Wittgenstein's response, warranted or not, is attuned to the way in which the specific thing Pascal did say not only went beyond what she could know but also sought to elicit sympathy for her suffering. Indeed, the more given Pascal is to complaint or hypochondria, the more sympathy we have for Wittgenstein. The declarations of suffering among such people are often bulls.h.i.t. (Indeed, it is only in rare cases, such as when a doctor asks us to describe a pain, that our reports of how much pain we are in are primarily information reports.) Bulls.h.i.t is not simply any speech unconcerned with truth, then, but rather speech the truth of which is irrelevant but which aims to evoke some sort of positive att.i.tude toward the speaker.56 If we take up the first-person situation, we get similar results. In planning to write a joint grant proposal, I can say to a colleague: "Here we have to add some bulls.h.i.t about the training opportunities the grant will afford to graduate students. I have some boilerplate on that that I can import from another grant I have written." I am willing to call this portion of our proposal bulls.h.i.t precisely because it is meant to express a positive att.i.tude toward the education of graduate students and, thus, to get the adjudicators to like the proposal, even though my own att.i.tude for or against graduate education need not be accurately expressed by what I write. Or, again, consider the following sort of exchange, after a department meeting: GARY: (nervous and pale, his upper lip trembling) I didn't know that you thought so highly of the Dean.
ALAN: Oh, that was just bulls.h.i.t; I wanted to appeal to the high opinion others have of him in order to pa.s.s the motion on hiring that Thomist I want to hire.
Here we see a key difference between lying and bulls.h.i.tting. If I was praising the Dean in order to win over his fans in my department for my side of an argument about hiring, I am not really lying in expressing something that is not my true att.i.tude toward the Dean. My att.i.tude toward the Dean was not the point of what I was saying about the Dean; I was engaged in something else entirely. Knowing my intention, you could not successfully accuse me of lying.57 Nonetheless, the remarks made about the Dean are relevant to the situation; I couldn't have recruited support for my favored candidate by saying nice things about the local ice hockey team, even if my colleagues like the team better than they like the Dean, the team being irrelevant in the situation at hand.
Similarly, when I complain that the son of a friend does not know how to disguise his disappointment at the presents I give him, I am complaining that this child has not learned courtesy conventions that are the nearest kin to bulls.h.i.t. The sort of honesty involved in saying, straight-away, "I hate this stupid sweater" is not warranted in the gift-receiving situation, if the gift was itself offered in good faith. (Compare the case of your older brother, who seems to give you only joke presents. After thirty years of this, you might say, "Why do you keep giving me this bulls.h.i.t?" He has failed the sincerity conditions of gift giving; his is a series of bulls.h.i.t acts, raising questions about the nature of your relationship.) We don't want him to lie and say "Thank you for this sweater; I love it," but we'd like him to be courteous and say "Thank you for this sweater."
So, the sort of bulls.h.i.t that one recognizes as bulls.h.i.t and seeks (as Wittgenstein did in relation to Pascal) to deflate is more than saying X without being a position to know that X. In addition, X and the utterance of X are meant somehow to reflect well on the speaker. This contrasts with the sort of bulls.h.i.t that is offered as entertainment or to kill time among those who mutually understand the conversation they are in not to be an attempt to convey accurate information. Thus, I think, contrary to Frankfurt (p. 11), that at least the sort of bulls.h.i.t that evokes "That's bulls.h.i.t" as a response does have pretentiousness as a const.i.tutive element. But, not all bulls.h.i.t is liable to evoke that response. Indeed, some bulls.h.i.t is stock-in-trade and when well-crafted discharges a legitimate function.
Bulls.h.i.t as a Condition of Life.
Bulls.h.i.t, therefore, is vastly more widespread than straight-out lying. Bulls.h.i.t is a sort of misdirection; lying is direct and to the point. Students lie when they say they tried to turn in their papers but the office was closed; they bulls.h.i.t when they come to office hours to offer up excuses for why they could not possible turn in their papers on the due date. What they say in such circ.u.mstances is rarely evidently false (if it were, it wouldn't work), it is simply a story put together in such a way as to get them what they really want, which is an extension. They do this by evoking sympathy for their circ.u.mstances, which have to be plausibly true and, importantly, hard to check.
Bulls.h.i.t is in fact so ubiquitous that one cannot engage in some activities without engaging in bulls.h.i.t. Consider grant proposals again. These require a sort of breathless discussion of how ground-breaking and exciting your research is, how it requires a hundred thousand dollars to do, how fabulous it will be to have research a.s.sistants (who will do your photocopying and be paid fifteen thousand a year for the privilege), and so on. Proposal writers know that this is all bulls.h.i.t, but generically-necessary bulls.h.i.t; proposal readers know it, too. Readers discount and ignore exactly what the writers put in as the bulls.h.i.t component. But, no one will succeed if she does not put in the bulls.h.i.t. One must perform certain values in a grant proposal even though they count for nothing. (It is like figure skating, which requires compulsory figures but doesn't count them.) This is the equivalent of Frankfurt's pompous Fourth of July speaker (pp. 1618): patriotism is the order of the day on the Fourth of July in the United States, and no one takes expressions of patriotism offered on that day seriously precisely because on that day they are utterly pro forma. Nonetheless, no Fourth of July orator can safely set patriotic themes aside. That would be a spectacular mistake in judgment and value, a confession of a profound ignorance of the very genre.
The grant proposal and the Fourth of July oration are, indeed, bulls.h.i.t genres. Another bulls.h.i.t genre, perhaps the most important in academic life, is the letter of reference. All letters of reference are unreliable as guides to the genuine virtues of the applicants. Yet straight-out lying ("Mortimer invented the Internet, and his oils hang in the Louvre") would be counter-productive. Confident a.s.sertions of bulls.h.i.t have to be on points on which legitimate disagreement is widely accepted and on which standards of evidence can be expected to diverge. Thus, I can write that "Mortimer's Ph.D. thesis offers a counterfactual account of causation that is a significant contribution to our understanding of causation" without fear that I have engaged in gratuitous and counter-productive bulls.h.i.t. Indeed, if I am Mortimer's advisor, I am supposed to write this, even though the number of Ph.D. theses in philosophy that are significant contributions to anyone's understanding of anything is vanishing small.
A reader's bulls.h.i.t detector might start sounding if I say, however, something like "Mortimer's contribution is the most significant contribution to the understanding of causation since Hume." Such a claim is almost always over-the-top even within a genre in which bulls.h.i.t is expected; I have here entered the terrain of gratuitous and damaging bulls.h.i.t. I must write bulls.h.i.t but not induce my readers to say "That's bulls.h.i.t" in response.58 So, we have the beginning of an answer to one question Frankfurt left as an exercise for his reader: Our att.i.tude toward bulls.h.i.t is more benign because there are various things we do in which we cannot succeed without the right amount of bulls.h.i.t. Moreover, there are other activities in which att.i.tudes and acts that are close kin to bulls.h.i.t (courtesy, for example) are necessary for the maintenance of civility. Honesty is rarely the best policy in cases in which honesty is not the whole point of the enterprise. That is why bulls.h.i.t is everywhere; it is dishonesty without tears.
The interesting questions begin just when we recognize bulls.h.i.t's ubiquity. Letters of reference are a bulls.h.i.t genre, so in order to write a good letter of reference for Mortimer I will have to bulls.h.i.t. Yet, it is, it seems, not hard to imagine a world in which a letter of reference is simply an honest appraisal. Such a world might seem more functional than our world, since it is harder to evaluate bulls.h.i.t accurately and effectively than it is to evaluate the truth. So how did the letter of reference become a bulls.h.i.t genre? This, it seems to me, is a question for sociology and for rhetoric. Philosophers should be a bit chary about venturing a priori answers to such questions, but there are real conceptual difficulties that a bit of philosophy can help with here, even if it cannot wholly sort them out.
An answer that suggests itself immediately appeals to free-riders. If everyone else is truthful about his or her students while I bulls.h.i.t about mine, mine will do better on average than they ought to do (provided I bulls.h.i.t well). So the letter of reference genre tends towards bulls.h.i.t. But this is not sufficient. My students might do better in getting into graduate school than they should if I bulls.h.i.t and no one else does. But, my bulls.h.i.t will not make them succeed in graduate school.59 So, if my a.s.sessments are bulls.h.i.t while everyone else's are not and, thus, my students get in to better schools than they should, the sanction should quickly come to rest on me-my students are worse than my letters let on, and my letters will quickly come to be regarded as bulls.h.i.t.60 At this point, now that we have seen that bulls.h.i.t often matters and may be unavoidable, I begin to want to distance myself even more from Frankfurt's account of bulls.h.i.t. Bulls.h.i.t in bulls.h.i.t genres like letters of reference is, as Frankfurt concedes (pp. 2223), well-crafted. I write letters that are dishonest in a sense, but I do not write things that are false; I do care that my claims are "true enough" or, to use Stephen Colbert's coinage, "truthy." I write "Mortimer will be an a.s.set to any PhD program that accepts him; I recommend him without reservation" precisely because if I were honest that I do worry that his personal reticence will make him ill-suited to the pressure cooker of some departments, he will not get in-not just to those departments but to others in which he will do well. I tick the "top ten percent" box if it is the highest one available or the "top five percent" box if that one is, because I am not certain what either really means when the issue is "takes initiative" and the damage of putting Mortimer in the second rank is much higher than the damage of over-estimating him. Indeed, letters of reference can be extraordinarily well-crafted. Sometimes I wish my "without reservation" to be seen as bulls.h.i.t. But I do not write my reservations into the letter; they appear in precisely how I do and do not say some things.
So, I do not think that free riding is the origin of bulls.h.i.t genres-since it is counter-productive. Much more likely, it seems to me, is the fact that the letter of reference has not multiple audiences but multiple interested parties. I need to be able to say with plausibility to the student that I have written him a good letter, to the departments that receive the letter that I have written them something that accurately expresses (not, reports) the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate, and to myself, that I have not lied or been dishonest (in any way that goes beyond the dishonesty of the genre itself). My ability to say these things with a plausible modic.u.m of truth requires just the right amount of bulls.h.i.t in the letter. Bulls.h.i.t often arises in this way: I wish to recruit my colleagues to a cause, so I appeal to their values in arguing for the cause; thus, I offer an argument I myself do not believe or endorse. I have to craft this just right, however, so that I don't lose, say, my colleagues who distrust the Dean when appealing to those who do trust him. The better I can do this, the more well-honed is the performative nature of argument. I have learned to use arguments I neither endorse nor believe to recruit people into doing what I want to happen for other reasons entirely. I have become a highly effective bulls.h.i.tter-a politician, a courtier.
Thus, given the nature of the act and to whom that act is responsible, the fate of reference letter writing to be a bulls.h.i.t genre is sealed-and our imagined world of honest letters of reference disappears. The details of how bulls.h.i.t will be deployed are still open. British letters are rhetorically less inflated than American letters. They still strongly smell of bulls.h.i.t, however, although of a more genteel and inst.i.tution-based variety. (The candidate is less praised than her American counterpart; but, her college at Oxbridge, good heavens, has been pumping out intellectual deities for centuries.) Moreover, the enormity of the American system and its diffuseness mean that letter readers often do not know the letter writers and the bulls.h.i.t quota goes up the more personal trust goes down. (If I know Professor X and know that he knows me and we have a decent relationship, I can write in a more honest tone, relying on his ability to read my intent.) The World as Will to Bulls.h.i.t.
So, in this our world, bulls.h.i.t is unavoidable. So far that seems a depressing conclusion. But the most depressing aspect is yet to come. There is bulls.h.i.t in the world, but it does not yet get to the core of what bothers so many today-the sense that bulls.h.i.t is increasing, that a sort of smug dishonesty is overtaking everything, even where it is not needed.
One of my local video stores posts, prominently, the following customer service guarantee:61.
Each of us at Ballbreakers is empowered, authorized, and committed to serving you.
The service there is not notably better than anywhere else in retail. If one has a complaint, moreover, the guarantee does not cause the staff to take you very seriously and seek to remedy the situation. No, the guarantee serves for them as evidence that they have already done all that could reasonably be expected and that you, the customer, must be a crank.
Another prominent example in the lives of many of the authors in this book is the recent rise of the university "mission statement" and "academic plan." Universities have existed for hundreds and hundreds of years, but within the past twenty or so, their administrators have come to feel that someone (who?) needs to know better what their universities are trying to do, hence, the university mission statement. Mission statements cannot be honest: "We aim to provide a good postsecondary education subject to the constraints under which we operate" just doesn't inspire. So, instead, we have hundreds of universities that "aim to be one of the leading universities in the world" or to be "world-cla.s.s." Here, for example, is the mission statement of my employer, The University of British Columbia62: UBC'S VISION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY.
The University of British Columbia, aspiring to be one of the world's best universities, will prepare students to become exceptional global citizens, promote the values of a civil and sustainable society, and conduct outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada, and the world.
OUR MISSION.
The University of British Columbia will provide its students, faculty, and staff with the best possible resources and conditions for learning and research, and create a working environment dedicated to excellence, equity, and mutual respect. It will cooperate with government, business, industry, and the professions, as well as with other educational inst.i.tutions and the general community, to discover, disseminate, and apply new knowledge, prepare its students for fulfilling careers, and improve the quality of life through leading-edge research.
The graduates of UBC will have developed strong a.n.a.lytical, problem-solving and critical thinking abilities; they will have excellent research and communication skills; they will be knowledgeable, flexible, and innovative. As responsible members of society, the graduates of UBC will value diversity, work with and for their communities, and be agents for positive change. They will acknowledge their obligations as global citizens, and strive to secure a sustainable and equitable future for all.
Everyone knows that very few universities can be "one of the world's best"63; everyone knows therefore that these missions are, by and large, impossible and often, as in the case of UBC's, just silly. More importantly, because everyone knows that, everyone knows that these are not really the missions of the universities at all. But every year huge pots of money go into carefully crafting more and more bulls.h.i.t mission statements.
I have written to administrators of my home inst.i.tution, objecting to some things in the academic plans. My missives look like this: "You say that a strong faculty is the university's chief a.s.set and that, thus, you are committed to making the working conditions as good as they must be to attract and retain a strong faculty. Yet, you started knocking down the neighboring wing of my building in January-right at the beginning of our second term-and it is, in consequence, almost impossible for me to work in my office. Surely, what you say about a strong faculty is true but your actions are not in accord with your pledge." The response, should there be one, is invariably puzzled. The administrator, much like our video store employees noted above, seems to think that the commitment to doing what is best for the faculty, having been made, is automatically fulfilled. The response has the form: "We have made that pledge. Therefore, we are doing everything we can to retain a strong faculty. You must be a crank and a prima donna." The desire to make me see my own crankiness is so ingrained that almost invariably these responses go out of their way to say that "all other feedback received on this matter has been positive." That I know that, too, to be false (since I know my colleagues well enough to know I am not alone) is again not to the point. Increasingly, it is hard for me to figure what the point really is.
The video store and the university administration point to two phenomena. The first is the explosion of bulls.h.i.t genres. University missions and customer service commitments have not been and need not be matters of bulls.h.i.t; yet, now, increasingly they are. Even more disturbing than this explosion of bulls.h.i.t is the phenomenon of self-fulfilling bulls.h.i.t: "We have treated you well in the very act of pledging to treat you well; now, p.i.s.s off." This last is an odd sort of new-fangled performative bulls.h.i.t. Its mark is a commitment that is taken to be fulfilled simply in virtue of its having been made.64 Consider the video store employee who acts as if he has fulfilled his commitment to treating you with respect because it says on the prominently-displayed pledge that he will treat you with respect. If he genuinely believes this, then he does not understand that the conditions under which commitments are undertaken are different from those under which they are fulfilled. A commitment involves conditions both for its proper issuance and for its fulfillment, but these are (except in a few self-referential cases like "I hereby promise to make a promise") distinct. You have not treated me well by saying that you will. You have placed yourself under an obligation to treat me well, which obligation you might not otherwise have had. I do not have complete say over whether that obligation has been fulfilled, but my sense that it has not is, on the face of it, evidence that it has not been. Moreover, no one whose commitment to treat me well is genuine will cite the fact that they pledged to treat me well as evidence that they have.
Performative bulls.h.i.t has the form of a commitment, but it is not a real commitment. There are two options, however, regarding its dishonesty. In the first case, the person performing bulls.h.i.t might genuinely believe that she is making a real commitment. I am not certain that this ever happens. The second case, so it seems to me, is thus universal or nearly so. In this case, the person knows he has not really made the commitment but acts as if it is in effect in order to make it impossible to get anywhere. Thus, the video store employee does not really believe that he has treated you well because he has pledged to do so. However, if he takes his good treatment of you to have been discharged in the pledge to be good to you, then there is no place from which you can issue a complaint that he need take seriously. If a university administrator acts as if pledging to do everything it takes to retain her faculty is itself doing everything that it takes, then no faculty member may properly complain to her about mistreatment. Mistreatment continues as before, but the ground has shifted so that it becomes illegitimate to claim mistreatment.
Performative bulls.h.i.t is the source of much of the sense many of us have that the world is making us crazy. Whereas a public performance of a genuine commitment would precisely make it easier to demand that it be fulfilled, the pseudo-commitment of performative bulls.h.i.t removes the ground for that demand. And the realm of performative bulls.h.i.t goes well beyond commitments of various sorts.65 As applied to arguments, performative bulls.h.i.t directs that an argument be taken as a good argument by virtue of having been offered as a good argument.
Thus, if George W. Bush argues on the basis of fabricated intelligence that Saddam had weapons of ma.s.s destruction and, thus, that the USA has to go to war against Iraq, he attempts to defuse any objections to the argument simply by pointing out that the argument was offered as a good argument.66 If it is discovered that the intelligence was false, this does not touch the argument, performed as bulls.h.i.t, which remains good because it was the proffered reason. For those for whom it is impossible to maintain that a false reason is a good reason, another bulls.h.i.t reason can be fabricated (defeating Al-Qaeda, expanding freedom and democracy-take your pick). The entire sequence of reasons, whose truth does not matter and whose connection to whether the USA should go to war does not matter, has caused the deaths of countless people and destabilized the entire region. It has, moreover, further damaged the whole business of honestly and sincerely offering and demanding reasons for political action. True reasons might be able to contend with faulty reasons, but in a world of performative bulls.h.i.t, all bets are off. The sincere person ends up diligently sifting through arguments that were never meant to be taken seriously in the first place.
We live in a world in which arguments are proffered which not only do not present the genuine reasons an action was undertaken but also deny the very existence of genuineness in the realm of reasons. We live in a world in which commitments are publicly made not only without any intention to fulfill them but also with the intention that the public issuance of them will prevent anyone from claiming that they were not fulfilled. In such a world, sincerity is not even possible. Indeed, irony in the strict dramatic sense is not possible, for, having become the spectators in the drama of our own lives, the emptiness of our own gestures is clear to us. Even cynicism, since it posits ulterior motives, is not possible-there are only pseudo-motives, lacking even sincere self-interest.
Overcoming Overwhelming Bulls.h.i.t.
In a bulls.h.i.t world, no one succeeds like the bulls.h.i.tter. I mean the person whose very being is const.i.tuted from bulls.h.i.t. There are such people. Consider the administrator whose whole job is to craft and then endorse the bulls.h.i.t mission statement for a university. Whatever the university does, it does. But then someone adds the imprimatur of The Mission, which says of what was done that it was done so that the university will be "world cla.s.s." The whole professional being of this person is to add the bulls.h.i.t that serves as the locus of value of the acts of the university. Absent the bulls.h.i.t, this person would have no role. The bulls.h.i.t being present, this person creates our contemporary replacement for genuine value, the pseudo-value that inheres in actions that must, const.i.tutively, have value simply for having been done. This person does not hide what she really wishes to do beneath the smokescreen of the mission; there are simply actions and then the ritual claim that they were done for the mission.
Our problem is not that a bulls.h.i.t world is unstable, but precisely that it is inherently stable. If every employee-customer interaction is an instance of good customer relations because the bulls.h.i.t pledge of customer satisfaction proclaims it so, then disrupting this situation is very difficult. Customers, who began only by asking for something more from the person who is "helping" them, come to be seen as subject to "rage," and this provides one more opportunity to serve the customer by not serving her.
Suppose, however, you are not happy about living in a bulls.h.i.t world. Are there any remedies? If sincerity has been drained out of a situation, can it be put back in? There is one strategy in the field that seems to be of some consequence: flat-out, self-evident bulls.h.i.t that outperforms its covert compet.i.tors. This is the Jon Stewart gambit: We will offer a news show that clearly is made-up and that yet does a better job of presenting the news than most of its alternative "serious" sources. Here bulls.h.i.t comes full circle: By self-consciously flouting the conventions of truth-telling and making it clear that he does not care about the truth-and yet doing a better job at revealing that truth, Stewart reminds us what those conventions were for and reveals something about how they've been perverted. Bulls.h.i.tters in covering themselves with faux virtue are notable for their lack of humor. In a bulls.h.i.t world, humor becomes the sincerest form of unconcern for the truth, the only form of concern for the truth still available.
But, what if bulls.h.i.t or comedy are for you an insufficiently inspiring pair of alternatives. Suppose you would like more options than the insincere sincerity of Fox News and the sincere insincerity of The Daily Show. I can think only of one option. Consider the university mission statement and imagine what it would be like to take the task of writing one seriously. Imagine you genuinely believe that in light of the current world situation the mission of higher education needs to be rethought. You might have questions such as these in mind: Is it possible to export democracy to parts of the world in which fundamental religious beliefs preclude the possibility that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "governments are inst.i.tuted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? Or, given that the principles of higher education have derived, since the eighteenth century, from Enlightenment ideals, can we either recover Enlightenment ideals we can endorse or reorient higher education in a post-Enlightenment world?
Crafted with such questions in mind, a mission statement would not look like a corporate pledge to maximize profits or a sports team's pledge to win a championship. It would seriously have to enunciate a new cultural mission for higher education and seek to make that mission both palatable and possible to our citizens. If we cannot sincerely endorse currently culturally available values, then we must fundamentally rethink those values. If we lack the courage or the ability to do that, then all we are left with, and all we deserve, is bulls.h.i.t.67
7.
The Importance of Being Earnest: A Pragmatic Approach to Bulls.h.i.tting.
CORNELIS DE WAAL.
One of the tasks Frankfurt sets himself in On Bulls.h.i.t is to sketch, as he phrases it, "the structure of [bulls.h.i.t's] concept" (p. 2). Frankfurt's approach is largely that of an ordinary-language a.n.a.lysis of what people are trying to say-or do-when they use the word. I agree with Frankfurt when he says that 'bulls.h.i.t' is a generic term of abuse that is applied to a very vague and open-ended range of epistemic phenomena, but I aim to explore, further than does Frankfurt, that most interesting aspect of bulls.h.i.t: the intention with which it is created. This is a paper on bulls.h.i.tting rather than bulls.h.i.t.
To get a better grip on bulls.h.i.tting I will compare it with situations where people are genuinely interested in figuring out how things really are, and situate it among other epistemic ventures that are illicit or unproductive. Part of the reason behind the prevalence of bulls.h.i.tting and the ease with which it is accepted is a lack of confidence that genuine inquiry is worth pursuing, or even possible. Admittedly there are other reasons why people bulls.h.i.t, such as epistemic sloth or the need to voice one's opinion on matters one is only marginally familiar with. But contrasting bulls.h.i.tting with the modest but honest attempt to figure out how things really are seems to me profitable. In brief, what distinguishes bulls.h.i.tting from genuine inquiry is a difference of intention.
Two Tauroscatological Schools.
G.A. Cohen's excellent article, "Deeper into Bulls.h.i.t" (Chapter 8 in this volume) marks the beginning of two distinctive schools in bulls.h.i.t thinking. Cohen separates what he calls Cohen-bulls.h.i.t from Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.t. He also observes, not without satisfaction, that one doesn't need a Frankfurt bulls.h.i.tter to generate Cohen bulls.h.i.t. Cohen points to several differences between the bulls.h.i.t he is interested in and the bulls.h.i.t he sees Frankfurt addressing.
The key difference between the two, however, is that whereas Cohen focuses on bulls.h.i.t as a product, irrespective of how it is generated, Frankfurt concentrates on the act of bulls.h.i.tting itself. I will call these two approaches to bulls.h.i.t the structuralist school and the intentionalist school because of their respective emphasis on structure and intention. Since in the intentionalist school we are speaking of the act of bulls.h.i.tting, intention refers to the reason, motive, or purpose with which the act is engaged in, like courting a woman with the intention to marry her, or approaching a tourist with the intention to steal her purse.
Within the intentionalist school the focus is on the bulls.h.i.tter, not the bulls.h.i.t. The essence of bulls.h.i.tting is that the bulls.h.i.tter does not care about the truth of his statements, because he is indifferent to how things really are, or because he believes that whatever he says doesn't really make a difference. Often, but not always, the bulls.h.i.tter tries to hide his indifference to truth. When the bulls.h.i.tter is publicly hostile to "those old-fashioned prigs who still hold on to the notion of truth"68-a view that is in vogue in certain relativist, postmodernist, and neo-pragmatist circles-this indifference may even be openly flaunted. Within the intentionalist school the bulls.h.i.t that results is only of secondary interest; it is simply what we get when people bulls.h.i.t. What counts is the intention of the producer.
At face value it seems that intentionalists fail to appreciate that one person's bulls.h.i.tting can generate another person's insight. This suggests that intention doesn't guarantee bulls.h.i.t, as the intentionalists claim. We may call this the insight problem. I think, though, that the insight problem is best treated as a case of unintended consequences-like someone dodging an unpleasant task by reading this essay instead is an unintended consequence of me writing it. The intentionalist can argue that just as I cannot take any credit for having helped someone dodge a particular task, the bulls.h.i.tter cannot take any credit for what value others might see in what he excretes. I will return to this a bit later.
Within the structuralist school, in contrast, the focus is squarely on the bulls.h.i.t. On this view whether something counts as bulls.h.i.t has little to do with the intention with which it is generated, but depends wholly on its intrinsic features. For instance, a piece of writing that is "unclarifiably unclear," Cohen observes, is bulls.h.i.t, no matter what its author's intentions were or what went through his head when he wrote it (p. 130). To determine whether a certain text is bulls.h.i.t, one must a.n.a.lyze the text, not speculate about the intentions of its author. True, those intentions may explain how the bulls.h.i.t came to be, but in the end those intentions are irrelevant to the question what makes something bulls.h.i.t. Bulls.h.i.tting and bulls.h.i.t are on this view logically independent. Someone who is bulls.h.i.tting may unwittingly produce brilliant insights, while someone who is genuinely concerned with truth but who happens to have been hanging around with the wrong crowd, may become a veritable fountainhead of jargonistic bulls.h.i.t. For the structuralist, what counts as bulls.h.i.t is determined by its structure, or the lack thereof, and not by how it is produced.
There are a few, admittedly rather uneven reasons why I feel more attracted to the intentionalist school. One of these is that much has already been written about Cohen bulls.h.i.t, albeit under different names, and that various strategies have already been developed to separate bull from knowledge. These include, among others, Descartes's insistence on clear and distinct ideas, the verificationist principle of the logical positivists, and the pragmatists' pragmatic maxim. To these can now be added the Cohen-Brown test, on which something is bulls.h.i.t when it is just as plausible as its negation (p. 132). The intentionalist school, in contrast, brings in something important that till now has been almost entirely ignored.
A second reason for favoring the intentionalists' approach is that although I agree with Cohen that the bulls.h.i.tter can generate genuine knowledge, even if only by accident, I am not so sure that this exempts it from being bulls.h.i.t. Take a physician and a sham astrologer who respectively make a false and a true prediction about the death of a certain celebrity-the physician after physically examining her and studying her medical record, the astrologer by consulting Tarot cards which he does not really believe in and which he doesn't quite know how to read. Should we abstain from calling the astrologer's conclusion bulls.h.i.t simply because it turns out his prediction was the right one? My view is that we should still call it bulls.h.i.t because of how the claim was generated. That the claim happens to be true, or that important segments of the argument are innovative, carefully crafted, or make sense, is another matter. Even when the bulls.h.i.tter just happens to get it right, it remains bulls.h.i.t until someone who is not bulls.h.i.tting has gone over it, affirmed it, and thereby transformed it into knowledge.
This gets us back to the insight problem. Precisely because the focus is on intention, the product of one person's bulls.h.i.tting can be another person's insight, just as one person's trash can be someone else's treasure. The claim that a certain chair cannot be at once trash and treasure mistakenly a.s.sumes that these are qualities intrinsic to the object, on a par with the chair being wobbly or the chair being extended in s.p.a.ce. The structuralist school takes this stance: calling something bulls.h.i.t is very much like calling a chair wobbly. The intentionalist school denies this. Just as calling something trash has to do with the att.i.tude that is taken towards it, calling something bulls.h.i.t has to do with the intention with which it is generated, and not with any of its intrinsic qualities. Just as no chair is trash in and of itself, no claim or argument is bulls.h.i.t in and of itself. In fact, the discovery that one's bulls.h.i.tting is taken by someone as genuine insight can come as quite a shock to the bulls.h.i.tter, as happened with William Perry's undergraduates who bulls.h.i.tted their way through an exam and later discovered that they got an A for it.69 Of course none of this means that no claim or argu-ment can be plain nonsense in and of itself. But nonsense need not be bulls.h.i.t.
The Epistemic Imperative.
To get a better grip on bulls.h.i.tting, I will contrast it with genuine inquiry. For the purpose of this paper I will interpret inquiry (including, but not just including, genuine inquiry) as any activity that leads to knowledge claims that are in some aspect new to those partic.i.p.ating in the activity. Now it may be argued that the bulls.h.i.tter, who doesn't care about the truth of what she is arguing for, cannot possibly be engaged in inquiry, so that contrasting bulls.h.i.t with inquiry is misguided. However, because bulls.h.i.tting and inquiring are alternative ways of responding to questions that are posed or problems that are raised, the two can be compared and contrasted. Someone who is bulls.h.i.tting about whether cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, or whether h.o.m.os.e.xuals should be allowed in the army, stands in the same arena as those who really seek to know whether something is true or whether something should be allowed. To the untrained ear the genuine inquirer and the bulls.h.i.tter may be indistinguishable. In fact, the bulls.h.i.tter, who is far more flexible because she is much less restricted in what she can say, may even be the most convincing. In short, bulls.h.i.tting and inquiring are sufficiently similar to warrant comparison.
There is another reason why contrasting bulls.h.i.tting with genuine inquiry is insightful. Even the most avid bulls.h.i.tter is not likely to accept bulls.h.i.t from others in matters that are of real importance to him. For instance, when he is feeling sick he wants not bulls.h.i.t, but the doctor to genuinely inquire into his ailment. Bulls.h.i.tting, prevalent as it may be, is essentially a free-rider problem. Bulls.h.i.tters are like people that hop on the bus without buying a ticket. One can only do this as long as others pay for the busses to go. The same is true for bulls.h.i.tting. With the exception of areas of no practical importance (such as metaphysics or literary criticism), bulls.h.i.tting can flourish only in an environment that is secured by people who do more than just bulls.h.i.t.
Contrasting bulls.h.i.tting with genuine inquiry also puts us on track to cure it. A general loss of faith in the very possibility of genuine inquiry, or in the possibility of genuine inquiry in certain areas (often extending to everything except the hard sciences), is an important cause of the prevalence of bulls.h.i.t.
To understand genuine inquiry we ought to turn to the pragmatists, and especially to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophical importance is increasingly recognized. For the pragmatists, knowledge is generated through our interaction with a world that poses real problems that generate living doubt. Hence, inquiry takes the form of problem-solving, and any conception of knowledge that banishes knowledge from the world in which we live is firmly rejected. Because of its focus on action, pragmatism is a natural fit for the intentionalist school.