Bullshit and Philosophy Part 4
Following Peirce, I define genuine inquiry as any inquiry that is fueled by the desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking, or involved (perhaps indirectly) in asking. Peirce defined science that way.70 To define science in terms of the scientific method, as was done traditionally, was for Peirce to put the cart before the horse. If inquiry is conducted with the right att.i.tude, methods that further that inquiry will evolve naturally in the course of that inquiry. The use of scientific method by itself doesn't guarantee that inquiry is conducted with the right att.i.tude, as the pseudo-inquirers may be more successful in reaching their goals when they use methods developed by scientists. In short, what makes something scientific is not the correctness of the conclusions, nor the methods employed, but the att.i.tude with which it is conducted. The resulting conception of science is a very broad one. It includes any inquiry that is engaged with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking. Thus conceived, it encompa.s.ses the work of homicide detectives who want to find the murderer, philologists who seek to recover the meaning of an ancient text, politicians who want to know which health plan best serves the public, and car mechanics who are looking for the cause of a suspicious rattle.
What characterizes genuine inquiry is neither its methods, nor its results, but the att.i.tude with which it is conducted. Inquiry should be engaged in with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions that are being asked. Taking this posi-tion does not commit us, however, to the view that we can solve all the questions we can possibly ask. It doesn't even commit us to say that any particular question we ask must be solvable merely because we were able to formulate the question. All it commits us to is that when we try to answer a particular question we proceed from the notion-or the postulate, if you will-that that question can be answered, and hence that we direct our inquiry in such a way as to find that answer. One possible outcome of that inquiry might be that the question was ill-posed, which may lead to its abandonment or point to a new question that seems to have better prospects. Formulating better questions is one way of advancing our knowledge.
To truly counter the bulls.h.i.tter, however, we must show that genuine inquiry is not a pipedream, but something attainable. One thing that keeps genuine inquiry within our reach is that its aim is not something grand and abstract, like "discovering the whole truth," but, modestly, finding answers to the questions that are actually being asked. This raises the question of what it is to answer a question. Staying close to the intentionalist stance, we can say that a question is answered (or resolved) when the doubts that initiated the question have been satisfied. This may raise an eyebrow or two, since at least on the face of it the correctness of an answer seems independent of what the inquirer believes it to be, something that is borne out by the fact that occasionally (if not to say often) people are quite satisfied with a wrong answer.
Several things can be said about this. Whether the answer he comes up with is mistaken or not, once the inquirer has satisfied himself that he has found the answer, he will stop inquiring. Put differently, the satisfaction of the inquirer brings the inquiry to conclusion. Subsequent doubts about this answer can cause the same inquirer, or others, to reopen the investigation until everyone is again convinced that the right answer has been reached, and then inquiry once again comes to a close. Such new doubt can emerge when new facts come to light, or when the question is looked at with fresh eyes. For many of our questions this is a long and torturous process, sometimes involving generations of inquirers.
This account of inquiry also points at something else: inquiry is a deeply social enterprise. Given our a.s.sumption that the inquirer is really interested in uncovering the right answer, reasonable doubt expressed by others, especially when they are peers, is powerful fuel for rekindling doubt. In fact, interaction with others is often the only way that personal biases, quirks, lacunae, etc., can be ironed out.
The above claim that the answer to the question must be independent of what the inquirer thinks it to be is misleading. What is really meant is that the answer is not determined by what the inquirer believes it to be. However, we can maintain the opposite: the answer that solves the puzzle will determine, or at least influence, what the inquirer is going to conclude if he is interested in finding that answer and if he is given enough time to complete the inquiry. Put differently, whereas the doubt that generates the question can be seen as the efficient cause of inquiry, the answer can be considered its final cause; it is that toward which genuine inquiry directs itself. Pragmatists even go a step further. Rejecting any view as meaningless on which truth is made into something that is in principle unattainable, they argue that the answer that would be agreed upon in the long run by the community of all inquirers is the truth with respect to that question.71 There is no more to truth than that. It is called the final opinion, in that neither new facts nor fresh eyes can elicit any doubt that the answer that has been reached is indeed the right one. We do not need to go that far for our purpose-which is merely to show that wherever the outcome matters genuine inquiry is superior to bulls.h.i.tting-but it does show that a robust theory on which genuine inquiry is truth-indicative is possible.
Remaining with the pragmatists a little, we can say that although for countless questions the moment a final opinion could be reached lies infinitely far in the future, there are also countless questions for which we have already reached such an opinion or for which such a final opinion is in our reach. However, at the same time, since we are human and hence fallible, there is no guarantee that in any actual case the answer we have reached, and have come to agree upon, is correct. Hence, though we can say that many of our answers must be true (how else could we survive?), we cannot point at any single one of them and say with certainty that the answer to that particular question is true. Consequently dogmatism, which maintains that there are certainties we can identify and build upon, goes out the window.
This, however, by no means forces us into skepticism, as is often a.s.sumed. The skeptic concludes from the fact that we can doubt any of our answers that we can doubt all our answers. But that simply doesn't follow. From the fact that a pa.s.senger can occupy any vacant seat in the train it does not follow that she can occupy them all. The viable third option that presents itself here is that of the fallibilist, who argues that though we can trust many of our beliefs to be true, we cannot single out any particular belief as true. The fallibilist is like someone who is building a house in a swamp. Though none of the foundation poles. .h.i.t solid ground, all of them combined keep the house firmly in place. Hence, whereas skepticism undermines the very possibility of knowledge, fallibilism does not.
The above, very brief discussion of inquiry allows us to recast the scientific att.i.tude in terms of a general epistemic imperative: When engaging in inquiry we should 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.
The Problem with Bulls.h.i.tting.
Where there's an imperative there are ways it can be violated. Bulls.h.i.tting is one such violation, but there are others. Let us look at a few. Peirce, who inspired the imperative, directed most of his own criticism against what he called "sham reasoning." In sham reasoning, the intent is not to find true answers to the questions asked, but to find facts that will support a conclusion that is already believed. Creationism, which uses science specifically to support the preconceived notion that the universe is created literally as explained in the Old Testament, is a paradigm case of sham reasoning. The creationist already knows the answer. His attention is focused on finding the facts that support it and refuting the arguments that deny it. The creationist, however, genuinely believes that the theory of evolution is wrong. It has to be wrong because its conclusions are wrong. Hence, the creationist isn't bulls.h.i.tting. In contrast to the bulls.h.i.tter, the creationist cares about how things really are. However, he is not a genuine inquirer either, because the conclusion is set beforehand and isn't negotiable.
A different type of violation-one that Susan Haack has dubbed "fake reasoning"-occurs when the inquirer is not concerned with finding the right answer, but with some ulterior goal, one that is related to the inquiry but is in essence extraneous to the question that is being inquired into.72 An inquirer who receives funding from a large corporation has a strong incentive to produce work that gives the results her sponsors want hear. Someone who is working toward a conclusion, not because he thinks it is the right answer, but because it will give him fame, save his career, bring in research money, land him votes, etc., is a fake reasoner. A marketing campaign that tailors claims about the benefits of a product to scenarios that maximize the company's profit is engaged in fake reasoning as well. A special kind of fake reasoning is that which is designed to absolve the reasoner of responsibility. We can find this with cold-blooded murderers who plea temporary insanity, corporations that seek to avoid damage claims, and politicians that smooth over the gap between what they promised and what they actually did.
Note that the fake reasoner need not actively doctor the results. The influence of ulterior goals can take place at a subconscious or even at an unconscious level. The fake reasoner is also not a bulls.h.i.tter. The issue is not that he doesn't care about the truth, as with the bulls.h.i.tter, but that there are certain other goals that he cares about more. He is not a genuine inquirer either, as finding the right answers is not his highest priority. Sure, his reasoning may be shaky, he may twist language, ma.s.sage his statistics, or embrace logical fallacies with vigor, but all that does not make him a bulls.h.i.tter, at least not in the intentionalist school. The fake reasoner per se still believes in genuine inquiry and departs from it only because of other reasons more pressing in his eyes-the inquiry being only one of several b.a.l.l.s that are being juggled.
A third violation is that of prematurely dismissing the inquiry as going nowhere, so that the answer to the question we are asking is a defeatist "we'll never know." This is the approach of the skeptic. But there is a difference between being convinced that there is no truth and not caring whether what one says is true. Consequently, the skeptic too is no bulls.h.i.tter.
So, what then is bulls.h.i.tting? What makes someone a bulls.h.i.tter-at least in the intentionalist school of Frankfurt and others-is that he doesn't care about the truth or the correctness of his statements, either because of a total indifference to how things really are, or because of the belief that whatever he says makes no difference at all, his voice being only one in a sea of others, many of which more powerful, and all clamoring for attention.73 The sales clerk who doesn't care about the company she works for, and who tells her customer that the shoes she is trying really look great on her without paying any attention to whether they do or not, is bulls.h.i.tting. There is no motivation to get things right, nor to deceive; there isn't even any ulterior motive. In bulls.h.i.tting claims are made, judgments cast, arguments presented, all with the unbearable lightness of those who are free of any responsibility or commitment, even if it is a freedom that is rooted in a profound sense of impotence or insecurity.
A lack of faith in genuine inquiry, intellectual laziness, being forced to speak on issues one knows too little about, all contribute to a culture of bulls.h.i.tting. And it is a culture that can very well feed on itself. Bulls.h.i.tting invariably invites more of it. It would be a mistake, however, to limit one's search for bulls.h.i.tting only to spent scientists, oily politicians, or slick marketers. When philosophy itself is boldly identified, per Richard Rorty, with "carrying on the conversation" and truth is defined as "what your peers will let you get away with," even the perennial search for wisdom is being reduced to mere bulls.h.i.tting. What this means is not just that what some philosophers say is jargonistic, obscure, or meaningless, but that even philosophers are not immune to losing the desire to really search for answers to the questions they are raising. The temptation to just blurt out what sounds good and the power of whatever sounds good to find willful ears (generally including one's own) is just too great.
Not all violations of the epistemic imperative are so simple and straightforward. They can be blended, and even combined, with genuine inquiry. The fake reasoner who doesn't care what people think, or who has lost all respect for his audience, may resort to bulls.h.i.tting when trying to bridge the gap between the results he needs and the results inquiry would bring him. He makes factual claims and explanations without caring whether they are true or false, whether they make sense or not, or whether they are even convincing. The same can be said for the sham reasoner who seeks to defend his holy truths in a political arena where he is faced with an audience that steadfastly refuses to see things as he sees them. Also the genuine inquirer may engage in bulls.h.i.tting when playing the game of keeping corporate sponsors, university administrators, or grant agencies happy, furnishing them with facts, findings, and arguments he doesn't himself believe. One can even bulls.h.i.t about bulls.h.i.tting. 74 It's important, however, to keep such second-order bulls.h.i.tting separate from first-order bulls.h.i.tting. Otherwise one runs the risk of losing the child with the bathwater, as when one would dismiss excellent research because of the bulls.h.i.tting with which its findings were made public.
In light of the above, one might still argue that there are some situations where bulls.h.i.tting is productive, and that even within genuine inquiry there is a proper place and time for it. Frankfurt's discussion of the bull session points in this direction (pp. 3437). Bulls.h.i.tting could be interpreted as creating the right atmosphere for inquirers to vent new hypotheses they feel unsure about or draw wild a.n.a.logies that contain a potential key for further progress. However, there remains an important difference between brainstorming, however creative, and bulls.h.i.tting. Returning once more to the central premise that drives the intentionalist school-that what makes something bulls.h.i.t is the intention with which it is generated-we can say that what distinguishes a brainstorm session from an evening of bulls.h.i.tting is that the partic.i.p.ants in the former are interested in discovering something, a desire that is altogether absent among bulls.h.i.tters. Bulls.h.i.tting lacks the openness of mind and the ability to adapt in face of new insights that are essential for anything to be taken seriously or as worth pursuing. True, what bulls.h.i.tters excrete may on occasion prove useful to others, but that's an accidental and unintended consequence. Taken in that way, listening to someone bulls.h.i.t is no more part of inquiry than serendipitously hitting upon some insight while browsing tabloids or while mindlessly driving through town.
So Why Bulls.h.i.t?
Having distinguished bulls.h.i.tting from genuine inquiry as well as from sham and fake reasoning, and having said something about why people engage in those activities, the question remains: Why do people bulls.h.i.t? Why do people make epistemic claims without caring whether they are true? Leaving pure epistemic sloth aside and with no pretense of being exhaustive, I will say a little about two (mutually reinforcing) reasons why people bulls.h.i.t: the social pressure to speak on any issue (often combined with the notion that whatever one says makes no difference), and a lack of faith in the possibility-or the usefulness-of genuine inquiry. Because I have separated bulls.h.i.tting from sham and fake reasoning, some motives often attributed to the bulls.h.i.tter properly belong to the sham or the fake reasoner.
Within a liberal democratic society, as Frankfurt notes, every individual is expected to be a responsible citizen who is able to instantly voice an opinion on countless pertinent and not so pertinent issues (p. 63). This expectation goes back to the Cartesian rejection of authority and the Enlightenment's appeal that everyone should think for himself. However, when the situation is such that one is forced, or conditioned, to speak with conviction on many issues one knows little about, one will be unable to always speak from a genuine desire to find true answers. For one thing, there simply isn't the time. Moreover, in cases where one is not directly affected there is little motivation to do so. Being relatively detached from the issues one is voicing opinions about, and finding that one's voice is just one among many, has the liberating effect that what opinion is being voiced does not make any difference. Hence, there's no real need to be concerned about the truth of what one is saying.
In addition to the feeling that one does not need to engage oneself in genuine inquiry for many of the issues one is asked or feels compelled to voice an opinion about, there is the belief that genuine inquiry is far too romantic an ideal to be worthy of actual pursuit. Generally, such a prophylactic pessimism follows the disillusion caused by a failed search for certainty. I hope that the above account of genuine inquiry, which makes no reference to something like "Truth with a capital T," and with its fal-libilistic stance, makes a sufficient case to counter this type of bulls.h.i.tter.
When addressing the issue of the prevalence of bulls.h.i.t it may be fair to say that the Enlightenment's narrow focus on individuals has made bulls.h.i.t its natural outcome, as it leaves every individual to fend for himself in an overwhelming epistemic landscape. Put differently, one way of looking at the prevalence of bulls.h.i.t is that it is the price we are paying for the Cartesian-style epistemic emanc.i.p.ation that developed into a linchpin of the ideology of modernity, an ideology that situates knowledge within the individual and makes any appeal to authority suspect.
Hence, the best way to counter bulls.h.i.tting is to restore confidence in genuine inquiry and insist that people be in earnest when they make epistemic claims. Confidence in genuine inquiry also alleviates the need to be able to speak on any and every issue, as it allows one to rely on the work of others. Scientists work like this. Unless there is good reason to doubt the work of their colleagues in other fields of research, they take the results they obtained at face value, a.s.suming that they are the product of genuine inquiry.
Now one might object that by focusing on inquiry I did not cast my net wide enough, because there is more to life than inquiring into things, even if we include sales clerks helping customers find the right shoes. May there then not be some other function of bulls.h.i.tting that is not a violation of the epistemic imperative? Take, for instance, the formulaic "It's nice to see you!," which is not intended to reveal or conceal the speaker's real feelings, nor to convince the addressee about the true nature of those feelings, but rather to make the addressee feel at ease. It could be argued that the claim's truth value doesn't matter for that, so there's is no need for any of those involved to concern themselves with the claim's truth value, thereby making bulls.h.i.tting permissible.
In response to this, it might be suggested that this is not a case of pure bulls.h.i.tting but that it is bulls.h.i.tting for a cause, and that the claim "It's nice to see you!" is in effect a purported product of inquiry, even if this inquiry amounts to little more than a reflection upon one's feelings. With the formulaic "It's nice to see you!" this inquiry is simply not engaged in because no matter what the inquiry would reveal about our feelings toward that person, the best strategy remains to say "It's nice to see you!" That is what best serves the purpose that is deemed more important, which is to ease our interaction with that person-making it technically a case of fake reasoning. What this comes down to is the belief that it is not always best to be earnest. Just as there may be situations where it is better to lie, there may be situations where it is better to bulls.h.i.t.
Alternatively, take the case of a few friends that are just having a good time by horsing around a bit for fun. Their bulls.h.i.tting serves no other purpose than that they enjoy doing it; it plays a role not unlike that of playing Scrabble or some other game. However, since we are still dealing with a situation that involves pa.s.sing off claims as knowledge, however casually, it satisfies the broad definition of inquiry given before, on which inquiry encompa.s.ses any activity that leads to knowledge claims that are in some aspect new to those partic.i.p.ating in the activity. Such cases of horsing around can be defended, though, by arguing that in situations where the conclusions reached do not matter, the enjoyment of the activity can overrule the epistemic imperative. Yes, bulls.h.i.tting too has its aesthetic appeal.
The fact that these two cases can be interpreted in terms of inquiry doesn't prove that all cases of bulls.h.i.tting can be satisfactorily interpreted that way. Personally, I doubt that this can be done. What it does show, however, is that looking at bulls.h.i.tting from the perspective of inquiry gives us a viable framework through which to interpret and evaluate bulls.h.i.tting. A better understanding of bulls.h.i.tting may be a first step, not only towards detecting and identifying bulls.h.i.t, but also towards countering or preventing it when it is inappropriate.
II.
The Bull by the Horns.
Defining Bulls.h.i.t.
8.
Deeper into Bulls.h.i.t.
bulls.h.i.t n. & v. coa.r.s.e sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing. - v. intr. (-s.h.i.tted, - s.h.i.tting ) talk nonsense; bluff. bulls.h.i.tter n.
-Oxford English Dictionary.
It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth-this indifference to how things really are-that I regard as the essence of bulls.h.i.t.
-Harry Frankfurt, On Bulls.h.i.t, pp. 3334.
1 Without the s.h.i.t of the Bull.
Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bulls.h.i.t" is a pioneering and brilliant discussion of a widespread but largely unexamined cultural phenomenon. Upon being honored by an invitation to contribute to a volume that celebrated his work,75 I decided to focus on Frankfurt's work on bulls.h.i.t, partly because it is so original and so interesting, and partly because bulls.h.i.t, and the struggle against it, have played a large role in my own intellectual life. They have played that role because of my interest in Marxism, which caused me to read, when I was in my twenties, a great deal of the French Marxism of the 1960s, princ.i.p.ally deriving from the Althusserian school.
I found that material hard to understand, and, because I was naive enough to believe that writings that were attracting a great deal of respectful, and even reverent, attention could not be loaded with bulls.h.i.t, I was inclined to put the blame for finding the Althusserians hard entirely on myself. And when I managed to extract what seemed like a reasonable idea from one of their texts, I attributed to it more interest or more importance (so I later came to see) than it had, partly, no doubt, because I did not want to think that I had been wasting my time. (That psychological mechanism, a blend, perhaps, of "cognitive dissonance reduction" and "adaptive preference formation," is, I believe, at work quite widely. Someone struggles for ages with some rebarbative text, manages to find some sense in it, and then reports that sense with enthusiasm, even though it is a ba.n.a.lity that could have been expressed in a couple of sentences instead of across the course of the dozens of paragraphs to which the said someone has subjected herself).76 Yet, although I was for a time attracted to Althusserianism, I did not end by succ.u.mbing to its intoxication, because I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigor was not matched by conceptual rigor in its intellectual practices. The ideas that the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false. (Failure to distinguish those opposed interpretations produces an illusory impression of interesting truth).
No doubt at least partly because of my misguided Althusserian dalliance, I became, as far as bulls.h.i.t is concerned, among the least tolerant people that I know. And when a set of Marxists or semi-Marxists, who, like me, had come to abhor what we considered to be the obscurity that had come to infest Marxism-when we formed, at the end of the 1970s, a Marxist discussion group which meets annually, and to which I am pleased to belong, I was glad that my colleagues were willing to call it the Non-Bulls.h.i.t Marxism Group: hence the emblem at the head of this article, which says, in Latin, "Marxism without the s.h.i.t of the bull." (The group is also called, less polemically, and as you can see, the September Group, since we meet each September, for three days.) 2 Two Species of Bulls.h.i.t.
I should like to explain how this chapter reached its present state. I read Frankfurt's article in 1986, when it first appeared. I loved it, but I didn't think critically about it.
Having been asked to contribute to the present volume, I reread the article, in order to write about it. I came to realize that its proposal about the "essence" of bulls.h.i.t worked quite badly for the bulls.h.i.t (see Section 1 above) that has occupied me. So I wrote a first draft which trained counter-examples drawn from the domain of the bulls.h.i.t that interests me against Frankfurt's account. But I then realized that it was inappropriate to train those examples against Frankfurt, that he and I are, in fact, interested in different bulls.h.i.ts, and, therefore, in different explicanda. Frankfurt is interested in a bulls.h.i.t of ordinary life,77 whereas I am interested in a bulls.h.i.t that appears in academic works, and, so I have discovered, the word "bulls.h.i.t" characteristically denotes structurally different things that correspond to those different interests. Finally, and, belatedly, I considered, with some care, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) account of "bulls.h.i.t", and, to my surprise, I discovered (and this was, of course, rea.s.suring) that something like the distinct explicanda that I had come to distinguish are listed there under two distinct entries.78 So, instead of citing cases of the bulls.h.i.t that interests me in disconfirmation of Frankfurt's account, I now regard it as bulls.h.i.t of a different kind.79 Which is not to say that I have no criticism of Frankfurt's treatment of the kind of bulls.h.i.t that interests him.
Frankfurt is partly responsible for my original, misdirected, approach. For he speaks, after all-see the second epigraph at the beginning of this article-of the "essence" of bulls.h.i.t, and he does not acknowledge that the explicandum that attracted his interest is just one flower in the lush garden of bulls.h.i.t. He begins by saying that the term 'bulls.h.i.t' is very hard to handle, a.n.a.lytically, but, as we shall see, he rather abandons caution when he comes to offer his own account of it.
Consider, then, the OED reading of 'bulls.h.i.t': bulls.h.i.t n. & v. coa.r.s.e sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing.80 - v. intr. (-s.h.i.tted, -s.h.i.tting) talk nonsense; bluff. bulls.h.i.tter n.
The bulls.h.i.t that interests me falls under definition 1 of the noun, but the bulls.h.i.t that interests Frankfurt is closer to what's defined by definition 2 of the noun. And that is because of the appearance of the word 'insincere' in that second definition of 'bulls.h.i.t'. In definition 2 of the noun 'bulls.h.i.t', bulls.h.i.t is const.i.tuted as such through being the product of discourse governed by a certain state of mind. In this activity-centered definition of bulls.h.i.t, the bull, conceptually speaking, wears the trousers: bulls.h.i.t is bulls.h.i.t because it was produced by a bulls.h.i.tter, or, at any rate, by someone who was bulls.h.i.tting at the time. Bulls.h.i.t is, by nature, the product of bulls.h.i.tting, and bulls.h.i.tting, by nature, produces bulls.h.i.t, and that biconditional, so understood that 'bulls.h.i.tting' enjoys semantic primacy, is true of Frankfurt's view of the matter.81 Definition 1, by contrast, defines 'bulls.h.i.t' without reference to the bulls.h.i.t-producer's state of mind. The defect of this bulls.h.i.t does not derive from its provenance: almost any state of mind can emit nonsense or rubbish, with any old mix of sincerity and its lack. Here the s.h.i.t wears the trousers, and if there are indeed "bulls.h.i.tters," and "bulls.h.i.ttings," that correspond to the bulls.h.i.t of definition 1, then they are defined by reference to bulls.h.i.t: but it may be the case, as I meant to imply by that 'if', that the words 'bulls.h.i.tting' and 'bulls.h.i.tter' don't have a stable place on this side of the explicandum divide.82 However that may be, definition 1 supplies an output-centered definition of the noun: the character of the process that produces bulls.h.i.t is immaterial here.
Note, moreover, how the alternatives in the brief entry on the verb 'to bulls.h.i.t' match alternatives 1 and 2 in the definition of the noun (even though that entry isn't, as it perhaps should have been, sub-numbered '1' and '2'). One can "talk nonsense" with any intentions whatsoever, but one cannot unknowingly or inadvertently "bluff": bluffing is a way of intending to deceive. (I'm not sure, by the way, that the dictionary is right in its implication that it suffices for bulls.h.i.tting, in the non-bluff sense, that you produce bulls.h.i.t, in sense 1: innocent producers of bulls.h.i.t might be said not to be bulls.h.i.tting when they produce it.83) It is a limitation of Frankfurt's article that, as we shall see, he took for granted that the bull wears the semantic trousers: he therefore focused on one kind of bulls.h.i.t only, and he did not address another, equally interesting, and academically more significant, kind. Bulls.h.i.t as insincere talk or writing is indeed what it is because it is the product of something like bluffing, but talking nonsense is what it is because of the character of its output, and nonsense is not nonsense because of features of the nonsense-talker's mental state.
3 Bulls.h.i.t and Lying.
At the beginning of his article, Frankfurt describes a complexity that afflicts the study of bulls.h.i.t: Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the const.i.tution of bulls.h.i.t is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bulls.h.i.t is often employed quite loosely-simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous a.n.a.lysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bulls.h.i.t remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked. (pp. 23) I have no problem with Frankfurt's first remark, to wit, that "bulls.h.i.t" has a wide use in which it covers almost any kind of intellectual fault. To circ.u.mvent this problem, to identify a worthwhile explicandum, we could ask what 'bulls.h.i.t' denotes where the term does carry (as Frankfurt implies that it sometimes does) a (more or less) "specific literal meaning," one that differs, in particular, from the meanings carried by words that are close to 'bulls.h.i.t', but instructively different in meaning from it, such as the word 'horses.h.i.t', which, at least in the United States, denotes, I believe, something characteristically produced with less deviousness than characterizes the production of (OED-2) bulls.h.i.t. And I think that, for one such meaning, Frankfurt has provided an impressively discriminating (though not, as we shall see, fault-free) treatment: much of what he says about one kind of bulls.h.i.t is true of it but false, for example, of horses.h.i.t.
Frankfurt's second remark, about the difficulty caused by the fact that "the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous," is more problematic. Notice that this remark is meant to be independent of the first one (hence the words 'For another . . .'), as indeed it must be, since no phenomenon could be thought to correspond to 'bulls.h.i.t' where it is an undifferentiated term of abuse. In making this remark, Frankfurt must suppose, if, that is, he supposes, as he appears to do, that he will command the reader's agreement, that the reader has some "specific, literal meaning" of 'bulls.h.i.t' implicitly in mind. But that is extremely doubtful, partly because it is a gratuitous a.s.sumption (and, indeed, as the OED reveals, a false one) that 'bulls.h.i.t' has some single "specific, literal meaning." In a word: how can we be expected to agree, already, that bulls.h.i.t is "vast" and "amorphous," when no specification of 'bulls.h.i.t' has yet been provided?
However that may be, Frankfurt leaves these preliminary problems behind, and plunges right into his subject, by reviewing, refining, and developing a definition that Max Black once gave of 'humbug' (which is close to bulls.h.i.t of the OED-2 kind), and then by commenting on an example of real or feigned rage expressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein against (putative) bulls.h.i.t uttered by Fania Pascal.
Emerging from the Black and Wittgenstein discussions, Frankfurt very surprisingly says, that "the essence of bulls.h.i.t . . . is . . . lack of connection to a concern with truth-. . . indifference to how things really are" (pp. 3334), where that indifference (see the Frankfurt pa.s.sage quoted in the paragraph that follows here) is concealed by the speaker. It's the word 'essence' that surprises me here: it seemed to be implied by Frankfurt's preliminary remarks that the term 'bulls.h.i.t', considered comprehensively, denotes no one thing whose essence one might try to specify,84 and Frankfurt had not in the interim indicated a particular region of bulls.h.i.t, whose bulls.h.i.t might, perhaps, be identified by an essence.
Frankfurt later elaborates his definition as follows: This is the crux of the distinction between him [the bulls.h.i.tter] and the liar. Both he [the bulls.h.i.tter] and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bulls.h.i.tter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are. (pp. 5455) Notice that, when Frankfurt elaborates what is supposed to be a proposal about bulls.h.i.t, he speaks not of "bulls.h.i.t" but of the "bulls.h.i.tter." This confirms that it is the bull that wears Frankfurt's trousers. But he wrongly takes for granted that that is the only important or interesting bulls.h.i.t that there is.
Now, in the light of the semantic promiscuity of 'bulls.h.i.t' that was discussed at the outset of this section, it was, so I have suggested, unwise of Frankfurt to cast his claim as one about the "essence" of bulls.h.i.t, as he does in the pp. 3334 pa.s.sage. He should have submitted his indifference-to-truth thesis as an attempt to characterize (at least) one interesting kind of bulls.h.i.t, whether or not there are other interesting kinds of it. Let us a.s.sess his thesis as such, that is, not with the ambitiously generalizing status that Frankfurt a.s.signs to it, but as an attempt to characterize one kind of bulls.h.i.t, and, in particular, an activity-centered kind of bulls.h.i.t. I return to the distinct bulls.h.i.t-explicandum , which corresponds to OED definition 1, in Section 4 below.
Consider Frankfurt's statement, with which we may readily agree, that The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bulls.h.i.t so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and cla.s.sic paradigms of the concept. (p. 22) I find it hard to align this remark with Frankfurt's proposal about the essence of bulls.h.i.t: advertisers and politicians are often very concerned indeed "to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality" (p. 55) and to design what we might well call "bulls.h.i.t" to serve that end (yet the quoted p. 55 words are used by Frankfurt to characterize the purpose of liars as opposed to bulls.h.i.tters). Is it not a problem for Frankfurt's proposal about the essence of bulls.h.i.t that those whom he designates as paradigm bulls.h.i.tters engage in a great deal of what is not, for Frankfurt, bulls.h.i.tting?
Frankfurt might say (as he must, to sustain his proposal) that, when advertisers and politicians seek to cover up the truth, they are doing something other than bulls.h.i.tting. But when we are inclined to agree with Frankfurt that advertising and politics supply paradigms of bulls.h.i.t, it is not the subset of their doings to which his proposal points that induces our inclination to agree. I think we are induced to agree partly because we recognize at least some lying to be also bulls.h.i.tting.85 Frankfurt's contrast between lying and bulls.h.i.tting is malconstructed, and he erred, I believe, because he failed to distinguish two dimensions of lying, which we must separate if we are to determine the relationship between lying and Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.tting.
Standardly, a liar says what he believes to be false: let us call all that his standard tactic (or, for short, his tactic). Liars also standardly seek to deceive their listeners about some fact (other than the fact that they disbelieve what they say): we can call that the liar's (standard) goal. And normally a liar pursues the stated goal by executing the stated tactic: he says something that he believes to be false in order to induce his listener to believe something false. (Usually, of course, what I have called the liar's "standard goal" is not also his ultimate or final goal, which may be to protect his reputation, to sell a bill of goods, to exploit his listener, or whatever.86 But the liar standardly pursues such further goals by pursuing the goal which liars (as I have said) standardly seek. None of these further goals distinguish the liar from non-liars.) Now, what I have called the "standard tactic" and the "standard goal" of lying can come apart. Consider what was one of Sigmund Freud's favorite jokes: Dialogue between two travelers on a train from Moscow: "Where are you going?"
"To Pinsk."
"Liar! You say you are going to Pinsk in order to make me believe you are going to Minsk. But I know you are going to Pinsk. So whom are you trying to fool?"87 Suppose that the first traveler's diagnosis of the purpose of the second traveler's uttering 'To Pinsk' is correct: let us therefore call the second traveler 'Pavel' (because of the 'P' in Pinsk), and let us call the first traveler 'Trofim'. On the indicated supposition, Trofim is right to call Pinsk-bound Pavel a liar, since, as Frankfurt says, the liar is someone who tries "to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality" (p. 55), and that's what Pavel is trying to do to Trofim. The peculiarity of the present example is that Pavel here seeks to deceive by telling the truth. Pavel does not, in my view, lie, on this occasion, but he nevertheless proves himself to be a liar. Pavel's goal is the standard goal of the liar, but his tactic, here, is to speak the truth. (The important and entirely non-verbal point is that the standard goal and the standard tactic of lying lose their normal a.s.sociation here, not whether Pavel is lying, or telling a lie, etc.) A converse case, in which the standard tactic subserves a non-standard goal, would go as follows. Pavel knows that Trofim knows that Pavel habitually lies, at any rate when it comes to disclosing his intended destinations. But, on the present occasion, it is very important to Pavel that Trofim should believe the truth about where Pavel is going. So Pavel, once again traveling to Pinsk, says that he is going to Minsk, precisely because he wants Trofim to believe the truth, which is that Pavel is going to Pinsk. I don't know, or very much care, whether Pavel thereby lies, but he is not here "attempting to lead [Trofim] away from a correct apprehension of reality," save with respect to his own state of mind: he wants him to think he's trying to get Trofim to believe something false, when he's not.
We must, accordingly, distinguish two respects in which liars characteristically traffic in falsehood. Liars usually intend to utter falsehoods, while intending that they be thought to be speaking truthfully; but that is quite separate from their standard goal, which is to cause a misrepresentation of reality in the listener's mind.
What is the bearing, if any, of this distinction, on Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bulls.h.i.tting?
The root difficulty for Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.tting-lying distinction, the difficulty underlying the problem with his advertiser example, is that, while Frankfurt identifies the liar by his goal, which is to mislead with respect to reality, he a.s.signs no distinctive goal to the bulls.h.i.tter, but, instead, identifies the bulls.h.i.tter's activity at the level that corresponds to what I have called the liar's tactic. The standard liar pursues his distinctive goal by a.s.serting what he believes to be false and concealing that fact. Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.tter a.s.serts statements whose truth-values are of no interest to him, and he conceals that fact. But Frankfurt a.s.signs no distinctive goal to the bulls.h.i.tter that would distinguish him from the liar. And, in fact, Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.tters, as he identifies them, have no distinguishing goal: they have a variety of goals, one of which can be precisely to mislead with respect to reality, and that, indeed, is the goal of bulls.h.i.t advertising.88 Advertisers and politicians spew a lot of bulls.h.i.t, and they indeed seek to induce false beliefs about reality, but those are not, as Frankfurt must have it, separate but, typically, coincident activities on their parts.
The failure to distinguish the level of tactic from the level of goal runs throughout the discussion. Frankfurt writes at p. 47 (my emphasis): Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bulls.h.i.t. For the essence of bulls.h.i.t is not that it is false but that it is phony.
The problem is that this falsehood is at the level of tactic, whereas phoniness is at the level of goal. If bluffing is like bulls.h.i.t, that is partly because bulls.h.i.tting, too, is often devoted to conveying something false-although often not by saying that false thing itself.
As Frankfurt says, the bulls.h.i.tter may not care whether or not what he says is true. But Frankfurt has confused that with the bulls.h.i.tter's not caring whether his audience is caused to believe something true or false. That explains an error that Frankfurt makes about the Fourth of July orator whom he describes at pp. 1618 (my emphases)89: Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about "our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind." This is surely humbug . . . the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country's history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech.
It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statement as false. Rather . . . the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history.
The orator's unconcern about truth is, mistakenly, identified at the level of his goal, rather than, in line with p. 55, merely at the level of his immediate tactic. For the bulls.h.i.tting orator, as Frankfurt describes him, might well care a lot about what the audience thinks about the Founding Fathers.90 If the orator had been Joseph McCarthy, he would have wanted the audience to think that the "new beginning" that the Founding Fathers "created" should persuade the audience to oppose the tyranny supposedly threatened by American Communism. The fact that it is not "fundamental" that "the speaker regards his statements as false" in no way implies that "he is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history." (Similarly, advertisers may not care whether or not what they say is true, but they do care about what their audience is caused to believe, or, rather, more generally, about the thought-processes that they seek to induce in people.91) 4 Bulls.h.i.t as Unclarifiable Unclarity.
Unlike Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.tting, lying is identified in terms of the defect at which it aims, namely, falsehood. We clarify what a liar is by reference to falsehood, rather than the other way around; we do not, that is, when asked to characterize what falsehood is, say that falsehood is what a liar aims to say. In parallel, we might, unlike Frankfurt, seek to clarify what a bulls.h.i.tter is by reference to what he aims at, to wit, bulls.h.i.t. We might start with the s.h.i.t, not with the bull. And that would induce us to consider OED definition 1 ("nonsense, rubbish") the one that fits the bulls.h.i.t that interests me, rather than the bulls.h.i.t that interests Frankfurt. My bulls.h.i.t belongs to the category of statement or text. It is not primarily an activity but the result of an activity (whether or not that activity always qualifies as an activity of bulls.h.i.tting.92) A liar who tries to say something false may inadvertently speak the truth, whether or not he is then lying, and whether or not what he then says is a lie. And there is also the opposite case in which an honest person, by mistake, speaks falsely. The bulls.h.i.t that interests me is relevantly parallel. I countenance a bulls.h.i.tter who has tried, but failed, to produce bulls.h.i.t-what comes out, by accident, is good sense-and I also countenance a lover of truth who utters what he does not realize is bulls.h.i.t. A person may avow, in full honesty, "I'm not sure whether what I'm about to say is bulls.h.i.t." These are not possibilities for the bulls.h.i.t that interests Frankfurt. But they are possibilities. So the bulls.h.i.t that interests Frankfurt doesn't cover the waterfront.
A person who speaks with Frankfurtian indifference to the truth might do so yet happen to say something true, and, in at least one sense of the term, the one that interests me, what he says could not then be bulls.h.i.t.93 And, oppositely, an honest person might read some bulls.h.i.t that a Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.tter wrote, believe it to be the truth, and affirm it. When that honest person utters bulls.h.i.t, she's not showing a disregard for truth. So it is neither necessary nor sufficient for every kind of bulls.h.i.t that it be produced by one who is informed by indifference to the truth, or, indeed, by any other distinctive intentional state.
The honest follower, or the honest confused producer of bulls.h.i.t, may or may not count as a bulls.h.i.tter,94 but she is certainly honest, and she certainly utters (one kind of) bulls.h.i.t. There exists bulls.h.i.t as a feature of utterances that does not qualify as bulls.h.i.t by virtue of the intentional state of the utterance's producer (although that state may, of course causally explain why the bulls.h.i.t is there, and/or why what's there is bulls.h.i.t).
But what is that feature of utterances? One thing it can be, at least to a first approximation, is what the OED calls it, to wit, nonsense. But what particularly interests me is a certain variety of nonsense, namely, that which is found in discourse that is by nature unclarifiable, discourse, that is, that is not only obscure but which cannot be rendered un.o.bscure, where any apparent success in rendering it un.o.bscure creates something that isn't recognizable as a version of what was said. That is why it is frequently an appropriate response to a charge of bulls.h.i.t is to set about trying to clarify what was said. (Think of attempts to vindicate Heidegger, or Hegel. The way to show that they weren't bulls.h.i.tters is not by showing that they cared about the truth, but by showing that what they said, resourcefully construed, makes sense. Those who call them bulls.h.i.tters do not doubt that they cared about the truth, or, at any rate, it is not because of any such doubt that they think Hegel and Heidegger were bulls.h.i.tters. 95 That Frankfurt issue isn't the issue here.) Something is unclarifiable if and only if it cannot be made clear, but I shall not try to say what "clear" means in this essay. (I'm inclined to think it's not possible to do so, in an illuminating way.) Note, however, that there are relevantly different forms of unclarity, all of which have bearing here. There is the unclarity of a sentence itself, and then there is the unclarity as to why a certain (possibly perfectly clear) sentence is uttered in a given context: So, for example, the meaning of Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him" is in one way perfectly clear, but it might nevertheless be judged obscure, and unclarifiably obscure, by one who doubts that it carries, in context, a graspable point. There is also the unclarity of why one statement should be taken to lend credence to another statement. And there are no doubt other pertinent unclarities too.
Note that it is not an objection to the proposed sufficient condition of bulls.h.i.t that different people might, in the light of different background beliefs, impose different standards of clarity, and, therefore, identify different pieces of texts as bulls.h.i.t. Some of the people might, of course, be wrong.
I emphasized "one thing it can be" three paragraphs back because defects other than unclarifiable unclarity can suffice to stigmatize a text as bulls.h.i.t. I focus on this variety of the phenomenon because it commands a greater academic following than other varieties do. In the various varieties of bulls.h.i.t, what is wanting, speaking very generally, is an appropriate connection to truth, but not, as in Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.t, as far as the state of mind of the producer is concerned, but with respect to features of the piece of text itself. Unclarifiably unclarity is one such feature. Rubbish, in the sense of arguments that are grossly deficient either in logic or in sensitivity to empirical evidence, is another. A third is irretrievably speculative comment, which is neither unclear nor wanting in logic, such as-David Miller's excellent example-"Of course, everyone spends much more time thinking about s.e.x now than people did a hundred years ago."
I focus on unclarifiable unclarity in particular in preparation for a further inquiry into bulls.h.i.t that addresses the question why so much of that particular kind of bulls.h.i.t is produced in France. This kind of academic bulls.h.i.t, unlike the two contrasting types of bulls.h.i.t, be they academic or not, mentioned in the previous paragraph, comes close to being celebrated for its very unclarity, by some of its producers and consumers. What some of them certainly celebrate is a disconnection with truth: in what perhaps ranks as the consummation of the development of unclarity-type bulls.h.i.t, a consummation that Hegel might have called "bulls.h.i.t risen to consciousness if itself", truth is, in much post-modernism, expressly disparaged.
Although I foreswear a definition of 'clarity', I can offer a sufficient condition of unclarity. It is that adding or subtracting (if it has one) a negation sign from a text makes no difference to its level of plausibility:96 no force in a statement has been grasped if its putative grasper would react no differently to its negation from how he reacts to the original statement. The deliberate bulls.h.i.t published by Alan Sokal97 no doubt comes out as unclarifiable, by that criterion. Note that this test does not apply to the different sorts of bulls.h.i.t reviewed a couple of paragraphs back, and, being a merely sufficient condition of unclarifiability, it does not characterize all cases of the latter either.
An objection that faces my account is that it appears to cla.s.sify good poetry that isn't bulls.h.i.t as bulls.h.i.t, since a piece of good poetry may be unclarifiable. A tempting way of acquitting such poetry of the charge of bulls.h.i.t is by reference to its designation as poetry, rather than as some sort of contribution to knowledge in a more straightforward sense. But then the same text would be bulls.h.i.t or not according, Frankfurt-like, to its, as it were, intentional encas.e.m.e.nt, and I am trying to characterize an intention-independent sense of the term.
An unclarifiable text can be valuable because of its suggestiveness: it can stimulate thought, it can be worthwhile seeking to interpret it in a spirit which tolerates multiplicity of interpretation, and which therefore denies that it means some one given thing, as a clarifiable piece of text does. So let us say, to spare good poetry, that the bulls.h.i.t that concerns me is not only unclarifiable but also lacks this virtue of suggestiveness.98 (I am sure that many academic bulls.h.i.tters get away with a lot of bulls.h.i.t because some of their unclarifiabilia are valuably suggestive, and therefore not bulls.h.i.t. Their readers then mistakenly expect more, or most, of it to be so.) So much by way of a preliminary attempt to identify the bulls.h.i.t that interests me. But what reading of 'bulls.h.i.tter', if any, corresponds to the bulls.h.i.t that I have tried to identify? Producers of Cohen-bulls.h.i.t are clearly not by nature bulls.h.i.tters, in Frankfurt's sense, though Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.tters often produce Cohen-bulls.h.i.t, at least in the academy. Rather, I would say that the word 'bulls.h.i.tter' that corresponds to my bulls.h.i.t has two readings. In one of its readings, a bulls.h.i.tter is a person who is disposed to bulls.h.i.t: he tends, for whatever reason , to produce a lot of unclarifiable stuff. In a second acceptable reading of the term, a bulls.h.i.tter is a person who aims at bulls.h.i.t, however frequently or infrequently he hits his target.99 (Notice that other nouns that signify that their denotations engage in a certain activity display a similar pair of readings: a killer may be a being that tends to kill, with whatever intention or lack of it (a weed-killer, for example, is a killer, and a merely careless human stomper on flowers is a (flower-) killer); or he may be a being who intends to kill, whether or not he ever does). Aim-(Cohen)-bulls.h.i.tters seek and rely on unclarifiability, whereas innocent speakers of bulls.h.i.t are merely victims of it. Aim-bulls.h.i.tters resort to bulls.h.i.t when they have reason to want what they say to be unintelligible, for example, in order to impress, or in order to give spurious support to a claim: the motives for producing bulls.h.i.t vary. (And just as a person might sometimes kill, without being a killer in either of the senses I distinguished, so a person who is in neither of the senses I distinguished a bulls.h.i.tter might, on occasion, produce bulls.h.i.t.) What about the verb, 'to bulls.h.i.t'? Does the producer of my bulls.h.i.t, always bulls.h.i.t when she produces bulls.h.i.t, as Frankfurt's does? I see no reason for saying that an innocent does, especially if she's not even a disposition-bulls.h.i.tter. But an aim-bulls.h.i.tter who produces bulls.h.i.t indeed bulls.h.i.ts.100 5 Bulls.h.i.t as Product and Bulls.h.i.t as Process It matters that bulls.h.i.t can come in the non-intention-freighted form by which I am exercised. For there is, today, a great deal of my kind of bulls.h.i.t in certain areas of philosophical and semi-philosophical culture, and if, as we should, we are to conduct a struggle against it, the sort of struggle that, so one might say, Alan Sokal has inaugurated,101 then it is important not to make false accusations, and not, therefore, for example, to charge possibly innocent traffickers in bulls.h.i.t of lacking a concern for truth, or of deliberately conniving at obscurity.102 Our proper polemical target is bulls.h.i.t, and not bulls.h.i.tters, or producers of bulls.h.i.t, as such. So while it's lots of fun, for people like me, who have a developed infantile streak, to talk about bulls.h.i.t, and even just to write 'bulls.h.i.t', over and over again, in an academic article, there is nevertheless, in my opinion, something important at stake here, and the character of what is at stake makes the bulls.h.i.tter/bulls.h.i.t distinction important.
To prevent misunderstanding, let me add that I do believe that there is quite a lot of aiming at obscurity in the production of philosophical bulls.h.i.t, and a lot, to boot, in this region, of lack of concern with truth.103 But these moral faults should not be our primary focus. For reasons of courtesy, strategy, and good evidence, we should criticize the product, which is visible, and not the process, which is not.104
9.
The Unity of Bulls.h.i.t.
GARY L. HARDCASTLE.
Our topic is bulls.h.i.t, of course, and it goes almost without saying that in reflecting on our bulls.h.i.t-rich practices, and on the various concepts we use to describe them, we'll be making use of philosophy. Since reflection and tinkering with concepts is part of our practice as well, in thinking philosophically about bulls.h.i.t we have every chance (and by 'we' I mean 'I') of actually engaging in bulls.h.i.t (that is, "bulls.h.i.tting"). Perhaps without even knowing it, or, perish the thought, caring. So there's not just philosophy afoot, but irony as well. Fair warning.
Yet think about bulls.h.i.t we must. Not just because this is a volume of essays on bulls.h.i.t, and not just because I'm a contributing editor to that volume facing, for this very paper, a ridiculous deadline, the missing of which will obligate me to purchase a very expensive French dinner for another of the volume's contributors (nor has it escaped my attention that these conditions are themselves ideal for the promulgation of bulls.h.i.t, so the bulls.h.i.t-risk I'm running in even attempting this essay is, shall we say, immense).
No, the reason we must talk about bulls.h.i.t is simply because (a) it's a fixture in our lives, and (b) we'd rather it wasn't. That is, we find bulls.h.i.t-not always, but often enough-obnoxious and, occasionally, intolerable. And under exactly these conditions arises, inexorably, that oldest genre of talk: complaint. As in, "What's with all this bulls.h.i.t?!" (but in Sumerian).
Fortunately, not all our bulls.h.i.t talk is complaint. Everyone, from me to all but the most cynical among us, nurses the hope that with a bit of care, a bit of insight, a bit of resolve, and a bit of luck, we could reduce, nay, eliminate, the amount of bulls.h.i.t in our own lives, nay, in the lives of everyone we deal with, nay, in everyone. Or, if not eliminate, maybe overcome the bulls.h.i.t. And it's that hope that sends us off, personally, in our families, and occasionally in our communities, on anti-bulls.h.i.t campaigns of various scales, with limited success but nearly unlimited expectations of success. Preliminary to these campaigns, and usually in conjunction with them as well, we settle on what it is exactly we'd like to eliminate. And that involves a certain amount of talk very different in kind from complaint. It involves marshalling examples, crafting definitions, designing a strategy, antic.i.p.ating resistance, measuring success, and articulating some sort of exit strategy (that last one optional in the United States).
The talk is usually just thought, of course-talk to ourselves. But occasionally someone climbs on stage, takes a deep breath, and lets the rest of the world, or at least everyone who is listening, in on her plan. When one too many "Customer Service Specialists" consigned the earnest and hard-working Laura Penny, a Canadian writer and writing instructor, to one too many "Automated Customer Service Facilities," the result was an anti-bulls.h.i.t declaration pedestrian in sentiment but celestial in eloquence. The ending of Penny's Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bulls.h.i.t genuinely touches me: You, Gentle Reader, are probably not one of the powerful malefactors of great bulls.h.i.t, so all of this huffing and puffing is kind of like chastising kids for poor attendance at school. The kids who are congenitally un-there aren't around to hear you chew them out.
But in the event you are a perpetrator (and you know in your heart of hearts if you are), I say unto you: Shame. Shame! Have you no sense of decency? You take names in vain, and send legions of vain names into the world. And when you f.u.c.k with English, you are money-changing in my temple.105 How much bulls.h.i.t do you suppose it takes to get a writing instructor to write that? A lot, I'm imagining. Go Laura!
It's been some time since a philosopher worked up a comparable head of steam, but let's note that this sort of talk about bulls.h.i.t-devising definitions, crafting strategies, countering resistance, and so on-is one thing philosophers do regularly, as a matter of profession and sometimes as a matter just of professional habit. And every so often one philosopher makes such headway against bulls.h.i.t, or at least comes to believe that such headway has been made, that his or her particular anti-bulls.h.i.t project attracts the attention not just of other philosophers but of regular people. This happened most recently with Harry Frankfurt's On Bulls.h.i.t, a bona fide bestseller.
On Bulls.h.i.t is a charming (if skinny) book with a catchy t.i.tle, and partly because of this, no doubt, it enjoyed twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, where dashes demurely obscured its t.i.tle's naughty bit. And since Frankfurt's book had circulated as a paper for some years before its promotion to book, other philosophers-notably G.A. Cohen, whose "Deeper Into Bulls.h.i.t" is included in this volume (pp. 117135)-had something to say about bulls.h.i.t. Philosophically speaking, 2005 was a very good year for bulls.h.i.t, and so was 2006.
We should celebrate both On Bulls.h.i.t's enormous success, and the immanent delivery of yet more related philosophical work (including the book you're holding right now), to the public that professional philosophy all too often forgets. We should celebrate it not as the long-awaited return of the philosopher kings to the public debate (or even to Rolling Stone) but simply as an occasion for philosophy to join the discussion taking place more