The Philosophy and Science of Bullshit
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry.” — Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
“On Bullshit”, is really more of an extended essay. Frankfurt, an analytical philosopher, tries to formulate a formal theory of Bullshit — what is it, what are its effects, and how might we combat it?
Where in normal conversation I may call something Bullshit, it’s often synonymous with the words false, inconvenient, or hurtful: “that test was bullshit”, “[claim] is bullshit”, et cetera. Frankfurt instead treats Bullshit as a technical term, with sharply delineated boundaries of Bullshit and Not-Bullshit. I’ll attempt to explain what he means in this post.
What is Bullshit?
Bullshit as a concept lies somewhere in the realm of ideas like Truth, and Lies. It’s with these concepts that Frankfurt starts to tease apart what separates bullshit from general lying. He starts with an anecdote taken from a biography of Wittgenstein:
“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.” [Wittgenstein] was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like” — Fania Pascal, Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir
Now why might Wittgenstein be irritated by such a claim? We know he was extraordinarily pedantic when it came to language, so what about this statement bothered him?
Pascal isn’t lying — she does feel that way — but she’s also not telling the Truth. Frankfurt contends
“The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. To the Wittgenstein in Pascal’s story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit.”
Pascal’s statement isn’t meant to correspond to reality in a meaningful way. She’s trying to convey a feeling. Her sin, in Wittgenstein’s estimation, would not be in attempting to deceive her conversational partner, but that she doesn’t care about the Truth value of her statement.
This is the fundamental distinction between Lies and Bullshit. A liar speaks untruths with intent to deceive, whereas a bullshitter doesn’t care about deception, only that the appropriate feelings are conveyed. A bullshitter would say true things, false things, or anything in between, so long as the emotional affect is “correct”. In the words of Frankfurt, “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
In other words, the product of Lies and Bullshit may be the same — false statements — but the process one uses to get to either is fundamentally different.
Where do we see Bullshit?
One image.
The POTUS is notorious for his Bullshit. Look at any of his speeches and you’ll see a mess of internal contradictions, made-up facts, and outright falsehoods. But characterizing this manner of speaking as Lying is to miss that Trump doesn’t care about the truth — he’s not even lying. He’s Bullshitting.
Journalists who keep tallies of his false statements — like in the article “Trump made 18,000 false or misleading claims in 1,170 days” — are taking the wrong approach to dealing with the man. In a 2017 paper by Briony Swire, we can see how Trump voters are more likely to believe, or simply care less about truth, when they know a statement has come from the president. The Bullshit is noticed and it is tolerated, if not supported.
For a more detailed analysis of Trump’s Bullshit, I’ll direct you to two articles on the topic:
Trump is not alone in his Bullshit. A vast number of public figures are known for spouting nonsense at the drop of a hat. Deepak Chopra has an entire website dedicated to generated false tweets with similar levels of Bullshit. Gwyneth Paltrow has built an entire business around Bullshit — for an analysis of her Bullshit, see here. Trump is simply the most visible of them.
What makes us susceptible to Bullshit?
I’d like to first show you one of my favourite papers ever: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”.
In it, the authors conduct a series of studies designed to gauge the relative “Bullshit receptivity” of people, with an analysis of why some might be more readily influenced by Bullshit than others.
Here’s a breakdown of their study design:
- participants were presented with ten statements that have syntactic structure but that consist of a series of randomly selected vague buzzwords
- Participants were asked to indicate the relative profundity of each statement on a scale from 1 (not at all profound) to 5 (very profound)
- Participants also completed a series of relevant cognitive and demographic questions.
In other words, the authors got data about the participants, showed them Bullshit, and looked at their reaction to it. This isn’t a complex methodological process. It doesn’t need to be.
What were their findings? I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:
“These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our re- sults also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.” — Pennycock et. al., 2015
Who’s more receptive to Bullshit? The authors have a table for that:
In summary, Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) was negatively correlated with good scores on a cognitive reflection test, success on a bias test, verbal intelligence, and numeracy. Ontological confusion and religious belief were positively correlated with BSR.
You may be wondering what went into the authors’ ontological conclusion and religious belief scales. Ontological confusion levels were measured by asking participants to rate statements like:
“a rock lives for a very long time”
OR
“friends are the salt of life”
Participants rated these on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “fully metaphorical” and 5 being “fully literal”. Friends may be the salt of life in a metaphorical sense, but someone who is ontologically confused — that is, confused with what is literally true — is more likely to give such a statement a higher rating.
Religious belief was evaluated in a similar manner, with participants rating their levels of belief in common religious beliefs: afterlife, heaven, hell, miracles, angels, demons, soul, and Satan.
Beyond having a funny title, this paper is an engaging read, and the authors do good work in follow-up studies that tease apart where participants’ Bullshit Receptivity is coming from. Here’s the link again: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”
What does the Bullshit epidemic say about us?
As Harry Frankfurt said in his introductory paragraph, Bullshit is everywhere. What does this mean? It’s depressing that we live in a culture that allows for the widespread proliferation of Bullshit. Everyone uses it — when convenient. You’ve been a purveyor of Bullshit when it suits you, it’s just easier to see it in others, particularly when they hold positions you disagree with.
There’s a structural similarity between Bullshit and the Motte and Bailey Doctrine. In a Motte and Bailey rhetorical strategy, the speaker uses wildly outrageous claims (Bailey), only reverting to an innocuous or unobjectionable claim when challenged (Motte). The different between the two concepts is that Bullshit is all Bailey. Trump doesn’t revert back to an unobjectionable claim when challenged on his false statements — he moves on to saying new things. And so the cycle repeats.
I encourage you to seek out Bullshit, wherever it may be. Here, I’ll get you started:
If I could have you take anything away from this essay, it would be a new bias towards looking at statements and thinking: “Is this true? Or does it just sound truth-y?”
Bullshit exists because we allow it. It exists because we tolerate it. It exists because we don’t challenge it when it’s inconvenient for ourselves. If I were a more cliché person, I’d tell you to “be the change you want to see in the world”. Instead, I think this might be better received:
Manifest your desire for change in the matrix of your entangled relations with others. Make the local non-local and spread this invisible message to all corners of the cosmos. Namaste. — Milne, 2020
