Slate Magazine
Defining Bullshit
By Timothy Noah
"We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production," observes Laura Penny, author of the forthcoming (and wittily titled) Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. But what is bullshit, exactly? By which I mean: What are its defining characteristics?
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2114268/
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The curious may want to also check out the following...
An excerpt from Frankfurt's essay upon which the book is based.
On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
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. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not, or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.
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full at --
<http://www.ditext.com/frankfurt/bullshit.html >
Scott McLemee on Frankfurt's work --
A Critique of Pure BS
By Scott McLemee
Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit has just been published by Princeton University Press as a handsome little volume you would call a pamphlet if it were not in hardback. I haven't actually done much more than glance it over for a few minutes in a bookstore, but am going to write about it anyway.
No, that does not mean that this column will bullshit on On Bullshit. In fact the volume is simply a reprint -- incorporating two or three quite infinitesimal changes -- of a paper originally presented by Frankfurt, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, in 1986. It was reprinted in a collection of his essays, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and has been available online for some time now.
Anyone involved in either academe or journalism certainly ought to be familiar with "On Bullshit," and for those of us at their fragrant crossroads, it is indispensable. Alas, nothing in the new edition informs the reader of the essay's scholarly provenance. It tells you the book appeared in 2005, not that it is already a classic. Then again, most copies of the book will doubtless be purchased, not by those with a sincere interest in bullshitological studies, but as gag gifts -- with a likely spike of sales coming right around graduation time.
It is, however, a serious exercise in conceptual definition. Frankfurt writes with a certain dry eloquence, and commands impressive analytic perspicacity -- all of which is thrown into still more striking relief by the appearance, every few sentences, of the word "bullshit.
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full at --
<http://insidehighered.com/index.php/mla/views/intellectual_affairs__4
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