On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 Ulhas cited the first paragraph of
> Slate Magazine
> Defining Bullshit
>
> A philosophy professor says it's a process, not a product.
> By Timothy Noah
>
> Posted Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 4:37 PM PT
I think this review article is worth quoting in full, because that first paragraph doesn't quite get across how interesting this is. It gets better and better as it goes on, and what starts with a contorted example ends up as a surprisingly sharp distinction. And one more reason to call them The Bushits.
Michael
=========
URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2114268/
Posted Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 4:37 PM PT
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Defining Bullshit
A philosophy professor says it's a process, not a product.
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? What
is its Platonic essence? How does bullshit differ from such precursors
as humbug, poppycock, tommyrot, hooey, twaddle, balderdash, claptrap,
palaver, hogwash, buncombe (or "bunk"), hokum, drivel, flapdoodle,
bullpucky, and all the other pejoratives* favored by H.L. Mencken and
his many imitators? The scholar who answers the question, "What is
bullshit?" bids boldly to define the spirit of the present age.
Enter Harry G. Frankfurt. In the fall 1986 issue of Raritan,
Frankfurt, a retired professor of philosophy at Princeton, took a
whack at it in an essay titled "On Bullshit." Frankfurt reprinted the
essay two years later in his book The Importance of What We Care
About: Philosophical Essays. Last month he republished it a second
time as a very small book. Frankfurt's conclusion, which I caught up
with in its latest repackaging, is that bullshit is defined not so
much by the end product as by the process by which it is created.
Eureka! Frankfurt's definition is one of those not-at-all-obvious
insights that become blindingly obvious the moment they are expressed.
Although Frankfurt doesn't point this out, it immediately occurred to
me upon closing his book that the word "bullshit" is both noun and
verb, and that this duality distinguishes bullshit not only from the
aforementioned Menckenesque antecedents, but also from its
contemporary near-relative, horseshit. It is possible to bullshit
somebody, but it is not possible to poppycock, or to twaddle, or to
horseshit anyone. When we speak of bullshit, then, we speak,
implicitly, of the action that brought the bullshit into being:
Somebody bullshitted. In this respect the word "bullshit" is identical
to the word "lie," for when we speak of a lie we speak, implicitly, of
the action that brought the lie into being: Somebody lied.
Is "bullshit," then, a synonym for "lie"? Not exactly. Frankfurt asks
us to consider an anecdote told about Ludwig Wittgenstein wherein the
great philosopher phones a friend named Fania Pascal who's just had
her tonsils removed. How are you, Wittgenstein asks. Like a dog that's
been run over, Pascal answers. Wittgenstein then replies testily, "You
don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." In effect,
Frankfurt argues, Wittgenstein is suggesting that Pascal is spouting
bullshit. (A more reasonable person, Frankfurt concedes, would reach
the charitable conclusion that Wittgenstein's friend is merely
expressing herself through the use of allusive or at worst hyperbolic
language.) Wittgenstein's grumpy outburst seems so absurd that very
possibly the real bullshit here is the anecdote itself. But Frankfurt
asks us to assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that the
anecdote is true and that Wittgenstein's objection is rational and
sincere.
So: Wittgenstein thinks Pascal is bullshitting him. But why, Frankfurt
asks,
does it strike [Wittgenstein] that way? It does so, I believe,
because he perceives what Pascal says as being--roughly speaking,
for now--unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is
not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not
even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog
feels. Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly,
something that she is merely making up.
Is Pascal lying? No. She isn't trying to deceive Wittgenstein about
how she really feels, and she isn't trying to deceive Wittgenstein
about how a dog would feel if run over. Her error, Frankfurt
concludes, isn't that she conducted a faulty inquiry into how a dog
would feel if run over, but that she conducted no inquiry at all (in
this case, because none is possible)."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 bullshit."
Frankfurt's definition is provocative because it allows for the
little-recognized possibility that bullshit can be substantively true,
and still be bullshit. Last summer, the Financial Times reported on
evidence that the infamous war-justifying "16 words" in President
Bush's 2003 State of the Union address ("The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa") may have been true after all. Previously, a
consensus had dismissed the Bush administration's charge that Iraq had
sought to buy yellowcake from Niger (implicit in Bush's use of the
word "learned" rather than "concluded") as outright bullshit--a lie,
even. Did the FT's stories mean that the 16 words might not be
bullshit? No. They meant the 16 words might be true, but still didn't
legitimize the shoddy White House research that had led to their
inclusion in the speech. When those words were written into the
speech, the president and his staff lacked the evidence needed to
support them. They were bullshitting. The 16 words therefore remain
bullshit, and will continue to remain bullshit even if the charge is
eventually proved true.
More often, of course, bullshit is not true, in the same sense that a
stopped clock is wrong 1,438 out of 1,440 minutes per day. Is bullshit
as bad as a lie? Frankfurt thinks it's worse:
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their
beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they
endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it
deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a
person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting
tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He
does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and
oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue
of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Bullshit, Frankfurt notes, is an inevitable byproduct of public life,
"where people are frequently impelled--whether by their own
propensities or by the demands of others--to speak extensively about
matters of which they are to some degree ignorant." But politics is
not a creation of the modern era; it's been around for centuries.
Why should bullshit be so prevalent now? The obvious answer is the
communications revolution. Cable television and the Internet have
created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't
enough truth to go around. So, we get bullshit instead. Indeed, there
are some troubling signs that the consumer has come to prefer
bullshit. In choosing guests to appear on cable news, bookers will
almost always choose a glib ignoramus over an expert who can't talk in
clipped sentences. In his underappreciated book Public Intellectuals:
A Study of Decline, Richard Posner found a negative correlation
between media mentions and scholarly citations for the 100 public
intellectuals most mentioned in the media--and these 100 accounted for
67.5 percent of all media mentions!
The Bush administration is clearly more bullshit-heavy than its
predecessors. Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, put his finger
on the Bush administration's particular style of lying three years
ago:
If the truth was too precious to waste on politics for Bush I and a
challenge to overcome for Clinton, for our current George Bush it
is simply boring and uncool. Bush II administration lies are often
so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you
realize: They haven't bothered.
But by Frankfurt's lights, what Bush does isn't lying at all. It's
bullshitting. Whatever you choose to call it, Bush's indifference to
the truth is indeed more troubling, in many ways, than what Frankfurt
calls "lying" would be. Richard Nixon knew he was bombing Cambodia.
Does George W. Bush have a clue that his Social Security arithmetic
fails to add up? How can he know if he doesn't care?
©2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive