“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.“ These are the opening sentences of the paper On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University. We all have a sense of what bullshit is, but find it hard to define. Whilst acknowledging the term bullshit is used very loosely, he puts forward a theory for it. Here are the main points from his paper.
Definition
In summary, bullshit1 is:
Deliberate misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts…
Bullshit vs Lying
Since “short of lying” is the key point, we need to understand what lying is. The liar deliberately says something that they believe to be false. For example, you are lying if you know the world is spherical2, but you tell everyone it’s flat. You’re intentionally misrepresenting what you believe to be true.
So how is bullshit different to lies? Someone bullshitting doesn’t care about the truth of the statement they’re making. Bullshit is unconcerned with the truth.
Here’s an example of bullshit:
A friend asks you to pick some milk up from the shops, but when you get there you see a long queue to get inside. You don’t know how many people are waiting, but the queue extends outside the shop. You phone your friend: “Sorry, I can’t pick the milk up because there are a hundred people queueing to get in.”
You’re bullshitting because you have no idea about the number of people in the queue. The aim was to convey the idea that the queue was so long it wasn’t worth waiting in. You had no concern for the truth i.e. the actual (or rough) number of people waiting.
Is it just carelessness?
You could argue that bullshit is just carelessness - in the above example, you didn’t bother counting (or even estimating) the number of people in the queue. Frankfurt acknowledges that bullshit can stem from carelessness, but bullshit shouldn’t be defined by it. He gives an example where bullshit is actually very well crafted:
The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve amongst the indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.
He suggests that in these fields people are using sophisticated methods (e.g. statistics and behavioural theory) to manipulate people. They’re bullshitting to achieve their goals by evoking emotional responses, and are very precise in how they do so.
A Post-Truth World
It’s impossible to tell whether there is more bullshit nowadays than before, but the fact remains that there is currently a lot of it.
There are a number of reasons for this. Bullshit is unavoidable when you’re required to talk about a subject you know very little. For example, politicians resort to bullshit when asked about matters outside their fields of expertise.
Our bullshit culture has deeper sources though - it stems from the fact that many people believe there is no objective truth. How can you lie about a matter if you don’t believe anything can be objectively true? Bullshitting is the only way out.
1 Frankfurt borrows this definition from Max Black’s paper The Prevalence of Humbug. Initially he equates bullshit to humbug, and then builds on the definition.
2 On the subject of the world’s shape, The Relativity of Wrong is an interesting read.