On Bullshit (Harry Frankfurt)
- Is sincerity really BS? *
- Should we be tempted to fight others' BS with our own?
- Or must we redouble our commitment to truth and renounce BS, if we would assert our identity as lovers of wisdom?
==
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
“Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a particular point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to have that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who takes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as is required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist'.”
“Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. 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.”
“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.” *
g'r
Bullshit and Philosophy
"It just keeps piling..."
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
ReplyDeleteThis would indicate that Trump is bullshitting rather than lying because I sincerely doubt he knows the truth of what he says.
No, he's consistently as pointed an instance of what Frankfurt calls "indifference to the truth" as anyone I've ever heard of. ("On Bullshit" was written in the mid-80s, in retrospect it was amazingly prescient: first about the Iraq war, and now all this.)
DeleteFrankfurt wrote an essay in 2016 acknowledging Drumpf's remarkable piling abilities...
"Donald Drumpf provides a robust example of someone who is, with respect to matters particularly relevant to the exercise of high political authority, neither well-informed nor especially intelligent. Moreover, even apart from these rather egregious cognitive deficiencies, much of what Drumpf has said during his presidential campaign has been—to put it mildly—quite unconvincing. This goes not only for his sometimes boorishly insulting characterizations of the personalities, behaviors and even the physical features of others, but also for his bizarrely self-congratulatory claims concerning his own capacities, plans and intentions.
It is generally easy to identify which of Drumpf’s assertions are, in one way or another, unworthy of belief. What is somewhat more difficult to establish is whether his unmistakably dubious statements are deliberate lies or whether they are just bullshit.
The distinction between lying and bullshitting is fairly clear. The liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false. He deliberately misrepresents what he takes to be the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. In making his assertion, he is indifferent to whether what he is says is true or false. His goal is not to report facts. It is, rather, to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way..." (continues)
https://time.com/4321036/donald-trump-bs/