bullshit

I'm a bit disappointed to learn that the student presentation on Harry Frankfurt previously scheduled for this morning's class won't be forthcoming. Maybe a certain imprecation is in order?

Harry Frankfurt is the Princeton philosopher whose clever-funny-serious essay "On Bullshit" created a mild sensation among me and my fellow grad students back in the '80s, and then found a new (and, of all things, a mass market) audience just a couple of years ago. And then inspired Bullshit and Philosophy... or was it the other way around?

Bullshit bears a family resemblance to Carl Sagan's "baloney," Monty Python's "argument clinic" (and witch-hunting) and Stephen Colbert's "truthiness"...


What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of  affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes    the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to...