Frankfurtian reality

Jamie's report yesterday was on bullshit.

More precisely, on "On Bullshit," Harry Frankfurt's infamous essay-cum-mini-book bestseller. And, on Bullshit and Philosophy. Plenty to draw on there.

What did Wittgenstein say? Show, don't tell?

But it was not a bullshit report. Not at all. Jamie's regard for the truth was one of its most salient features.



The example I raised in class-- the "birthers" etc.-- poses the question: can you be a liar and a bullshitter both, simultaneously? Frankfurt suggests that the statements of bullshitters are typically

unconnected to a concern with the truth.. not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. [They] do not even think they know, except in the vaguest way... concoct it out of whole cloth...repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.

But if "it" is a matter of the documented public record, and "they" choose to ignore it, they're exactly what Al Franken called Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, et al. "Lying liars." And I say they're bullshitters too.

What if they believe their own bullshit lies? They're delusional as well. Really scary. Happy Halloween.

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...

truthiness

How can we talk about Truth, without first consulting the lexicographer Colbert?

Truthiness is a term first used in its recent satirical sense by American television comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005, todescribe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1] Colbert introduced this definition[2] of the word during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd". Truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster.

From the horse's mouth...

BTW: truthiness, being generally indifferent to the actual truth or falsehood of its progeny, has much in common with Harry Frankfurt's "bullshit."