Difficulty: What the hell
In his work On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt famously defined bullshit as, roughly, a product of a speaker who is indifferent to the truth. Note that bullshitting is different from lying. A liar cannot be indifferent to the truth, because she must first pay attention to what she thinks is true–and then avoid it.
Lying vs. bullshitting
Here is an easy example of the difference between lying and bullshitting:
If a student is writing a paper on, say, Hitler, and she knows that Hitler was born on April 20, she would be lying if she attempted to deceive her teacher about that fact. But if she’s doing a last-minute job and has to fill 10 pages with words, and so she changes the font and margin size and writes a shit ton of whatever, then she would be bullshitting. That’s not because she’s lying–she’s not. It’s because she’s indifferent to whether what she writes is true, but pretends to care.
But Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit” is not perfect (and to be fair, he neither claimed nor argued that it was). What prompted me to revise his definition is that at the very end of On Bullshit, he accuses “anti-realists” in academic philosophy of bullshitting or, at the very least, of making it dangerously easier for bullshit to spread.
His idea seems to be that because anti-realists reject the existence of certain objective truths, they must then be indifferent to truth. Since to those anti-realists, there is no such thing as truth, the only “truth” they can care about is their sincerity, which is bullshit, Frankfurt says. Doing my best to understand him, I think what he means is:
If there are no objective truths on your view, you can’t (and thus don’t) care about the truth.
There are no objective truths on your view.
Therefore, you can’t (and thus don’t) care about the truth.
What about sincerity? I’m not sure. But my guess is that he means that these sincerity folks take this stance: “Since truth is gone, the only thing that matters is expressing what’s inside me.”
And from here, they say shit like, “I’m just expressing myself.” No concern for truth, in Frankfurt’s sense, seems to be doing any work there.
But I have to respond: WTF? Frankfurt seems to slide between two things:
(A) Bullshit (his definition)
Speaker is indifferent to truth
(B) Anti-realism
Truth is not objective / not available / not truth-apt
And (A) and (B) are very different. For instance, anti-realism includes a philosophical area called non-cognitivism, and non-cognitivists–who reject that moral statements (like “stealing is wrong”) are true or false–often:
- think hard about meaning, use, and justification
- are not just saying “whatever works”
- and are often more careful than ordinary speakers
Many prominent non-cognitivists are clearly not bullshitters. So to clarify our understanding of what bullshit is–and is not–we need to refine its definition.
The revised definition
I’ve revised Frankfurt’s definition as follows:
Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning and truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of correctness.
In short, it’s about:
pretending to play by the rules while not actually giving a shit about them—or simply not caring about them at all
What unifies (a) and (b) is a lack of genuine constraint: in both cases, the speaker or agent is not genuinely guided by the standards that are supposed to govern the activity.
Following (a), this definition allows us to say that intellectually serious non-cognitivists (and other anti-realists) are not bullshitters, even though they may seem indifferent to the truth of certain things, such as moral truths, that they believe not to exist. If these anti-realists are playing by the rules of reasoning and getting things right, even though they don’t believe in the existence of certain objective truths, then they can’t be said to be bullshitters.
Note that the revised definition says “speech or deed,” not just “speech.” And how, you might ask, could a deed be bullshit?
Say that you’re in a philosophy seminar where some graduate students pretend to understand things by stroking their chins and nodding their heads. The thing is, these students don’t care about learning things. They are merely simulating adherence to the relevant standards of correctness, and they are not genuinely concerned with getting things right. Specifically, they pretend to play by the rules (social norms, philosophical thinking in grad school) without giving a shit about the rules.
That’s plausibly an instance of bullshit.
Or consider tagging on a dumpster that looks like “street art” or a “statement.” If the point is just visibility or ego—no concern for craft, meaning, or whether any implied claim is true—then it’s bullshit: it imitates the norms of art or discourse without being guided by them.
Following (b), this revised definition also captures cases of bullshit dumpster tagging done “just for kicks.” If the teenagers vandalized the dumpster without regard to any standard at all–they didn’t even pretend to follow the rules (property norms, social norms, aesthetic standards)–then we can plausibly say, with exasperation, “That’s bullshit.”
Interestingly, this revised definition allows us to capture not just deeds, but also statements that are not truth-apt (neither true nor false)—an expansion that Frankfurt’s original definition struggles with. After all, if bullshit is defined purely in terms of indifference to truth, then it becomes unclear how to classify questions, expressions, or other non-truth-apt utterances.
But these can clearly be bullshit. Consider a philosopher asking questions she has no interest in answering, or a child who keeps asking “why?” not out of curiosity, but just to annoy you. These are not false statements—but they still display a lack of concern for getting anything right.
The revised definition captures this more naturally.
In other words, bullshit can be about truth, but it’s often also about whether you’re actually trying to get anything right at all.
Philosophy without Bullshit 