Difficulty: What the fuck
In her 2025 paper “Bullshit Philosophy,” Rima Basu argues that bullshit philosophical inquiry is both a moral and epistemic wrong. My focus for this post is on the epistemic implications of bullshit in philosophy, so it’s nice that Basu cleanly outlines her argument that bullshit philosophical inquiry is epistemically damaging:
(1) Philosophy aims at understanding.
(2) The principle of charity is a constitutive methodological principle central to any epistemic practice that takes understanding as its aim.
(3) Therefore, the principle of charity is a constitutive methodological principle central to philosophy.
(4) Bullshit inquiring undermines charity.
Therefore, bullshit inquiring undermines philosophy.
Basu gives a concrete example of how bullshit philosophical inquiry might arise in the case of a PhD candidate trying to pass her thesis defense. A committee member asks the candidate a question, and the candidate, unable to answer the question, proceeds to bullshit: she carefully responds with a string of true statements that are irrelevant to the question asked, hoping that the irrelevance of these statements would pass unnoticed.
Perhaps, Basu says, if the candidate is very lucky, the committee member might even charitably reconstruct those true statements so that they seem relevant to the question asked, providing the candidate with an argument where there was none. She states, “[W]e are at risk of confabulating something, anything, to make what is said make sense, to grasp at some underlying connection when there was no underlying connection in the first place.”
Basu’s math analogy and its flaws
Then Basu offers this analogy:
“In this way, PhD Candidate resembles a math teacher who asks her students to show the work for arriving at answers to a problem set while knowing full well that some of the answers she provided in the worksheet might be wrong, because she copied them out of the textbook in haste. Imagine attempting to complete that worksheet. Although the answers may seem impossible, because we generally defer to authority figures like teachers, we convince ourselves that they must be possible. It is due to our intellectual failures that we can’t arrive at the answer the worksheet says we should be able to arrive at.”
But this analogy, which is supposed to do significant work in support of Basu’s argument, is inapt.
Notice first that the hypothetical scenario stipulates that the PhD candidate carefully selects a string of true, if irrelevant, statements. That is obviously not what the sloppy math teacher, who knows “full well that some of the answers she provided in the worksheet might be wrong, because she copied them out of the textbook in haste,” does.
This is a crucial difference: for Basu’s argument to work, she must show that this type of bullshit philosophy, where the PhD candidate carefully selects only true statements, does epistemic damage. But she then attributes the epistemic damage to the confabulation that may result from false answers, as in the math analogy. So Basu has not clearly shown that the bullshitter PhD candidate causes epistemic damage the way the sloppy math teacher does.
For the analogy to be more apt, we have to reconstruct it as follows:
The math teacher copies the answers carefully, ensuring that the answers for which her students must show their work are correct. But the math teacher does not understand how the correct answers connect to the work shown. She does not understand why the answers are correct.
This is much more analogous. Both the PhD candidate and the math teacher carefully produce answers that are true, but both are bullshitting in the sense that they lack understanding.
But with this revised analogy, it becomes difficult to see how the math teacher—and, by extension, the PhD candidate—cause epistemic damage. The math students may very well conscientiously show their work and gain a better understanding of math even if their teacher doesn’t understand how the math works. The committee member, too, may gain deeper philosophical understanding despite the PhD candidate’s bullshit (but true) responses.
Indeed, one might even argue that the PhD candidate could come away with greater philosophical understanding than she would have if she had simply said “I don’t know,” provided that the committee’s charitable reconstruction reveals a genuinely interesting line of thought. Given that she truly wants to pass her thesis defense, she would need to understand the reconstructed argument that the committee member charitably offered so that she could come up with better answers for the rest of the defense. As admirable as it would have been if she had simply said, “I don’t know,” neither she nor the committee member would likely have come up with the stronger reconstructed argument. That would have been as if the math teacher, unable to understand the connection between the math answers and the work, simply admitted to her students, “I don’t understand how this math works, so I’m not assigning you any worksheet.”
Thus, even if bullshit inquiry is bad, the audience’s charitable and exploratory response to it need not be bad. In philosophy, that response may sometimes still generate genuine understanding.
Incidentally, there is also a second problem with Basu’s analogy. The math case is structurally convergent: students are trying to derive one determinate answer, and if that answer is wrong, their effort is likely to misfire. Philosophy is often much more divergent. Faced with a question, philosophers regularly generate multiple candidate interpretations, distinctions, and lines of thought. What Basu describes as a risk of “confabulation” may, in philosophy, sometimes be part of the ordinary process by which understanding is produced. Even if the PhD candidate lacks understanding, the committee’s charitable attempt to draw connections among the candidate’s true claims may still deepen the committee’s own understanding rather than undermine it.
The takeaway
Basu’s argument seems caught in a dilemma. If the math analogy is left as she presents it, it is not genuinely parallel to the PhD-candidate case, because it relies on false answers rather than true-but-irrelevant ones. But if the analogy is repaired so that it becomes genuinely parallel, the alleged epistemic harm is no longer obvious. In both the repaired math case and the philosophical case, the audience’s charitable reconstruction may still generate understanding rather than undermine it.
So Basu has not yet shown what she needs to show: that bullshit inquiry, in the form she describes, is epistemically damaging in a way that undermines philosophy itself. At most, she has shown that such inquiry may shift onto others the burden of making sense of what the bullshitter says. But that is not the same thing as proving that charity here is epistemically corrupting rather than epistemically productive.
In philosophy, charity may sometimes rescue bullshit. But in rescuing it, it may also produce the very understanding Basu says bullshit inquiry undermines.
Philosophy without Bullshit 