Raymond Chuang

Is the Fallacy Fallacy a Formal or Informal Fallacy?

Difficulty: What the heck

Is the fallacy fallacy a formal or informal fallacy?

Answer: it depends.

But first, briefly: the fallacy fallacy is the fallacy whereby the arguer concludes that an argument’s conclusion is false simply because the argument used to support it is fallacious.

For instance:

Debater 1: Trump is not evil, because you’re a cow.

Debater 2: Aha! That’s an ad hominem argument, and that’s fallacious. So you’re wrong that Trump isn’t evil. Therefore, Trump is evil.

Here, Debater 2 commits the fallacy fallacy by arguing that because Debater 1’s argument is a fallacious ad hominem abusive argument, Debater 1’s contention that Trump is not evil must therefore be false.

But the issue is this: just because someone’s reasoning is fallacious does not mean her conclusion is necessarily false. It does not mean it is true, either. It just means that the conclusion does not logically follow from that argument.

Think about it this way: if a kid were asked to do a multiplication problem—say, “2 × 2”—and, not knowing how to multiply, she used addition instead, she would still arrive at the right answer, “4,” even though her reasoning process would be wonky. It is the same way with logic and argumentation. A bad argument can accidentally land on a true conclusion.

However, the question I’ll have you ponder today is whether the fallacy fallacy is a formal or informal fallacy.

One way to interpret the fallacy fallacy is as relying on the following argument form:

Premise 1: If an argument is non-fallacious, then its conclusion is true.

Premise 2: This argument is fallacious.

Conclusion: Therefore, its conclusion is false.

If that is how the arguer is thinking, then sure: the fallacy fallacy can be understood as a formal fallacy. More specifically, it would have the form of denying the antecedent.

But here is another way to look at it. The arguer may instead be reasoning with a perfectly valid form—namely, modus ponens—while relying on a false premise:

Premise 1: If an argument is fallacious, then its conclusion is false.

Premise 2: This argument is fallacious.

Conclusion: Therefore, its conclusion is false.

If this is how Debater 2 is thinking, then the form itself is not the problem. The form is valid. The problem lies in Premise 1, which is false. In that case, the fallacy fallacy would be better understood as an informal fallacy.

So, is the fallacy fallacy a formal or informal fallacy?

Again: it depends on what, exactly, has gone wrong in the person’s reasoning.

And why does this distinction matter?

Because clarity matters. And because if we want to understand our own fallible thought processes, it helps to know whether the problem lies in the form of the reasoning or in the content of what we are assuming. But the psychology behind shitty logical reasoning is a topic for another day. Until next time, then.

Baby Logic: What the Heck are Sufficient and Necessary Conditions?

Difficulty: What the heck

In logic, words like “if,” “only if,” “if and only if,” and “unless” express different logical relationships. So if you conflate those terms and symbolize them incorrectly, you end up with confused garbage. Today’s post is on what “if,” “only if,” “if and only if,” and “unless” mean in logic.

“If”

This one is pretty straightforward. When we say “If P, then Q,” we mean that P is a sufficient condition for Q. That means that if P is true, that is enough for us to say that Q is true.

For instance, in the sentence “If Einstein is a parrot, then he is a bird,” Einstein’s being a parrot is sufficient for us to say that he is a bird. We symbolize a statement like this as follows:

P → Q

In this conditional, P is called the antecedent, and Q is called the consequent.

“Only if”

Now, that is logically equivalent to saying, “Einstein is a parrot only if he is a bird.” In ordinary language, whatever immediately follows “only if” is the necessary condition.

So the sentence “Einstein is a parrot only if he is a bird” means that being a bird is necessary for being a parrot. In other words, if it is true that Einstein is a parrot, then it must also be true that Einstein is a bird. So, once again, we symbolize the sentence like this:

P → Q

This is one reason people get confused: the phrase “only if” often makes them want to reverse the conditional. Don’t. The thing after “only if” gives you the necessary condition, not the antecedent.

Also note that this is equivalent to saying, “Only if Einstein is a bird is he a parrot.” That sounds more awkward, but the logical relationship is the same.

“If and only if”

Now consider the following sentence:

I will kick your ass if and only if you kick my ass.

This is what is called a biconditional. It means that each side is both necessary and sufficient for the other. In other words, the sentence can be broken down into two conditionals:

If you kick my ass, I will kick your ass.

If I kick your ass, you will kick my ass.

These can be symbolized as follows:

P → Q

Q → P

And those two together can be symbolized like this:

P ↔ Q

So “if and only if” means both directions hold. That is why it is stronger than plain old “if.”

“Unless”

And then there is “unless,” which seems like a pain in the ass to symbolize, but is not that hard once you get the hang of it. A useful rule of thumb is that “unless” can often be translated as “if not.”

So, “You will die unless you upload your brain to a computer” is logically equivalent to, “If you do not upload your brain to a computer, you will die.” This can be symbolized as:

¬B → D

where ‘¬’ means ‘not’, ‘B’ = ‘you upload your brain to a computer’, and ‘D’ = ‘you will die’.

So you can think of “unless” this way: “Unless B, D” means “If not B, then D.”

One last quick summary

Here is the baby-logic version:

If = sufficient condition
Only if = necessary condition
If and only if = necessary and sufficient condition
Unless = usually easiest to symbolize as “if not”

If you keep those straight, you will already be ahead of a whole lot of students who mangle conditionals into logical mush.

Apologies for the morbid tone today. Oh well. Until next time, then!

Is This a Bullshit Detector? Continental Philosophy and The “Negation Game”

Difficulty: What the heck

My undergraduate adviser once told me about a silly but revealing game. Take a passage from a philosopher known for difficult or opaque writing, insert or remove a negation, and see whether a careful reader can detect the change. If nobody can, that is at least a warning sign. It suggests that the passage may not have been doing much determinate philosophical work in the first place.

Call this the negation game.

Now, this is not a decisive test for bullshit. Not every difficult passage is empty, and not every reader who misses a negation is stupid. Sometimes the problem is unfamiliar terminology, lack of context, or simple inattention. Still, the game gets at something real. Negation is logically significant. If adding or subtracting a negation makes no noticeable difference to a passage’s apparent meaning, that is a symptom of obscurity, semantic slack, or pseudo-profundity.

Take, for instance, these sentences adapted from the writing of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher often accused of obscurity:

(A) “What can be said above all must not be silenced but written.”

(B) “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”

(C) “What cannot be said above all must be silenced but written.”

Which of these is Derrida’s original wording?

If you are already familiar with Derrida’s philosophy, this might not be too difficult. But the negation game is not really aimed at specialists who are already steeped in a philosopher’s vocabulary and framework. It is aimed at a careful and intelligent reader who is not already fluent in the author’s special idiom.

And Derrida is hardly the only philosopher people have in mind here. Similar accusations of obscurity are often directed at figures like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard, Paul de Man, and Félix Guattari.

Now, to be fair, this does not show that all of continental philosophy is bullshit. Nor does it show that obscurity is unique to continental philosophy. Some analytic philosophy is bullshit too—empty, jargon-soaked, pseudo-rigorous bullshit. It is just that certain continental philosophers have acquired a special reputation for writing that seems profound while resisting clear paraphrase, making them easier targets for this sort of game.

Take, for example, these gems adapted from Jacques Lacan:

(A) “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

(B) “I think where I am, therefore I am where I think. I am whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

(C) “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am whenever I am not the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

Again, which one is the original?

The point of the negation game is not that every difficult philosopher is a fraud. Nor is it that any reader who struggles with a passage has thereby exposed its emptiness. The point is narrower: if a passage can survive logically important alterations without a noticeable change in apparent meaning, that is some evidence that the original passage may not have been saying much of anything determinate.

And that matters because a negation is not some decorative flourish. It is not like changing “very” to “extremely.” Negation can reverse the content of a claim. So if you can add or remove a negation and the passage still sounds equally deep, impressive, or incomprehensible, then the depth may be only skin-deep.

To be clear, this is only a symptom of bullshit, not proof. Some writing is difficult because the ideas are genuinely difficult. Some passages need context. Some technical vocabularies take time to learn. But bullshit often thrives precisely where prose becomes so inert, vague, or semantically slack that major logical changes seem to leave it untouched.

That is why the negation game is useful. It forces us to ask whether a passage has enough determinate content that changing something logically important actually changes what is being said. If the answer seems to be no, then perhaps the passage’s aura of profundity is doing more work than its meaning.

And that, I think, is a fairly good bullshit detector.

Is Philosophy Bullshit?

Difficulty: What the heck

Some philosophy is absolutely bullshit.

There is pseudo-profound nonsense. There is empty jargon. There is status-signaling dressed up as rigor. There are philosophers and graduate students who perform seriousness without being genuinely guided by the standards of inquiry they invoke. So if by “philosophy” you mean that sort of thing, then yes, philosophy can be bullshit.

But it does not follow that philosophy itself is bullshit any more than the existence of bad science shows that science itself is bullshit. The real question is whether philosophy, at its best, is a useless exercise in verbal fog—or whether it does something intellectually and practically significant.

My answer is: no, philosophy is not bullshit. At least, not when it is done properly.

To see why, we need to make one annoying but necessary move: we need to get clearer about what we mean by both “bullshit” and “philosophy.” Otherwise, people end up yelling past one another. One person means pseudo-profound academic fog. Another means logic, ethics, political theory, or the philosophy of language. One person means empty performance. Another means disciplined reflection on reasons, concepts, and arguments. Unless we sort that out, the question “Is philosophy bullshit?” is too muddy to answer well.

Now, trying to define philosophy in a perfectly neat way is hard, just as trying to define science in a perfectly neat way is hard. Science includes physics, chemistry, and biology, but also things like geology, medicine, neuroscience, and perhaps at least some of the social sciences. Philosophy is similarly sprawling. It includes logic, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and much else besides. So instead of hunting for some magical one-sentence definition, it is more useful to ask: what does philosophy do when it is working properly?

At its best, philosophy clarifies concepts, tests reasons, exposes hidden assumptions, and asks what follows from what. It tries to distinguish what merely sounds plausible from what actually makes sense. It trains us not just to have opinions, but to examine them. And that, I think, is already enough to show why philosophy is not simply bullshit.

To answer whether philosophy is bullshit, then, we also need at least a rough grip on what bullshit is.

Let’s clear away a few common misconceptions.

Bullshit is not the same thing as lying.

Bullshit is not the same thing as falsehood.

On Harry Frankfurt’s account, bullshit is, roughly, a product of someone who is indifferent to the truth but pretends otherwise, misrepresenting herself as someone who cares. So a student who bullshits on an essay to reach a minimum word count may do so not by lying or writing what is false, but by not caring at all whether what she writes is true. She merely wants to appear as if she gives a shit so that she can get a decent score.

On my account, bullshit is, broadly put, the empty performance of norm-guided speech or conduct without being genuinely guided by the norms that make the practice intelligible. A few of the norms that make philosophy intelligible, for example, are clear argumentation, logical reasoning, and openness to criticism or objections. A philosopher who merely performs those norms while refusing to be genuinely guided by them is no longer engaged in serious inquiry. At that point, what we are seeing is not actual philosophy, but bullshit.

Now, what many people seem to mean when they say philosophy is bullshit is that philosophy is useless. But that opens another can of worms, because we would then have to clarify what “useless” means.

If by “useless” they mean that philosophy does not reliably lead to a high-paying job, then sure: philosophy is not a guaranteed path to wealth. But it would be a leap to say that because many philosophy majors do not become rich, philosophy is therefore bullshit. Poor career outcomes, even when they exist, do not show that a discipline is intellectually empty.

And even on practical grounds, philosophy is not obviously useless. Because philosophical inquiry emphasizes reading, writing, argumentation, and logical reasoning, philosophy majors tend to perform very well on standardized tests like the GRE and LSAT, and many go on to law school and careers in law, policy, business, and education. The ancient story of Thales of Miletus makes the same point in a more amusing way. According to Aristotle, Thales, annoyed at those who accused philosophers of being useless, used his intelligence to invest in the olive industry and made a fortune. “[Thales] proved,” Aristotle writes, “that philosophers can easily be wealthy if they wish, but this is not what they are interested in.”

So what are philosophers interested in?

They are interested in exercising their minds the way athletes exercise their bodies. They do this not to guarantee victory in every situation, but to build habits of discipline, responsiveness, and control that matter when things get difficult.

And I do not mean only intellectually difficult, though philosophy is certainly helpful for that. I also mean difficult in the more painful sense: your life turns to shit, and you are barely holding on.

In the 1960s, when U.S. naval officer James Stockdale was captured and tortured by North Vietnamese forces, he applied the Stoic philosophy he had learned at Stanford to remain sane. When Marcus Aurelius led the Roman Empire, he drew on the same philosophical tradition to maintain equanimity while confronting war, plague, and political burden.

So I am not saying that philosophy matters only in classrooms or journals. At one of the worst moments of my life, a philosopher once gave me a simple argument that helped keep me alive.

Sometimes, clear thinking is not an academic luxury. Sometimes, it is what makes life bearable. And often, it is what makes life worthwhile.

So, is philosophy bullshit?

Sometimes, yes—when it degenerates into pseudo-profound fog, empty performance, or jargon without guidance. But philosophy itself is not bullshit when it does what it is supposed to do: clarify, test, examine, and help us think more clearly about what matters.

Try it seriously, and that much should become obvious.

What the Heck Is an Enthymeme? And Why Are They So Sneaky?

Difficulty: What the heck

Consider the following argument:

“I will be a little late today; traffic is bad.”

Formulated more clearly, the argument looks like this:

Premise 1: Traffic is bad.

Conclusion: Therefore, I will be late.

That looks fine at first glance, but there is a missing premise that we would need to make explicit for the argument to deductively support the conclusion. In other words, the argument looks more like this:

Premise 1: Traffic is bad.

Premise 2: ?

Conclusion: Therefore, I will be late.

So what is the missing premise? People often guess things like, “I’m driving,” or “I’ll be stuck in traffic.” Those are reasonable guesses, but they are still not enough to make the argument deductively valid. To do that, we would need a hidden premise like this:

Premise 1: Traffic is bad.

Premise 2: If traffic is bad, I will be late.

Conclusion: Therefore, I will be late.

Now the argument has the form of modus ponens, perhaps the most basic rule in logic. Briefly, modus ponens is:

P
P $\rightarrow$ Q
∴ Q

where ‘P’ = ‘Traffic is bad’, ‘P $\rightarrow$ Q’ = ‘If traffic is bad, I will be late’, and ‘∴ Q’ = ‘Therefore, I will be late.’

Without the second premise, the argument is deductively invalid.

Arguments like this one, containing at least one hidden premise or unstated conclusion, are called enthymemes.

Now, not all enthymemes are sneaky in a bad way. We leave premises unstated all the time because ordinary conversation would be unbearably tedious if we said every single thing out loud. Enthymemes become sneaky when the missing premise is exactly the part of the argument that is weakest, most controversial, or most in need of scrutiny.

That is why they matter so much.

If you fail to identify premise 2 (“If traffic is bad, I will be late”), then you have one fewer premise to target in the argument. You may find yourself trying to disprove premise 1 (“Traffic is bad”), which, if the traffic actually is bad, would make it much harder to criticize what is really going on.

But once we identify the hidden second premise, we begin to understand what to target: is premise 2 true? Is it really the case that if traffic is bad, then the speaker will necessarily be late?

Once we begin to question that previously hidden premise, we can come up with counterexamples. We can say: “If traffic is bad, you can still arrive on time.” Why? Because:

you can take the metro
you can work remotely
you may already have built in extra travel time
you may live close enough to walk

This is an easy example, but things start to get trickier once we get into advertisements and political arguments.

Consider this fictional advertisement that I made up just now:

Do you like being pampered? Do you want to be attractive, alluring, charming, sexy, whatever it is that floats your boat? Then you must apply our proprietary Bullshit Lotion.

First, let’s try to figure out what the argument is actually saying:

Premise 1: You like being pampered and you want to be attractive/alluring/charming/sexy/whatever.

Conclusion: Therefore, you must apply our proprietary Bullshit Lotion.

Once we do that, the missing second premise becomes obvious. The argument is really saying:

Premise 1: You like being pampered and you want to be attractive/alluring/charming/sexy/whatever.

Premise 2: If you like being pampered and you want to be attractive/alluring/charming/sexy/whatever, then you must apply our proprietary Bullshit Lotion.

Conclusion: Therefore, you must apply our proprietary Bullshit Lotion.

Now that we’ve identified the missing second premise, we can cast doubt on it.

Is it true that if you like being pampered and want to be attractive, etc., then you must apply the proprietary Bullshit Lotion? Perhaps not. Perhaps you can apply some other brand of lotion. Perhaps you do not need lotion at all. Or perhaps, if you want to be pampered and attractive, you can just go to a spa. You get the point.

Or take, for example, political enthymemes. Suppose that a politician says:

“My opponent wants to cut the military budget. So my opponent is weak on national security.”

What is the missing premise? And how might you cast doubt on that premise by providing plausible counterexamples?

I’ll leave that as a little exercise for you. But now you can see why enthymemes are so sneaky: what is doing the most argumentative work is often the very thing left unsaid.

What the Hell is Epistemic Humility? More on the Philosophy of Bullshit

Difficulty: What the hell

What the hell is epistemic humility?

Epistemic humility sounds like the sort of phrase that philosophers would use to make a simple idea sound annoying. But the underlying idea is actually pretty ordinary.

To be epistemically humble is not to be timid, self-abasing, or allergic to strong opinions. It is not to say, “Well, who knows?” every five minutes, or to pretend that every claim is equally uncertain. Rather, epistemic humility is a willingness to let inquiry correct you.

In practice, that means being willing to say things like:

I might be wrong.
I don’t know.
That objection matters.
This evidence really does count against me.
I need to rethink this.

That may sound modest. But it is actually quite demanding. It requires that one do more than merely sound reasonable, careful, evidence-based, or open-minded. It requires that one genuinely allow reasons, evidence, and criticism to constrain what one says and how one proceeds.

Why bullshit hates epistemic humility

This is where bullshit enters the picture.

Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit differs from lying because the liar must pay attention to the truth in order to avoid it, whereas the bullshitter treats truth as beside the point. That insight is important. But I think there is another way to see what makes bullshit epistemically bad.

Bullshit often performs seriousness while insulating itself from serious correction.

That is, the bullshitter may speak in the language of evidence, rigor, nuance, clarity, realism, or practical wisdom, while refusing to let the standards associated with those words do any real governing work. Bullshit, in this sense, is hostile to epistemic humility because it wants the appearance of answerability without the vulnerability that real answerability requires.

To answer a question seriously is to risk exposure. It is to risk finding out that you do not know, that your view is weaker than you thought, or that the objection really does succeed. Bullshit tries to keep the social benefits of seriousness while evading that exposure.

That is why bullshit can be epistemically harmful even when it does not straightforwardly implant false beliefs. Sometimes its damage is deeper and more diffuse: it weakens the habits of mind by which we remain answerable to truth in the first place.

Not all bullshit is cynical

One reason bullshit is so hard to resist is that it is often sincere.

We are often tempted to think: if a person really means it, then it cannot be bullshit. But that is too quick. A person can sincerely believe that she is being careful, rigorous, helpful, realistic, or evidence-based, while the relevant standards are doing little or no actual guiding work.

That matters because sincerity and genuineness are not the same thing. Sincerity is a matter of what I feel: do I mean what I say? Genuineness is something else: is my activity actually being guided by the standards I invoke?

If I say that I care about evidence, then evidence should be able to count against me. If I say that I am being rigorous, then criticism should be able to threaten my argument. If I say that I am trying to get things right, then getting things right should matter more than merely sounding as if I am doing so.

Bullshit begins where that vulnerability ends.

A simple example

Suppose someone says, with great confidence, “I’m just being realistic,” or “I’m following the science,” or “I’m keeping an open mind.” Those phrases can be perfectly legitimate. But they can also function as a kind of epistemic camouflage.

Sometimes the speaker is not really opening herself to correction, reality, or science. She is borrowing the prestige of those things. She is using the appearance of intellectual virtue as a substitute for the real thing.

And when that happens often enough, the damage is not confined to one bad claim. It affects the surrounding culture of inquiry. Words like evidence, clarity, rigor, and nuance remain publicly praised, but they increasingly function as ornaments rather than constraints.

What makes this dangerous

A lie is often easier to understand morally and epistemically. The liar tries to get you to believe what she herself takes to be false. The betrayal is relatively legible.

Bullshit is often slipperier. It does not always aim to replace the truth in your mind with some specific falsehood. More often, it cheapens, bypasses, or exploits the norms by which truth is ordinarily tracked. It is vaguer, more atmospheric, more deniable.

That is why bullshit can be so culturally corrosive. Once it becomes common, people become less willing to say “I don’t know,” less willing to expose their views to genuine criticism, and less willing to distinguish between what merely sounds plausible and what has actually survived disciplined scrutiny.

A society saturated with lies is dangerous. But a society saturated with bullshit may be worse in another way: it gradually loses the capacity to notice what it has lost.

The anti-bullshit virtue

If that is right, then the remedy is not simply “more sincerity.” We already have plenty of sincerity. Nor is it enough to demand “more facts,” because facts can be selected, arranged, and performed in bullshitty ways.

What we need, rather, is a renewed willingness to be answerable to the standards our words invoke.

If I say I am following the evidence, then I should be willing to let evidence count against me. If I say I am being realistic, then I should be willing to ask whether reality is actually guiding my judgment. If I say I am open-minded, then I should be willing to let my mind be changed.

The enemy of bullshit is not permanent suspicion, clever debunking, or performative cynicism. Those can become their own species of bullshit. The enemy of bullshit is something quieter and more difficult: a genuine concern to get things right.

And sometimes that means saying the thing bullshit is designed to avoid:

I do not know.

I was wrong.

That objection matters.

That reason does not support what I wanted it to support.

That is not weakness. It is one of the conditions of serious thought.

What the Hell Is Akratic Bullshit? On Smoking, Weight Loss, and Self-Bullshit

Difficulty: What the hell

I used to be fit–not just in decent shape, but genuinely fit. I ran half-marathons, spent hours in the boxing gym, lifted weights, cranked more than a thousand pushups, and did multiple sets of 30 pull-ups on the same day. Now, I am nearly twenty kilograms overweight and struggling with nicotine addiction.

I take medication to help suppress my appetite, but yesterday I said “fuck it” and ate fried tofu and fried chicken in the same evening. Weeks ago, I also switched from cigarettes to a combination of heat sticks and a nicotine spray. I’d smoke a heat stick, say “fuck it” yet again, and spray nicotine on the inside of my cheeks right after having a smoke. “I’m losing weight and quitting smoking,” I tell others. “Science shows that rapid weight loss is not sustainable, and neither is quitting cold turkey.”

I know that this is not just weakness of will. It is also, I think, a form of bullshit. More specifically, it is what I want to call akratic bullshit.

Akrasia, or incontinence, is a Greek term that has no easy English translation. It is similar to weakness of will or hypocrisy, but more closely refers to intentionally performing some action despite believing that another course of action would be better.

So when I know I should reduce my caloric intake but eat fried tofu and fried chicken on the same day, that’s akrasia. When I smoke but believe that quitting is better, that’s akrasia.

Not all akrasia is bullshit. I can sincerely try to do what I take to be best and still fail. What makes some cases of akrasia bullshit is not the failure itself, but the performance of commitment. I simulate serious adherence to the relevant norms while not being genuinely guided by them. In that sense, akratic bullshit is not mere weakness; it is weakness masked, misdescribed, or performed as something more disciplined than it really is.

In short, we can define akratic bullshit as follows:

Akratic bullshit is the simulation of the commitment to a goal while not being genuinely guided by the norms, evidence, and practical discipline that the commitment would require.

Note that akratic bullshitters need not be insincere. They need not intentionally mask or misdescribe their failure. Indeed, I sincerely believe that I’m trying to lose weight and quit smoking, but because my concern to adhere to the relevant norms or standards is not genuine (not properly guided by the norms or standards I must respect, given the practice I am engaged in), what I do is still bullshit. So the issue is not whether I want to quit. The issue is whether my conduct is genuinely guided by that goal, or whether I am merely performing commitment to it while continuing to organize my behavior around competing desires.

Sometimes, akratic bullshit overlaps with classic representational bullshit, whose definition can also cleanly capture this species in cases like this. Revisit my definition of classic representational bullshit:

Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.

This case of akratic bullshit fits this definition. When I say, “I’m gradually quitting or losing weight because that’s what the science supports,” I am:

simulating evidence-guided reasoning
invoking research and rationality
performing honesty and realism without being genuinely guided by a concern to get the situation right

This overlap between akratic bullshit and classic representational bullshit matters because it points to a family resemblance in our taxonomy of bullshit. We can create new definitions to capture different species of bullshit, but we don’t want to have one definition for every species that pops up. That would be ad hoc and theoretically unhelpful.

The point, then, is not that every failed diet or failed attempt to quit smoking is bullshit. It is that some failures are accompanied by a performance of commitment that masks what is really going on. Akratic bullshit names that performance. And once we see it, we can also see how it connects self-deception, rationalization, and classic representational bullshit within a single broader framework.

Do Children Bullshit? Why the Hell My Definition of “Bullshit” Needs an Aptness Condition

Difficulty: What the hell

In the last several posts, I’ve been refining a definition of bullshit, defending it against objections, attempting a “constitutivist-lite” stance, exploring bullshit’s moral and epistemic implications, and defining and analyzing a species I call “presumptuous or exploitative bullshit.” Here I want to address a worry: overgeneration. My definitions risk labeling the speech or conduct of young children and mentally incapacitated people as bullshit. I think that problem can be fixed by adding an aptness condition.

On aptness and toddler bullshit

Now, we’re going to take a look at what bullshit is not, and I’m going to attempt to justify my stance while tacking on the aptness condition to the definitions of bullshit I’ve proposed.

My central argument: although my definitions of bullshit are susceptible to overgeneration–running the risk of labeling the speech or deed of young children and the mentally incapacitated as “bullshit”–this issue is fixable with an additional aptness condition:

to be aptly called a bullshitter, the bullshitter must be appropriately answerable to the norms in a relevant way.

I know that’s rather vague. So to clarify, let’s start with the risk of overgeneration. Recall my definition of classic representational bullshit:

Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.

A child or mentally incapacitated individual may at times say or do things that simulate an adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right. And sometimes, they are indifferent to any relevant standards of representational correctness. But very often, the speech and conduct of children and mentally incapacitated people cannot be aptly labeled as “bullshit.”

Case in point: my three-year-old son wore a t-shirt emblazoned with an image of a Parasaurolophus (a type of dinosaur). When his grandma asked him how to pronounce that word, he said, earnestly, “This dinosaur is called ‘Tyrannosaur-twat-twat-sus’.” At least at first glance, my son’s speech simulated adherence to standards of reasoning or truth–his assertion that the dinosaur is called “Tyrannosaur-twat-twat-sus” resembles truth-directed discourse. And that simulation lacked a genuine concern to get things right. To be genuinely concerned to get things right, he must be properly guided by the standards that must be respected, given the practice in which he is engaged. In this case, the standards are of pronunciation and communication. And he was not properly guided. But most of us would be loath to say that he uttered bullshit.

I argue that my own reluctance to call my son a bullshitter does not stem from the fact that he’s only three, or that it would be mean to associate an earnest toddler with excrement. To be sure, these are good reasons for parenting, but they are too surface-level to be philosophically significant.

The reason my son’s mispronunciation was not bullshit is that a young child is generally not appropriately answerable to the norms in a relevant way. In other words, because he’s not yet conversationally fluent in English and doesn’t know how to read, he is not yet appropriately answerable to the relevant norms of pronunciation in the way the charge of “bullshit” presupposes.

Now if, on the other hand, his mother told him to put on his shoes, and he explained that he doesn’t need shoes because he’s a brave T-Rex, then we may be much closer to toddler bullshit. In that case, he is not merely mispronouncing or misunderstanding. He is offering a pseudo-justification in a context where he is already beginning to grasp the relevant practical norms, even if only in a rudimentary way.

Important considerations

The aptness condition is philosophically important because it mitigates overgeneration. Without this condition, the definition risks misclassifying cases in which the structural resemblance to bullshit is present, but the ordinary charge is inapt because the speaker is not appropriately answerable to the relevant norms.

It would also be wrong–not because children are innocent, or because the mentally incapacitated deserve our compassion (of course they do), but because it would cast a demeaning blanket over people who, in virtue of their cognitive state, do not deserve the belittlement and scorn.

The point, then, is not that children can never say bullshit-like things. It is that the ordinary charge of “bullshit” presupposes a kind of normative answerability that small children often do not yet possess. My definitions therefore need an aptness condition—not because children are cute, but because a theory of bullshit should not confuse structural resemblance with full-fledged bullshitting.

What the Hell is Wrong with Presumptuous or Exploitative Bullshit? Here’s Another Species

Difficulty: What the hell

Defining another species of bullshit

So somebody just called me for the second time in three days–past 10 p.m., no less. The first time, I answered her call reluctantly. This time, I refused to pick up, so she called yet again. Then she texted my wife, telling her to let me know that I’d missed the calls.

I knew what the caller wanted: unpaid labor, outside normal hours, framed as if it were an ordinary and acceptable request. She was presumptuous. She was exploitative. She unfairly attempted to impose upon me an illegitimate expectation disguised as something normal. In other words, what she was doing was presumptuous, exploitative bullshit.

This got me thinking: could my own definition of classic representational bullshit somehow be applied to this case? Recall my definition:

Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.

Unless we do some tortuous argumentative gymnastics, the answer is: not really. So instead, I am setting out to capture this different species of bullshit with a different definition, one that will hopefully help explain the conceptual connections between presumptuous or exploitative bullshit and the classic representational species I’ve already defined. Here it is:

Presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is speech or deed that simulates the legitimacy of a request, expectation, or social claim without being genuinely guided by the norms of fairness, reciprocity, or boundary-respect that would make it appropriate.

What immediately jumps out is that both classic bullshit and presumptuous or exploitative bullshit involve a simulation of normative legitimacy without being properly guided by the relevant norms. Indeed, this points to something Frankfurt explained in On Bullshit: that while bullshit products are often defective, they need not be.

My definitions have also tracked the genuineness—or lack thereof—of the bullshitter’s concern. Genuineness is not the same as sincerity: a bullshitter can sincerely believe that she is following the norms or standards she must follow given what she is engaged in. But that doesn’t mean she’s not producing bullshit–that just means she’s bullshitting both you and herself.

Thus, the caller might be so deep into her own bullshit that she sincerely believes that she’s not doing anything inappropriate. Still, “This is fucking bullshit” seems like exactly the right response to her conduct.

Note that presumptuous and exploitative bullshit is not the same thing as being simply presumptuous and exploitative–an asshole is presumptuous, but assholes often do not even simulate conformity to a relevant standard or norm. Someone who employs child labor is exploitative, but that also doesn’t mean she simulates adherence to some standard or norm. So the defining feature of presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is not merely the absence of genuine guidance by the relevant norms. It is the simulation of legitimacy under those norms.

The ethical implications of presumptuous or exploitative bullshit

Now we get to the crux of the issue: why do we find presumptuous or exploitative bullshit morally objectionable?

Recall that classic representational bullshit is morally objectionable for at least three reasons:

(1) It is disrespectful because the bullshitter treats her victim as a means to an end.

(2) It is unfair because the bullshitter seizes the social authority that comes with sounding as if one is trying to get things right, without taking on the burden of actually doing so.

(3) It is socially corrosive because it makes it hard to distinguish genuine inquiry from empty performance, degrading the very practices on which intellectual and civic life depend.

I argue that presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is bad for similar reasons.

First, it is disrespectful–the presumptuous or exploitative bullshitter, in virtue of her arrogance or exploitative conduct, treats the victim as a means to an end. She acts as if her own wants automatically generate claims on other people’s time, labor, or goodwill, while the other person’s competing claims are treated as secondary or negligible.

Second, it is unfair–the presumptuous or exploitative bullshitter, by cheapening or bypassing the norms of fairness, reciprocity, or boundary-respect, undermines the level playing field that governs social norms. Further, she turns the tables. I didn’t have to answer her calls, and I didn’t have to do what she wanted. But by refusing to pick up or call back, I now look like the asshole.

Third, it is socially corrosive–because many of us find it so awkward to confront this kind of bullshit, it often goes unchallenged. That makes the tactic socially easier to repeat, and over time it can normalize a culture of entitlement and imposition.

I’m embarrassed to say that after refusing to pick up the phone, I texted the caller back. As expected, she promptly called me again, and I, disgusted at myself, answered her call.

Why, though, is this embarrassing? My guess is that by tacitly condoning her conduct, I submit myself to an authority she does not really have and thereby undermine my own dignity as a person. I allow her to use me. And by doing so, I also risk contributing to the proliferation of bullshit.

To be sure, the caller was polite on the phone, as she always was. She also asked if it was a good time to call me. But she did so after the fact, which suggests that her adherence to social norms was merely a simulation.

The reason this matters philosophically is that this sort of bullshit often works precisely by making resistance feel rude, disproportionate, or socially awkward. This is why bullshit is so insidious and pernicious. Because we tend to condemn liars more readily than bullshitters, we are often ill-equipped to deal with the bullshit that is so prevalent in our lives. We let it slide. And that’s not right.

What the Fuck Is Epistemically Wrong with Bullshit? A Problem for Basu’s Analogy

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.