Epistemology – Philosophy without 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.

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.

Category: Epistemology

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