bullshit – Philosophy without Bullshit

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 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.

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.

What the Fuck Is Morally Wrong with Bullshit? From Burger King Bullshit to Social Corrosion

Difficulty: What the fuck

Burger King bullshit

So I was at Burger King today, and after waiting forever for my food, I couldn’t help but mutter, “This is bullshit.” Then I recalled how I had been defining “bullshit” in the last few days:

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.

And then I thought: how does this apply to “Burger King bullshit”? I pondered this question for hours and finally had what seemed like a eureka moment:

Burger King bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of Burger King without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of Burger King correctness.

Obviously, this is not bullshit in quite the same sense as propaganda, bad-faith punditry, or empty philosophical posturing. And if it turns out that we could use my definition of bullshit as a template for calling anything that annoys or frustrates us “bullshit,” then the definition would be too ad hoc. As Karl Popper put it, “A theory that explains everything explains nothing.”

But, you might ask: so what if we could easily plug in whatever we want to explain Burger King bullshit?

Well, then dentist-office bullshit, airport-security bullshit, thermodynamics bullshit, etc., become mere rhetorical punching bags. We would find it difficult to explain what differentiates bullshit from incompetence, dysfunction, insincerity, institutional hollowness, hypocrisy, bad service, fraud, laziness, ordinary failure, and a whole lot of shit that annoys or frustrates us—and risk contributing to philosophical discourse a definition that is, well, bullshit.

The ethics of bullshit

That said, Burger King bullshit and representational, or “classic,” bullshit do have something in common. That is, both suggest that the bullshitter simulates adherence to some standard while not actually trying to get things right in accordance with that standard, or that the bullshitter is indifferent to some standard of correctness.

This might explain why we get upset when we are on the receiving end of bullshit: not only has the bullshitter failed to uphold some standard, but she either (a) pretends to uphold it or (b) doesn’t even try to pretend. And that, I will argue, is a moral failure.

First, recall this passage from On Bullshit, where Harry Frankfurt discusses a verse from Longfellow:

“In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.”

This means to say that people in the old days didn’t cut corners. They paid attention to details in their craftsmanship even if such details would normally be invisible, or else it would bother their conscience. “[O]ne might perhaps also say,” Frankfurt states, “there was no bullshit.”

The trouble is that not every failure of craftsmanship is a moral failure. A bad carpenter may simply be incompetent. A lazy Burger King employee may be rude, apathetic, or badly trained. So if bullshit were nothing more than failure to meet a standard, that would not yet explain why classic bullshit is morally distinctive.

The moral issue appears when we move into representational practices—assertion, inquiry, reporting, argument, testimony, and the like. In these practices, one does not merely produce an object or perform a service. One presents oneself as answerable to norms of truth, evidence, and getting things right. And that changes the moral landscape.

When a bullshitter merely simulates adherence to those norms, she does more than perform badly. She exploits a shared practice while refusing to be governed by the standards that make the practice possible. She takes the benefits of looking serious, informed, careful, or rational without submitting to the discipline that those appearances are supposed to signal.

That is morally objectionable for at least three reasons.

First, it is a kind of disrespect. The bullshitter treats her audience not as fellow participants in a truth-/reason-directed practice, but as people to be managed, impressed, manipulated, or pacified.

Second, it is unfair. The bullshitter wants 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.

Third, it is corrosive. Bullshit makes it harder for all of us to distinguish genuine inquiry from empty performance, and so it degrades the very practices on which intellectual and civic life depend.

Note that within our framework, all three reasons for why bullshit is morally objectionable can also be used to explain what is wrong with lying. Lying is also disrespectful and manipulative. Lying also gives the liar an unfair epistemic advantage. Lying is also corrosive to any dialogue in which we might partake.

So why the difference in moral judgment?

Why do we treat bullshitters more leniently than we treat liars?

This points to a distinction between Frankfurt’s moral argument against bullshit and mine. Rather than attributing the bullshitter’s moral failure to disrespect, unfairness, and corrosion, Frankfurt argues that bullshitting is a greater enemy to truth, and that it is thus more reprehensible than lying, which requires the liar to at least respect truth.

Truth, admittedly, seems like a loftier ideal for philosophers. But Frankfurt also says:

“The problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.”

We can now try to answer that question.

In response to Frankfurt, I will argue that the reason our attitude toward bullshit tends to be more benign than our attitude toward lying is not that bullshit is harmless, but that lying typically involves a more direct epistemic and interpersonal wrong. A lie aims to replace the truth with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshit, by contrast, often works less by directly overturning the truth than by cheapening, bypassing, or exploiting the norms that are supposed to guide truth-/reason-directed practice.

Recall that during his grand jury testimony in 1998, Bill Clinton parsed his earlier statement that “there is no improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky by saying, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” By quibbling over the word “is,” Clinton was not seriously trying to get things right. He was performing fidelity to standards of reasoning and truth while using those standards as a shield. That is a plausible case of insincere bullshit.

But suppose Clinton had said, instead, “There is and never was an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky.” This would be an instance of lying.

Now further assume that Clinton had achieved his goal of getting away with deception in both cases—bullshitting and lying—and that in both cases there was not enough evidence to hold him legally accountable.

The Clinton example gives us a useful way into the broader question of why lying is often judged more harshly than bullshitting.

Epistemic harm

First, bullshit is often easier to see through than a successful lie. In Clinton’s case, his evasiveness may frustrate us, but it need not destroy our grasp of the underlying truth. A successful lie, by contrast, more straightforwardly aims to replace the truth in the audience’s mind with what the speaker takes to be false. If Clinton had instead lied and succeeded in fooling us, we would have been even more furious at him for distorting our very perception of reality—namely, that he did have an affair with Lewinsky.

Disrespect and unfairness

Second, lying is usually more sharply interpersonal. The liar intentionally tries to get you to believe what she thinks is false. She directly recruits your trust against you. This is much more manipulative and disrespectful than bullshitting, which tends to involve merely putting on a show, as Clinton did. Lying is also more sharply unfair. The liar aims to replace the truth, in the hearer’s mind, with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshitting is often more like reckless disregard: it may not aim to destroy the truth outright, but it is willing to endanger the norms and practices by which truth is ordinarily tracked.

Clinton’s bullshit manipulates by performance and evasion; a lie would have manipulated more directly, by asking the public to accept as true what he himself took to be false.

Bullshit can be sincere; lying can’t

Third, a liar must, on some level, know that she is trying to get another person to accept what she herself takes to be false. That structure makes the wrong especially legible: the liar is betraying the audience’s trust on purpose. Bullshit can have that structure too, but it need not. A bullshitter may be vain, careless, tribal, self-deceived, or carried away by appearances. She may honestly believe that she is being serious and responsible. That does not excuse the bullshit. But it can make it seem less vicious, because the wrong is not always one of straightforward intentional betrayal.

I do not mean to suggest that Clinton’s own bullshit was sincere. The point is rather that bullshit as a category leaves room for sincerity in a way that lying does not. That helps explain why the moral profile of bullshit is often less stark than that of lying.

So this, I think, is part of why we often judge liars more harshly than bullshitters. Lying is necessarily insincere. Bullshit need not be. Still, bullshit remains morally objectionable because even when it is sincere, it exploits, cheapens, or corrodes the norms that make truth-/reason-directed practices possible.

A brief note on corrosiveness

Sharp readers may have noticed that I mostly set aside the corrosiveness point in the previous arguments. I did so because it is unclear whether bullshitting is more or less corrosive to civic discourse than lying. That said, I’ll take a stab at it.

When Frankfurt condemned bullshitting as more morally reprehensible than lying, his argument was that bullshitting, in virtue of the bullshitter’s indifference to truth, is a greater enemy to truth. That’s a nice idea, but how does that fit within my framework?

My take is that, while bullshitting is a less direct epistemic threat than lying, it may be the more insidious one. The bullshitter is like a reckless driver: she does not have to aim at truth in order to endanger it. The liar is more like a driver who deliberately targets a pedestrian: the threat is more direct, more intentional, and therefore more immediately legible as a wrong. Our outrage at premeditated murder tends to be stronger than our outrage at reckless endangerment or negligent killing. We are therefore often quicker to condemn the liar than we are to condemn the bullshitter. But that does not settle the deeper question of long-run social danger.

A liar, like a killer driver, is more likely to be punished severely. A bullshitter, like a careless driver, more easily gets dismissed as merely sloppy, frustrating, or irresponsible. But that does not mean bullshit is any less dangerous for society. Once we cultivate a culture of bullshit, the carelessness proliferates. We do not want to live in a society where certain pedestrians are deliberately targeted, but neither do we want to live in one where any pedestrian may become the hapless victim of recklessness. By the same token, we do not want liars killing the truth. But neither do we want truth to be unintentionally run over by bullshitters.

None of this shows that bullshit is less dangerous overall than lying. My point so far has only been that lying is usually judged more harshly because its wrong is more direct and more legible. The long-run corrosive effects of bullshit may, in some contexts, be just as serious—or worse.

So there may be no easy ranking here. Lying is often the more direct wrong; bullshit may be the more culturally pervasive one. Either way, a society that tolerates either too easily is in serious trouble.

What the Fuck Bullshit Is: Genuine Concern, Standards, and Getting Things Right

Difficulty: What the fuck

This is my third post in a series on bullshit, so if you haven’t read post 1 and post 2, you should probably do that first.

In those two posts, I revised Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit and argued that what matters is not just whether someone is sincere, but whether they have a genuine concern to get things right.

More specifically, I argued that 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.

And by “genuine concern,” I mean:

concern that is properly guided by the standards that must be respected, given the practice in which one is engaged.

But that immediately raises a harder question:

Who the hell are you to tell me what standards I must respect?

Fair enough. That is exactly the question this post is about.

What I want to argue is something that resembles, but falls short of, what philosophers call a constitutivist view. Don’t worry if that word sounds annoying. I’ll explain it without the usual philosophical fog machine.

First, what the fuck is constitutivism?

Constitutivism is a view about where certain norms come from, especially norms about what counts as doing something correctly.

The core idea is:

Some standards apply to you because they are built into what it is to engage in a certain activity at all.

Take chess.

If you move a bishop like a rook, someone can say, “That’s not allowed.”

And if you reply, “Why the hell should I follow that rule?”

The natural answer is:

“Because if you don’t, you’re not really playing chess.”

The rule is not just some random command imposed from outside. It is part of what makes chess chess.

Or say that you are building a house, but you don’t care whether it keeps the rain out. You don’t care whether it stands up. You don’t care whether anyone can live in it.

At some point, we stop saying:

“That’s a bad house.”

and start saying:

“That’s not really a house at all.”

Again, the relevant standard is not optional in the ordinary sense. A house is supposed to provide shelter. That standard is constitutive of the activity.

So the constitutivist-style thought is simple:

some standards are internal to a practice because without them, the practice is no longer the kind of thing it is.

The famous objection

Here is the obvious objection, associated with people like David Enoch.

You say:

“If you’re playing chess, you should move the pieces according to the rules.”

And the critic says:

“Fine. But why should I play chess at all?”

That is a serious objection. If your answer is only, “Well, because those are the rules,” then you have not really answered the deeper question.

And this brings us back to my view of bullshit and genuine concern.

My “constitutivist-lite” stance

My main idea is this:

To engage in a practice at all is to be subject to certain standards that partly constitute what that practice is.

Notice what I am not saying.

I am not saying that you morally ought, full stop, to engage in that practice.
I am not saying that some philosopher-king gets to issue divine decrees about what everyone must care about.
I am not saying that every mistake kicks you out of the practice.

What I am saying is narrower:

If you are purporting to engage in a practice, then you are purporting to be answerable to the standards that make that practice intelligible as the kind of thing it is.

So yes, of course someone can ask, “Why engage in the practice at all?” But that is a different question. My aim here is not to justify participation. It is to clarify what participation amounts to.

If you move chess pieces randomly, you are not playing chess badly. You are arguably not playing chess at all.

If you present something as an argument while not being guided at all by whether the premises support the conclusion, then at some point you are no longer merely arguing badly. You are performing the surface appearance of argument.

And that is where the notion of genuine concern comes in.

Badly doing X vs. not really doing X at all

Now we need to be careful here. If every mistake meant you were not really doing the thing, then almost nobody would count as doing anything.

A bad chess player is still playing chess. A weak writer is still writing. A sloppy arguer is still arguing.

So my claim is not that any failure to meet a standard disqualifies you from the practice. That would be ridiculous.

The point is that some failures are much deeper than ordinary incompetence.

Sometimes a person is trying, however imperfectly, to be guided by the standards of the practice. In that case, they are doing the thing badly.

But sometimes, a person might be misguided by other standards. The standards that are supposed to guide her are, deliberately or not, being used as decoration, camouflage, or theater. The person invokes the right standards, gestures at them, maybe even believes she is adhering to them—but in practice, those standards are not doing any governing work.

That is a different kind of failure.

And it is that deeper kind of failure that matters for bullshit.

So when I say that someone may “not really be engaging in argumentation as a practice,” I do not mean that every bad argument is fake argument. I mean that where the relevant standards are used as mere props rather than as constraints, the performance becomes hollow.

At that point, we are no longer dealing with mere incompetence. We are dealing with simulation, indifference, or both.

Genuine concern, sincerity, and being properly guided

This is why sincerity is not enough.

You can sincerely believe that you are being careful. You can sincerely feel that you care about truth, or evidence, or accuracy. You can sincerely think you are “following the argument where it leads.”

And yet your activity may still fail to be genuinely guided by the standards you claim to respect.

That is the point of the distinction I drew in the previous post:

sincerity is a mental state, whereas genuineness is a matter of being properly guided.

To be genuinely concerned to get things right is not merely to feel concern. It is to have your activity actually constrained and directed by the standards internal to the practice you are engaged in.

So if someone reasons in a way that systematically filters out counterevidence, cherry-picks support, and treats objections as things to swat away rather than seriously consider, that person may still be utterly sincere. But sincerity alone does not make the concern genuine.

Why not?

Because the relevant standards are not actually guiding the inquiry. They are being selectively invoked, distorted, or bypassed.

And when that happens in representational practices—contexts where one is supposed to be getting things right—that is precisely where bullshit arises.

“Who decides?”

At this point, someone may still push back:

“Okay, but who decides what counts as being ‘properly guided’?”

Good question.

The answer is not: me, as your philosopher overlord.

Nor is the answer: whatever standards happen to be socially fashionable this week.

Rather, the point is that once a practice has standards built into it, those standards are what make success and failure within that practice intelligible in the first place.

If the practice is argumentation, then things like logical support, evidential responsibility, and responsiveness to objection are not optional decorative extras. They are part of what makes argumentation argumentation.

If the practice is assertion, then accuracy and truth-related norms matter because assertion purports to represent how things are.

If the practice is inquiry, then openness to correction and a willingness to let evidence constrain belief are not just nice personality traits. They are part of what inquiry is.

So I am not imposing alien standards from outside the practice. I am pointing to standards without which the practice would lose its identity.

That is why my view is “constitutivist-lite.” I do not need the much stronger claim that these standards generate unconditional reasons for everyone, everywhere, no matter what. I only need the weaker claim that if you are purporting to engage in a practice, then those standards come with the territory.

What this has to do with bullshit

Now we can tie this back to bullshit more directly.

Recall the layman-friendly version of my definition from the earlier posts:

Bullshit is pretending to play by the rules while not actually giving a shit about them—or simply not caring about them at all.

The current post lets us say more clearly what the “rules” are supposed to be.

They are not just random social expectations. They are the standards internal to the relevant representational practice: the standards that partly constitute what it is to be arguing, asserting, inquiring, explaining, reporting, interpreting, and so on.

So when someone simulates argument without letting argumentative standards constrain the activity, that is bullshit.

When someone presents themselves as reporting facts while treating truth and accuracy as optional window dressing, that is bullshit.

When someone performs inquiry while using evidence as decoration after already deciding what they want to conclude, that is bullshit.

And importantly, this is why bullshit can coexist with sincerity. A person may not be consciously faking anything. They may honestly think they care. But if the standards are not actually doing any governing work, then the concern on display is sincere at best—not genuine.

A concrete example

Suppose a pundit says she is “just following the evidence.” She cites studies, uses the language of careful inquiry, and presents herself as someone who is simply being rational.

But in practice, the evidence functions only as set decoration.

She ignores inconvenient data, treats obvious objections as beneath notice, quotes experts only when they help her side, and starts with the conclusion she wants before “reasoning” backward to support it.

She may still be sincere. She may genuinely feel offended if you accuse her of dishonesty. She may even think of herself as serious and rigorous.

But if the activity is not actually being guided by the standards of inquiry she is invoking, then her concern is not genuine.

She is wearing the costume of inquiry without letting inquiry govern the performance.

That is bullshit.

The takeaway

So when I say that genuine concern is:

concern that is properly guided by the standards that must be respected, given the practice in which one is engaged,

I am not making some grand moral pronouncement about what everyone should care about, period.

I am making a narrower claim about what it is to count as genuinely engaging in a representational practice at all.

You do not have to do X.

But if you are purporting to do X—and X is a practice with standards built into it—then you must at least try to get X right by being guided by those standards.

Otherwise, you may not merely be doing X badly.

You may be doing something hollower than that: simulating the practice while consciously or unconsciously rejecting the standards that constrain you.

And in representational contexts, that is exactly the territory of bullshit.

This is also why bullshit can thrive in philosophy itself. A philosopher or graduate student may use the language of rigor, raise objections, cite famous names, and perform all the outer rituals of serious inquiry. They may well be sincere: they may honestly believe that they care about clarity, truth, and philosophical rigor. But sincerity is not enough. If career incentives, status signaling, tribal loyalty, or the mere desire to publish—not clarity, logical support, responsiveness to criticism, and a genuine openness to getting things right—are what is actually guiding the activity, then what we are seeing is not merely weak philosophy. It is, at least in part, bullshit philosophical inquiry: the simulation of philosophical seriousness without the corresponding discipline that gives that seriousness its point.

Next time, we will begin exploring the moral implications of bullshit.

What the Hell Bullshit Is: Addressing Potential Objections

Difficulty: What the hell

In my previous post on bullshit, I argued for a revision of Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, redefining it as follows:

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 correctness.

(Note to nitpicky readers: the disjunction, i.e., the “or” statement, here should not be read as allowing arbitrary separation of reasoning and truth, but as reflecting the different ways in which representational practices may be governed across contexts.)

I also formulated a more layman-friendly, if less precise, version of my definition:

Bullshit is pretending to play by the rules while not actually giving a shit about them—or simply not caring about them at all

What followed was a discussion on salient types of bullshit which Frankfurt’s definition struggles to capture, but which, I argued, my revised definition handles better.

In what follows, I will first offer a caveat on defining bullshit before turning to objections and counterexamples to my revised definition.

A caveat on definitions

So first, there’s something that Frankfurt states in his work On Bullshit that we need to keep in mind:

“Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely—simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being Procrustean.”

Here, Frankfurt briefly argues that because bullshit is such a messy concept, no definition of bullshit can be perfect, and any attempt to construct an ultra-precise definition would end up being Procrustean (overly rigid). As such, there will likely be overgeneration (some instances of non-bullshit might be captured) and undergeneration (some instances of bullshit might not be captured) no matter what definition we come up with.

That said, my aim is to minimize, as much as I can, issues of overgeneration and undergeneration, both of which are problematic on Frankfurt’s original definition. The goal is not to provide a perfect revised definition, but one that handles our messy conception of bullshit a little more adroitly. To that end, I will further refine my revised definition along the way.

Objections and counterexamples

Overgeneration

Case 1: The psychopathic serial killer

Consider a psychopathic serial killer who murders without any regard for moral or social norms. On my definition, such a person would seem to satisfy condition (b): she is indifferent to any relevant standards of correctness. But it would be highly inappropriate to describe her actions as “bullshit.” Murder is not bullshit—it is something far worse.

This suggests that my definition may overgenerate: it risks classifying extreme forms of wrongdoing as bullshit, when in fact the concept seems better suited to a narrower class of intellectual or expressive failures.

Case 2: The reckless driver

A reckless driver has no regard for traffic laws and social norms. This follows (b) because plausibly, the driver “displays indifference to any relevant standards of correctness.” However, it would not be apt to say that the “driver is bullshitting” or that “her driving is bullshit.”

This is another case of potential overgeneration.

Case 3: The bored vandal

On impulse, a teenage vandal smashes a window because she’s bored. The objection here is: “Sure, her behavior follows (b) because that’s a “deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of correctness.” But it’s more apt to call it an “act of destruction” rather than “bullshit.”

Again, potential overgeneration.

Case 4: The apathetic employee

An apathetic employee doesn’t care about doing a good job, ignores standards, and does just the bare minimum. This follows (b) (an indifference to any relevant standards of correctness), but it feels strange to say that the “employee is bullshitting.”

This is the last of the cases of potential overgeneration.

Addressing overgeneration objections

This is where we can refine my definition of bullshit, which, if you recall, states:

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 correctness.

And because all the aforementioned objections to potential overgeneration target (b), we will have to home in on (b)’s wording, specifically for “relevant.” So what are “relevant standards of correctness”? I stipulate:

A relevant standard of correctness is one that is representational.

If you want to specify that in my definition, we can word it as:

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 addresses cases 1 to 3.

For case 1 (the psychopathic serial killer), murder is not bullshit because it is not relevant to standards of representational correctness. Sure, there are behavioral norms and laws, and these are standards of correctness, but they do not concern matters of representation–such as representing some claim as true or false, or reasoning as fallacious or not, or a question as sincere or insincere.

Instead, these norms and laws govern matters like public safety and social mores.

And the same could be said about case 2 (the reckless driver) and case 3 (the bored vandal), both of which do not concern the relevant issue of representation.

Now I argue that case 4 (the apathetic employee) is in fact a case of bullshit. While it might seem strange to say that “the employee is bullshitting,” it’s quite intuitive to say that any work she produces is “bullshit” due to her indifference to “any relevant standards of representational correctness.”

Undergeneration

Case 5: The sincere-but-self-deceived bullshitter

Say we have a charismatic speaker (think wellness guru, motivational influencer) who is sincerely convinced of what she’s saying, cares about getting things right (in their own mind), presents confident, sweeping claims with “reasons.” But she ignores counterevidence, cherry-picks anecdotes, and overstates conclusions.

This is clearly a case of bullshit. However, although it might (initially) seem to be neither (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, nor (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness, my definition might fail to capture it.

Case 6: The self-deceptive ideologue

A partisan argues with apparent structure and confidence, genuinely believes her claims, and wants to be right. But she systematically filters evidence, rationalizes away disconfirming data, and uses arguments instrumentally (without noticing). Our intuition is to call this “bullshit.”

The objection here is that although there seems to be a “concern to get things right,” there seems to be a distorted epistemic (knowledge) practice that my definition might not capture. So like case 5, this is potentially a problem of undergeneration.

Case 7: The therapeutic “truth”

A therapist/coach says:

“You’re enough exactly as you are. Everything happens for a reason.”

Her advice is not offered as literal truth. It’s aimed at helping, not accuracy. And the speaker may even know it’s not strictly true.

This serves as a potential counterexample of undergeneration to my definition because it’s not clearly (a), as it might not initially appear to simulate, or pretend to be, adherence to standards of reasoning or truth. Moreover, there does seem to be a genuine concern to get things right. And it’s not (b): the therapist/coach is not indifferent, as there is a different aim (well-being) she cares about. Nevertheless, our intuition is that while some people might hear this as helpful, others might appropriately call it “feel-good bullshit.”

We can clarify this case further by distinguishing between two kinds of therapeutic speech. If a statement is clearly offered as comfort, without any pretense of representing how the world actually is, then it may fall outside the scope of bullshit altogether. However, when such statements are presented in the form of claims about reality—e.g., “everything happens for a reason”—simulating adherence to standards of reasoning or truth but without a genuine concern for whether they are getting things right, they can plausibly be regarded as a kind of “feel-good bullshit.”

Case 8: The PR spin that believes itself

Now consider a corporate spokesperson who uses polished talking points, believes the narrative, and wants to be accurate within that frame. But her language is evasive and selectively framed to mislead.

This is an instance that might not follow (a), as there is no obvious or deliberate simulation of adherence to standards of truth and reasoning. And neither does it follow (b), since the spokesperson is not indifferent, and she cares about being “correct” in the approved frame. Still, this is obviously bullshit.

Addressing undergeneration objections

To address these undergeneration objections, we must home in on the word “genuine.”

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.

Note that I used the word “genuine,” not “sincere,” because while these two concepts might often be related, they are not identical.

A manufacturer of boutique handbag knockoffs can be sincerely focused on her craft (as might be the case for many higher-quality, Chinese-made knockoffs), but that doesn’t mean the knockoffs are genuine. These handbags, then, can, in an extended sense, be called “bullshit products.”

Conversely, an original product might be genuine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the manufacturer sincerely gave a shit about them. It thus aligns with my definition of bullshit to say these products are not bullshit.

More philosophically, sincerity is a mental state. Genuineness is a mind-independent matter of being properly guided. In these cases of potential undergeneration, the bullshitters’ concern is sincere but not genuine, because it is not properly guided by the standards they must respect, given the practice they are engaged in.

So, in case 5, the wellness guru might sincerely be concerned to get things right, but because her concern to get things right is deeply misguided, she does not have a genuine concern.

The same goes for case 6 (the self-deceptive ideologue), case 7 (the therapeutic “truth”), and case 8 (the PR spin that believes itself), in which the bullshitters are sincerely concerned to get things right. Their concern is not genuine because it is not properly guided by the standards that they must respect, given the practice they are engaged in.

The takeaway

So based on these last two posts, what can we conclude about my definition of bullshit?

First, it avoids labeling non-bullshit, such as the work of some serious anti-realists, as bullshit.

Second, it captures salient instances of bullshit that Frankfurt’s definition struggles to include, such as bullshit questions and deeds.

Lastly, my definition avoids some potential counterexamples and objections regarding both overgeneration and undergeneration.

In sum, to accomplish this, we must not restrict our definition of bullshit to a concern with just truth, as Frankfurt did. And we should also carefully explain not just what “bullshit” means, but what certain terms in our definition mean.

So much for what bullshit is. Next time, I’ll explain what the hell a “genuine” concern actually is, and why that’s not just empty philosophical jargon.

What the Hell Bullshit Is: Revising Frankfurt’s Definition

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 or 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, with their body language, they pretend to play by the rules (of philosophical thinking) 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 artistic 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–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 statements are neither true nor false—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.

In the next post, I will address potential objections to my revised definition of bullshit.