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.
Philosophy without Bullshit 