Tag: writing

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.