Calling Bullshit 1.5 The Philosophy of Bullshit (Updated)

[MUSIC PLAYING] CARL BERGSTROM: OK. Right. I want to actually try to do
something a little bit serious, so I'll pretend I'm a
philosopher for a few minutes and tell you about the
philosophy of bullshit. So there is sort of a key.

It was originally
a scholarly paper, and it has been turned
into a best selling book that Henry Frankfurt
wrote that opened up bullshit to
philosophical inquiry. And and what he says is-- this is the start
of the book, which is beautiful, beautiful
starting lines. Hundred Years of
Solitude is better, but this is good, right? One of the most salient
features of our culture is that there's
so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.

Each of us
contributes his share, but we tend to take the
situation for granted. And then what Frankfurt
goes on to point out is, and we as
philosophers, nonetheless, have no theory about this. So we got to figure out-- we got to figure out what
bullshit actually is. Thank you.

I'll take that. And so Frankfurt, which
was our reading for today, tries to define what it is. And what Frankfurt
tries to do is he wants to actually try to
distinguish bullshit from lies. And so for Frankfurt, a liar
is someone who knows the truth and is trying to lead you
in the other direction.

So a liar knows what's
going on and is deliberately trying to deceive you. So there's some fact
about the world out there. The liar knows it,
and the liar wants to make you believe
not that thing. Bullshitter is different.

Bullshitter either
doesn't know the truth or just doesn't care at all. The bullshitter isn't trying to
convince you of not the truth. The bullshitter is just
trying to convince you that the bullshitter knows what
he or she is talking about. It's trying to be persuasive,
trying to be impressive.

And so it's this
notion that what's really pernicious about bullshit
is if I'm up here bullshitting about bullshit, for example,
I'm not actually trying to-- if I were doing that; I'm not. If I were doing that,
I would not actually be trying to convey
this information to you. I'd just be trying to make
you think, wow, Bergstrom is such a smart professor. He knew all the
philosophy of bullshit.

It was amazing-- for example. Right? And in some sense,
that's even more dangerous than lying because
you know where the liar stands with respect to truth. But if I'm just up here trying
to impress you with big words, then I'm indifferent
to the truth, and that's where bullshit comes
from, according to Frankfurt. Which seems like a fairly
reasonable first pass, but then there's
this wonderful essay that's in our supplementary
readings by GA Cohen.

And GA Cohen calls
bullshit on bullshit. And so what Cohen says is, look,
this doesn't make any sense. A claim is either
bullshit or it isn't. Right? We shouldn't have to appeal
to the intentional state, to the mental state,
of the person who made it to figure out whether
something is bullshit or not.

If I write something down, or I
see something on the internet, I don't have to think about
what the person who wrote it was thinking. I should just say, oh, that's
true, or oh, that's bullshit. And so this is what Cohen-- it's sort of his
rejoinder to Frankfurt. And he says, look,
bullshit stands on its own.

We don't have to think about
what the person who said it was trying to do. And instead, Cohen,
because he's interested in academic writing-- that's not a joke. Well, it is a joke,
but it's not a joke-- wants to focus on what he
calls unclarifiable unclarity. So writing that not only
is unclear but couldn't be clarified while retaining
its original meaning-- it's just so muddled or vague
that it just can't possibly mean anything.

And the test that
he proposes for this is take a statement
that you think might be unclarifiably
unclear, try negating it, and see if it actually means
anything any different. And if it doesn't, it's
almost certainly bullshit. Right? So that's Cohen's view
of what bullshit is. Could you turn the mic down? I'm pulling a
little interference.

We, of course, have our
own view of bullshit. I tried to pull in the best
aspects from each of these and from some of the other
things that have been written. You guys, of course, come
up with your versions, and they certainly
don't have to-- I hope they won't agree
completely with ours. But for Jevin and I, and
given our focus in this class on quantitative bullshit, we
say that bullshit involves language, statistical figures,
data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended
to impress, to overwhelm, to persuade, but are presented
with a blatant disregard-- same wonderful phrase
we had up there-- for truth, logical coherence,
or what information is actually being conveyed.

So I'm trying to impress you. I'm trying to persuade you. I'm trying to signal
something about myself while pretending to be signaling
something about the world, basically. That's the core of bullshit.

And of course, it's
a fool's errand to take a common language word,
like bullshit or anything else, and try to tightly
circumscribe exactly what it means in tight
philosophical language. So what we're
really thinking of-- what makes sense
to me is to just really think of prototypically,
what do we mean by bullshit? And this is
prototypical bullshit, the way I would tend
to think about it. Of course, calling bullshit--
the name of our course-- is is different than bullshit. Calling bullshit has a much
broader range of targets.

Right? So when we were talking
about bullshit-- even if you don't think
that a lie is bullshit, you can still call
bullshit on a lie. So you can call
bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call
bullshit on lies. You can call it treachery. You can call it on trickery.

You can call it on injustice. You can call bullshit
on a lot of things. And so what we want to
really focus on here is not only that kind of narrow
sense bullshit of disregard of the truth, but how do you
call bullshit on anything that needs bullshit called upon it? Right? And in order to talk about
this a little bit more, I want to take a
bit of a detour-- you'll see where this
is going eventually-- and talk about this idea in
the philosophy of language of performative utterances. So JL Austin, British
philosopher of language, has this wonderful
understated title, How to Do Things with Words--
it's not a self-help book; it's a serious book in the
philosophy of language-- where he gets into this notion
of performative utterances.

And The idea with
performative utterances is there are certain things
that we say that are actually like actions of a kind. They're not just
stating propositions, but you're actually
doing something. So I pronounce you
husband and wife, say. Or I christen this
ship the Gerald R Ford.

You're not reporting
on what you're doing; you're actually doing something. I resign in a chess game,
caught in a knight's fork, say. So with a performative
utterance, when I do one of these things,
I'm not describing the act. I'm actually executing the act.

So I'm not just describing,
oh hey, by the way, what I'm doing is
kind of narrating. I'm actually doing a thing. And this is a really
different notion of what we do with
words than people had, prior to this notion,
was well, with words, you can either give
direct commands or you can state propositions. But there wasn't room for this
in the philosophy of language.

And then Austin brings this in
to the philosophy of language. And it's important to
realize with these-- and then one of the
neat things that happens is these performative utterances
can't be true or false, but they can be-- because they're
not propositions. They're not stating
claims about the world. They're actions.

But they can be felicitous
or they can be infelicitous. They can be done
appropriately and correctly, or they can be done
inappropriately and incorrectly. So I could go-- and then there's-- and there's
also some cues as to what these performative utterances,
what form they take. So we typically see these
performative utterances in the form of first
person singular.

Right? I. I do something. Present, indicative, active. So it's a active tense.

I'm going to do this
thing in the present. So I resign, say. And English even has
a fancy signifier that we use to indicate
that a statement is a performative utterance rather
than a statement of fact, and that's hereby. So if you think about
like reading various kinds of legal language or whatever-- this document hereby
declares that going forward, these rights belong
to this person.

And this word hereby
signifying this is a performative utterance. Now, it's kind of archaic. We don't use that every day. At least, I hope you don't
say, I hereby call shotgun.

[LAUGHTER] You could try. It might work. But we have that
in our language. And so where I'm going with
this, of course, that you see, is that this-- I call bullshit-- this is
a performative utterance.

This is not a statement
of a proposition. This is an act. This is a forceful act. And it's an act that we want to
look at carefully in the class.

But it's also an
act that we want to treat with due respect in the
class because it is forceful. It puts you out there. It can put someone
else on the spot. It can cause tension.

It can get you in
a lot of trouble. It can get you sued. It get you punched. Any number of things can go
wrong when you call bullshit, and yet we desperately need it.

And so I just wanted
to kind of use that description of
performative utterances to show you the force, if you
will, behind these three words, which I, again, think
we desperately need. So this leads me very naturally
to course expectations and standards here. This is obviously going to be
somewhat controversial material we're going to be
talking about here. And so there are
three basic things I'm going to ask of
people in this class.

First and foremost is treat
other people with respect. It's a class on
calling bullshit. It's not a class
on disrespecting. A call of bullshit--
don't use calling bullshit as an insult.

Don't
use it as a dis. And don't interpret it as a dis. Jevin calls bullshit
on me all the time. We're still very good friends.

I don't interpret it as it dis. I interpret it as constructive
criticism, usually. [LAUGHTER] And so so that's
the first thing, is treat people with respect
when you're calling bullshit, if you have it called upon you. The second thing is call
bullshit on claims, not people.

OK? And this goes back to Cohen. Cohen says look-- this
is the part where he doesn't like about Frankfurt. Frankfurt is really focused on
calling out the bullshitter. And for further Cohen,
it's all about the claim.

He says out proper
polemical target-- when we're going to rant
against this stuff-- is bullshit, and not
bullshitters, or producers of bullshit, as such. And he explains why. And I think these
reasons are really important in this classroom
and in life beyond. For reasons of courtesy,
strategy, and good evidence, we should criticize the
product, which is visible-- this statement-- and
not the process-- the mental state
behind the person who decided to put that
statement out there, which is not visible.

And so that's
Cohen's view, and I'd like us to try to respect
that in the class. And then third-- look,
there's room in this classroom for diverging views. And we're not all going
to agree on everything, probably not on anything that
we talk about in the class. And so I want to make
sure that we retain that room for diverging views.

I don't want anyone to make
anyone else feel unwelcome, let alone unsafe, for
speaking their mind or thinking differently than
other people in the class. So this is what I'm going
to ask of everybody. I think it will be
something you will all have a reasonably
easy time doing, but I just want to lay it out
there right from the start. [MUSIC PLAYING].

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