By: Lucian
Gordon Pennycook, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, wants us to take bullshit seriously.
Pennycook’s charming research apparently owes much to the academic philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, who wrote a seminal work, called “On Bullshit”. No word yet on whether Pennycook or Frankfurt regard academic philosophy as bullshit. Still, you best not pay good money for the book (although P.A. will no doubt provide a link to it in their marketplace).
In the article, Pennycook (whose name is bullshit and he should really get a new one), accepts a distinction made by Frankfurt between bullshit and lying. The distinction runs as follows:
“Bullshit is something that is constructed absent of any concern for the truth. This is quite different from lying, which implies a deep concern for the truth (namely, its subversion). Bullshit is particularly pernicious since the bullshitter adopts an epistemic stance that allows for a great deal of agility. For the bullshitter, it doesn’t really matter if he is right or wrong. What matters is that you’re paying attention.” Incidentally, as soon as someone uses the terms “bullshitter” and “epistemic stance” in the same sentence, you know that they are getting paid too much, even if they are only making minimum wage.
This distinction is bullshit, of course. And not only because it requires such considerable knowledge of the speaker’s intent in order to apply it. Who’s to say whether a given speaker is with or without concern for the truth when they are speaking? Perhaps God knows what lies in the hearts of men, but that’s no help; just one stunning result of Pennycook’s bullshit research on bullshit is that people who believe in God are more prone to believing in bullshit than others.
Good work, Pennycook.
Intent aside, it isn’t clear that a form of human speech exists which is utterly bereft of concern for the truth. It would be interesting if Pennycook tried to explain how such a thing is possible, but he has more important things to do, like quote funny lines from New Age dingbat Deepak Chopra and compare them to other funny lines that were generated at random by computer programs designed to generate funny lines at random. Fiddle much while Rome is burning, Pennycook? Even the most cynical bullshitter will be concerned with what is truly compelling or truly persuasive to his audience.
Pennycook thinks he is clever. He isn’t. He begins his article by spouting some nonsense about how there is more bullshit in the world today than ever before. Then, he dazzles the reader by revealing that he was just bullshitting them. He is so impressed by this maneuver that he returns to it again at the end of the article, reminding us that we were persuaded by his bullshit earlier (we weren’t) and that we are therefore not so apt at detecting bullshit as we think we are. But we are apt enough to catch Poppycock, I mean, Pennycook, even if he can’t catch himself – his bullshit by design undermines the distinction made in his article. By his own standards, he is a liar, not a bullshitter.
In the comments to his original article, Pennycock responds to some of the criticisms raised here by saying the following: “Worth noting that bullshit that is found to be meaningful is still bullshit”. That statement should be subjected to his “study” too. Hilarious.
Right. Actually, when the guy is pressed on the difference between “intent” and “content”, he is compelled to narrow his definition of “bullshit” considerably.
When it comes to distinguishing “bullshit” from “truth”, for example, he says this, “When Frankfurt used “truth” when defining bullshit, he wasn’t referring to absolute (capital ’T’) Truth. He simply meant “truth as understood by the agent in question”. This is the way we are using it as well”.
Did he expect the reader of his article to have this notion of “truth” in mind as they began to read? It’s a completely disingenuous article. For it to mean anything it all, it would require that he begin by explaining that what he is studying and calling “bullshit” is actually a technical term with a very specific meaning, not at all what people generally mean when they use the term, “bullshit”.
But the appeal of his article, such as it is, the sense of what he says in it, and the alleged relevance of his study, all rely upon the common sense of “bullshit”, rather than his technical sense of it (which only comes out in the comments).