It may come as a surprise to you that one of the most popular courses at an Irish university this year is on bullshit. More precisely, the course is about On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s pithy essay on speech “unconnected to a concern with the truth”.
There is so much of the stuff swilling about and clogging up the pipes of public communication. It is something Frankfurt puts down to our increased opportunities today to comment on things of which we have limited understanding.
“The production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic,” Frankfurt says.
Last week was a case in point when a Krakatoa of bullshit erupted on social media as people rushed to comment on events between Israel and Palestine. In probably the worst 24 hours of “hot takes” ever on Twitter/X, arguments were put forward by ordinarily reasonable individuals that slaughtering civilians was part of legitimate “resistance” or self-defence – one comment went so far as claiming the massacre of Israelis was allowed under “just war” theory. This was accompanied by opposing but no less fanciful claims that Israel’s retaliatory actions are unavoidable – as though “an eye for an eye” is a scientific law and not a moral choice.
Ignoring facts that do not suit your ideology is known as “knowledge resistance” within the study of critical thinking. Psychologists and philosophers have identified a suite of other “thinking traps” that we frequently fall into. These range from confirmation bias and tribal reasoning to groupthink under “the bandwagon effect”. Bullshit, though, appears to be particularly rampant – and “each of us contributes his share”, writes Frankfurt.
The bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose”.
The gendered phraseology is accidental but seems apt. While Frankfurt says “bull” in this context can be female, men in the public realm probably need to hold their hands up a little higher.
Daniel Deasy, associate professor of philosophy at UCD who teaches On Bullshit to students as part of an undergraduate critical thinking module, says Frankfurt helps us to think about “a phenomenon of which we are all too familiar, but didn’t previously have a shared language to express”. Deasy’s course was the first optional module to “sell out” this year in social science and law, building on its popularity with students in recent years.
“My strong impression is that most people take it because they are genuinely interested in being able to reason well, and see that skill as one that can be usefully applied across their studies,” Deasy says.
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“Interestingly, there isn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for talking about politics, fake news, or conspiracy theories; they prefer to focus on developing the positive skill of critical thinking rather than criticising other people.
“They also know that there are a lot of gurus in popular culture – for example, Jordan Peterson – who preach ‘reason’ as a sort of manly virtue or weapon with which to attack one’s opponents, and they are generally suspicious of those people and their approach. I make it very clear in the lectures that critical thinking is a habit to be cultivated by long and arduous practice, and not a secret key to success, a weapon, or an alternative to empathy and emotion. What many students really want is to learn to reason well so that they can more effectively do good in the world.”
You should not study critical thinking just to say “gotcha” to debating opponents. But are there circumstances where publicly calling out bullshit – like in the past week – is healthy?
“I think it does matter who is bullshitting. Societies rely on more or less invisible networks of trust, and some people and institutions within society have a greater responsibility for maintaining those networks than others,” says Deasy.
He points to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle – coined by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini – that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it”.
“It is easy – and often tempting – to bullshit, but much harder to clean up afterwards,” Deasy says.
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Some are discovering that directly. In recent days we have seen a spate of people deleting or clarifying comments made online in the first 24 hours of Hamas’ attack. As the conflict enters a new and dangerous phase, and with so much misinformation circulating, there is an urgent need for keyboard warriors to show self-restraint. That does not mean shutting down debate. Nor should we be too hard on people who are trying out ideas, or testing propositions, in the absence of all the facts. One could call the latter “a kind of ‘innocent bullshitting’, or we could say that it isn’t really bullshitting at all; I don’t think that matters too much,” says Deasy.
“What matters for Frankfurt’s purposes is that there is a kind of nefarious content produced without regard for the truth that his concept of bullshit helps us to zero-in on.”