Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time by George A. Reisch & Gary L. Hardcastle

Author:George A. Reisch & Gary L. Hardcastle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0812696115
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

On Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, the bull, to borrow Cohen’s expression, “wears the trousers”; bullshit is whatever we get from the bull. What we need, according to Cohen, is a bullshit- (rather than a bull-) centered account of bullshit—an account of bullshit or nonsense independent of facts about the person serving it up (such as, for example, her mental state). And Cohen delivers an admittedly preliminary account of bullshit in this sense, one that emphasizes as a sufficient condition of bullshit its “unclarifiable unclarity” (p. 131). Something, a sentence for example, is unclarifiable “if and only if it cannot be made clear.” It’s disappointing that Cohen declines to say what ‘clear’ means —and, indeed, he lets on that he doesn’t think it’s even “possible to [say what ‘clear’ means], in an illuminating way” (p. 131). But it’s an ironic disappointment, so at least we have that.

Frankfurt and Cohen each have some ideas about bullshit, then, and, not surprisingly, they are at odds. My own idea about bullshit consists, I hesitate to divulge, in adding yet more ideas about bullshit to the mix, in the hope of resolving what appear to be irresolvable differences between Frankfurt’s idea and Cohen’s. This strategy of simplifying the conceptual stew by adding more things to it strikes many (my students especially) as a bit perverse. But it is in fact a reliable (and, partly for that reason, quite popular) way to actually make progress in these sorts of matters, especially when the ideas added to the mix have garnered decent reviews on the intellectual stage; when they have, that is, a respectable intellectual ancestry. Determining this strategy’s success in the particular instance of this paper I leave as an exercise for the reader.

The ideas I’ll be bringing to bear on the schism between Cohen and Frankfurt are the ideas associated with logical positivism—the premier, passionate, remarkably successful, and altogether thoroughly entertaining anti-bullshit philosophical program of the 1920s and 1930s (its end met, tragically but not surprisingly, at the hands of two of the twentieth century’s premier bullshit programs, European fascism and the Red Scare106). There are clear parallels between logical positivism and contemporary anti-bullshit programs,107 and, in fact, I’m surprised that so far so few, Frankfurt included, have either noticed the parallel or drawn upon it to add to the current discussion.108 But no matter; perhaps this book, and even this essay, is a start.

The logical positivists were not shy about bringing the hammer down on bullshit, but as often they described what they were up to in the appropriately positive terms of promoting unity among all the domains of genuine knowledge. Their idea was that the unity of science meant making clear the connections various domains of knowledge bore to one another, and that that led to eradication of the hidden depths and dark recesses that could serve as massive underground bullshit bunkers. “Unity of science!” they sang, warbling ‘science’ in its very general, distinctly German, sense. So using the logical positivist’s own ideas

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