Finding Oneself in the Other by G. A. Cohen

Author:G. A. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

5. It matters that bullshit can come in the non-intention-freighted form by which I am exercised. For there is, today, a great deal of my kind of bullshit in certain areas of philosophical and semiphilosophical culture, and if, as we should, we are to conduct a struggle against it, the sort of struggle that, so one might say, Alan Sokal has inaugurated,28 then it is important not to make false accusations, and not, therefore, for example, to charge possibly innocent traffickers in bullshit with lacking a concern for truth, or with deliberately conniving at obscurity.29 Our proper polemical target is bullshit, and not bullshitters, or producers of bullshit, as such. So while it’s lots of fun for people like me, who have a developed infantile streak, to talk about bullshit, and even just to write “bullshit” over and over again, in an academic essay, there is nevertheless, in my opinion, something important at stake here, and the character of what is at stake makes the bullshitter/bullshit distinction important.

To prevent misunderstanding, let me add that I do believe that there is quite a lot of aiming at obscurity in the production of philosophical bullshit, and a lot, to boot, in this region, of lack of concern with truth.30 But these moral faults should not be our primary focus. For reasons of courtesy, strategy, and good evidence, we should criticize the product, which is visible, and not the process, which is not.31

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