Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time, edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch, 2006.

On Bullshitmania

George Reisch and Gary Hardcastle

It was just a book, after all-a book written by an Ivy League philosopher, Princeton's Harry Frankfurt, attempting to clarify a particular concept. That clarification would be achieved, moreover, in an ordinary way, at least for Ivy League philosophers. Philosophical authorities from the past would be cited, quoted, and interpreted; the flaws in their analyses pointed out; and suddenly a concept or term we thought we had understood would be revealed as in fact confused, vague, and murky. Then, at the work's intellectual crescendo, a new and clearer interpretation of the concept would emerge for other philosophers to consider and, eventually, tear apart once again. A day in the life of professional philosophy.

But this book was unusual. It was very small, even cute. Sitting on bookstore shelves and display tables, it could easily have been mistaken for a children's book, or a pocket-size collection of affirmations. The austere, classical style of its cover and its title might rather have suggested an ancient oration or a collection of lyric poems. But the words elegantly printed on the cover did not say "On Love," "On Poetics," or even, "On Truth (and its General Scarcity)." They said "On Bullshit," and the public loved it.1

No other work by a living academic philosopher has been so well received. After twenty-six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, On Bullshit is poised to sell more copies than any commercial philosophy book, ever. Yes, philosophically themed books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Godel, Escher, Bach were hugely successful. But they were written for wide, popular audiences. On Bullshit, in contrast, circulated for two decades exclusively among professional academic philosophers. Such experts in logic, conceptual analysis and (Frankfurt's specialty) moral theory usually have little interest in popular philosophical writings. All the more surprising, then, that on leaving the ivory tower for main street, On Bullshit became such a hit.

Apropos for Today

Why did it happen? One answer, easy and obvious, was suggested by comedian Jon Stewart, host of television's The Daily Show. Stewart interviewed Frankfurt after the book had become a bestseller. When Frankfurt explained his idea that, unlike the liar, "the bullshitter doesn't really care whether what he says is true," the audience erupted in laughter and giggles. "I should warn you," Stewart said, leaning in to reassure his startled guest. "When they hear that word, it tickles them." "Especially coming from an Ivy League Professor," Frankfurt added.

True, that word does not often (or, really, ever) appear in the title of academic treatises. But this book's appeal cannot be fully explained by its cover. Like a sweet- little old lady giving someone the finger, the novelty of a minor obscenity quickly gets old. On Bullshit is different. Even for those who may see the book as merely a joke, or a most appropriate gift for an annoying boss or co-worker, it is a joke that seems to have hit a cultural nerve.

As it turns out, Stewart also suggested a deeper, and better, answer. The book, he noted, is "very apropos for today." He did not elaborate; he just asked Frankfurt about its origin and joked about whether Frankfurt had his facts right or was just . . . never mind. Truth is, Stewart didn't need to explain why the book is apropos. There was, as the saying goes, an elephant in the room during that interview. It was the same elephant that haunted Frankfurt's other appearances on television and radio. On each occasion it lounged next to Frankfurt and his interviewer, waiting to be named, discussed, or at least acknowledged. Yet not even Stewart, who makes his living with clever, incisive parody of politics and its news coverage, mentioned explicitly why it is that On Bullshit is "very apropos for today."

The elephant was, of course, a war. Like most others in United States' history, it sharply divided popular opinion. But this war was highly unusual, too. Its supporters as well as its critics came to agree that the official reasons for waging it, the ones put to the public, to Congress, and to the United States' allies, turned out to be . . . well, put it this way: the claims that once seemed to make the invasion of Iraq necessary and urgent -- that Iraq possessed and planned to use nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction, that it had high-technology devices (such as remote controlled airplanes) for deploying those weapons, and that it was complicit in the attacks of September 11th, 2001 -- are now understood to be best described by that word.

That's why Stewart's audience seemed to shift uncomfortably in their seats as he and Frankfurt discussed bullshit's indifference to truth and falsity, its hidden interest in manipulating belief and behavior, and the way one senses, as Frankfurt put it in his book, that the "bullshitter is trying to get away with something." The audience had come to see Stewart and his writers skewer current political events, after all, so few would have missed the obvious referents-the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the admission that sources for these claims were, in retrospect, not credible-that made the book so apropos. There is and will likely remain little agreement about who, exactly, got away with what, exactly, in the run-up to the war. But there is a widespread sense that United States citizens, soldiers, and allies have been taken in.2

These are troubling suspicions. They are unmentionable, if not unthinkable, for some, because they threaten cherished ideals about the political and moral integrity of the United States. That's why this elephant is difficult to acknowledge. One way to acknowledge it, though, is through the cushion of humor. Everyone in Stewart's audience had surely heard the joke that WMDs had finally been located: they were weapons of mass distraction, and they were stockpiled in Washington D.C. Others no doubt found a cushion in the small and inviting form of the book. It had just the right author -- an Ivy League philosopher, expert in the kind of critical, balanced, and objective thinking that, as the invasion of Iraq drew near, seemed eclipsed by frightening memories of 9/11 and frightening talk of WMDs. And it struck a comforting tone -- its classical title and book jacket portray bullshit not as something alien, massive, and menacing but rather as just one of the many human foibles that have puzzled thinkers and artists for centuries. Indeed, Frankfurt's philosophical detachment from contemporary events, necessitated in one respect by the essay's history, makes On Bullshit apropos in an altogether different way. Call it bullshit without tears. It allows readers to approach that elephant abstractly, generically, and as it recurs throughout the ages-without having to take up those disturbing questions that make the book so relevant in the first place.

The Year in Bullshit

When Stewart asked Frankfurt whether our culture occasionally cleans house by "truth-telling," or whether "it just keeps piling," Frankfurt thought carefully for a moment and scored another laugh with his audience -- "I think it just keeps piling." Again, they knew what he meant. For in the wake of the missing WMDs, On Bullshit appeared amidst an explosion of various kinds of fraud and deception. Some, such as identity theft and eBay swindles, were enabled by new technologies of commerce, the Internet, and the demise of the photograph as a trustworthy document (see the neologism 'to photoshop'). Yet other kinds seem inexplicable without positing something like a cultural attitude or climate in which truth has become-much as Frankfurt feared -- less important than the demands of political, commercial, artistic, and even scientific success.

Evidence for this abounds in Laura Penny's Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit, which appeared on bookstore shelves shortly after On Bullshit. Reflecting on years of headline scandals involving the Catholic Church, the mutual fund industry, and fallen corporate titans such as Enron and MCI, Penny observed that we live in an "era of unprecedented bullshit production" (p. 1). What's especially striking is the sudden prominence of fraud within institutions that have heretofore been very careful about what's fiction and what's not.

Like publishing. One of the more dramatic scandals surrounding truth and authenticity belonged to Oprah Winfrey and author James Frey, whose A Million Little Pieces Oprah recommended to her enormous, book-hungry audience as a true, inspirational story. After the book was exposed as largely fiction, Ms. Winfrey first defended the book (as nonetheless inspirational) but then dramatically retracted her support and scolded a remorseful, tearful Frey on national television for his betrayal of trust and truth. Within weeks, another celebrated novelist, J.T. Leroy, whose autobiographical writings detailed his rise from teen-age poverty and truck-stop prostitution to New York-style literary success, took his whacks-once again-for peddling fictional stories as nonfiction memoirs. Unlike Frey, however, J.T. Leroy felt little remorse, or pain. In fact, he didn't exist. This fiction included the author himself, who turned out to be constructed by an aspiring female writer who for years posed successfully as the celebrated author's friend, confidant, and business agent. (When cameras were present, J.T. Leroy himself was impersonated by a boyish female friend wearing men's clothes and dark glasses.)

The distinction between fiction and non-fiction has never been terribly popular in advertising circles. But professional advertising has at least always recognized the distinction between what is an advertisement and what is not an advertisement. Until recently, advertisements announce themselves on signs or billboards, and they remain confined between programming segments on radio or television -- all of which helps us recognize them as advertisements. Two emerging trends, however, seem designed to blur this distinction and create advertisements that appear to be something else entirely. "Product placement" injects recognizable products or brands into movies or television shows, while "word of mouth advertising" takes the additional step of blurring the distinction between professional advertisers and ordinary citizens. On this model, individuals are compensated to "talk-up" specific products with others whom they may encounter in the course of ordinary life -- at work, in the supermarket, at soccer practice, and so on. Here, advertising begins to seamlessly join ordinary life in ways that make it increasingly difficult to determine not only whether claims are true or false, but additionally whether a friend, colleague or family member is recommending a product because they honestly like it or because they are rewarded for recommending it.

Perhaps the most striking and surprising of bullshit's successes are the inroads it has made into the worlds of science and scientific research. The philosopher Karl Popper held that science deserves respect precisely because it seeks to falsify its own claims -- actively eliminating, so to speak, its own bullshit. Yet that ideal seems to be fading behind headlines about scientific fraud and misconduct. Some of the more familiar examples:

* Investigative panels determine that research purported to have established some result, taken as gospel by other labs, was fabricated.
* Pharmaceutical corporations generously fund scientific studies and publish only those that appear to document the safety of their products.
* Tenured university professors promote their religious convictions in the guise of scientific expertise.
* Political appointees at federal science agencies insert special wording in agency-publications designed to promote religious criticisms of established scientific knowledge.

There's nothing new in the appeal to science by individuals, corporations, or governments seeking to legitimate and advance their specific interests and plans. What is new is the notion that this is very easy to do -- that legitimate scientific knowledge consists merely in whatever claims may be hyped through an effective public relations campaign, or published without controversy in a magazine or journal.

And then there's "that word." Though it has become as ordinary and common as these kinds of fraud and misrepresentation to which it usually refers, there remain some frontiers it has not yet conquered. While most academics (not those writing here, of course) shun its vulgarity, that politeness has not stopped the establishment of a new academic journal -- Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication and Falsification -- dedicated to analyzing and better understanding all such varieties of fraud and misrepresentation throughout modern culture. Others, if less polite, are more direct. The popular writer and radio commentator Al Franken has lately augmented the rules of his call-in quiz show "Spot the Weasel" with a new, fourth choice. Callers attempting to match wits with Franken and his guests can now identify recorded statements by politicians as either true, a lie, a weasel, or "BS." While Comedy Central's The Daily Show goes all the way with mentioning "bullshit," the other major networks, as of this writing at least, continue to censor the word. Still, it's hard to miss. When Bright Eyes (aka Conor Oberst) sang "When the President Talks to God" on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, he asked,

When the President talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own [bleep]
When the President talks to God?

One could also ask whether these censors were effective. Did this audience, unlike Jon Stewart's, remain unaware that Oberst had again used "that word" to point to that elephant? The answer was at the end of Oberst's song, as he sang, "I doubt it. I doubt it."

It's this sense of despair and cynicism, finally, surrounding our era of bullshit that most fundamentally explains the appeal of Frankfurt's book. No doubt, some of those who picked up On Bullshit did so only for the novelty of reading an Ivy League philosophy professor expound on the topic. But for many that curiosity was connected to deeper worries about what lay ahead for a culture so knee-deep. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it when commenting on Ms. Winfrey's theatrical defense of truth, the scandal surrounding A Million Little Pieces was larger than the question of "whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes and Noble." The genuine scandal is that "such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life." In an age of bullshit, we all become politicians or white-collar criminals, able neither to confirm nor deny the veracity of what we see, or know, or think we know. "It's as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief," Rich suggested as he put his finger on the potentially enormous social and cultural costs of bullshit's dominance (New York Times, 22nd January, 2006). For constant, nagging suspicions -- that political leaders are consciously deceiving the public, that your favorite teacher is bent on partisan indoctrination, or that your family doctor, your senator, stockbroker, or product -- recommending neighbor is in some corporation's pocket -- would seem to be socially corrosive and destabilizing. The fear that simple, direct communication, free of hidden agendas and interests, is becoming impossible may have led many (including those television and radio producers who made Frankfurt a sudden celebrity) to seize Frankfurt as a popular guru with a prescient, prophetic warning -- a Marshall McLuhan or Timothy Leary for the post-Enron, post-Iraq era. After all, the opening line of On Bullshit, that "one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," was written in 1985. Twenty years later, there's so much more.

The Dream of a Bullshit-Free Culture

If ours is a culture of bullshit, then why was it that a philosopher took center stage as America's main bullshit-analyzer? Why not a novelist or sociologist? We don't pretend to understand the vagaries of fashion and popular taste better than anyone else. But part of the answer, we think, is that Frankfurt is reviving a philosophical tradition. Philosophers have long sought to understand exactly how it is that certain statements or beliefs seem to deceive us, take us in, or make us not care very much whether they are true or false. Long before Frankfurt, that is, philosophers have been trying to determine exactly what bullshit is and how it works its magic.

This may be a surprising claim. Philosophy itself, after all, is often regarded as part and parcel with the bullshit of popular culture. The person who survives a personal tragedy by reflecting on the mysteries of the universe, someone might say, is "taking things philosophically." That's more polite and respectful, after all, than pointing out that she's distracting herself from unbearable loss or disappointment by almost absent- mindedly contemplating abstractions or pondering paradoxes -- bullshitting herself. A walk through the "philosophy" section at your local bookstore may confirm the impression that philosophers' interests are in that otherworldly arcana of the supernatural, the occult, and the "metaphysical."

Not so. Some of the most influential and enduring philosophy, dating back centuries, is devoted to identifying and understanding bullshit. This is not so that it may be indulged in further, but so that we may liberate ourselves from its delusions and deceptions. The archetypal sage-in-a-toga Socrates, for example, is justly revered for dedicating his life to the search for persons who were truly wise, rather than interested merely in passing on opinion, or hearsay, or beliefs of any sort bereft of evidence or simply good sense.

Twenty centuries later, the French polymath Rene Descartes started off the first of his six Meditations on First Philosophy with the rather brave recognition that so much of what he learned in the best French schools of the time was just plain false. "Some years ago I was struck," he wrote, "by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them."3 Descartes's remedy was a program of self-discipline that began with the rejection of those beliefs that fell short of certainty and, that completed, proceeded with the construction of a system of beliefs that was "stable and likely to last." It was a lonely, individualistic enterprise, but the very fact that Descartes recorded his progress in his Meditations reveals that it was something he believed others could, and ought, to do as well. It was, indeed, a common Enlightenment fantasy that everyone would follow along. The result would be a world with a lot less bullshit, maybe none at all.

That vision was shared by the next century's David Hume (who otherwise shared precious little with Descartes, but it was enough). Hume held that all real knowledge took the form either of mathematics and similar "formal" sciences (which he termed "relations of ideas") or of natural science (for Hume, "matters of fact"), and he ended his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (a popularization, relatively speaking, of his two-volume A Treatise of Human Nature) with clear instructions for how to treat bits of speech that pretended to, but in fact did not, belong in either category:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.4

An Enlightenment call for book burning? Not quite. The books Hume would have us cast into the flames are books only in the most literal sense -- they have pages, bindings, covers and words strung together into sentences and paragraphs. But they say nothing. Their offense, moreover, is that they are presented as though they do say something. That's the illusion, and it's perpetrated by the sophistry of printed words, pages, bindings, covers, blurbs, reviews, and the rest. Better to burn such sham books, such bullshit, says Hume. Burn it all.

The Enlightenment passion that carried Hume to the end of his Treatise continued to inspire in philosophers visions of a bullshit-free world. You find them in the writings of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, though again you'd be hard-pressed to find much more in common among these philosophers or, for that matter, all the philosophers who have railed against bullshit. The twentieth-century apotheosis of the anti-bullshit crusade, however, is certainly the Vienna Circle, a collective of science and math-minded Germans and Austrians that shook a communal fist at the culture of their time and place, the intellectual free-for-all of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s (that culture, sadly, shook its much more powerful fist back, sending nearly all of the Circle flying to England and the United States by 1939). The Vienna Circle's preferred term for bullshit was 'metaphysics', and so their 1929 manifesto, the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung ("Scientific World-Conception"), led off with the worry that "metaphysical and theologizing thought is again on the increase today, not only in life but in science."5 The "Scientific World-Conception" would be the antidote. It was an embrace of modern science and a scientific attitude toward things, as well as the "new objectivity" (or neue Sachlichkeit) pursued by many artists, designers and architects in European culture.

The Vienna Circle's target was not the intellectual diversity that surrounded them but the putative parts of it that were presented (even accepted) as meaningful -- indeed, profoundly meaningful -- but in fact amounted to nothing. In 1932 the Circle's Rudolf Carnap criticized Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most prominent German-speaking philosopher of the time, on precisely these grounds.6 In his 1929 book What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger ruminated on the nature of Das Nichts (literally, "the nothing"), and inspired Carnap to figure out exactly what was wrong with such supposedly deep and insightful metaphysical inquiries. In statements like Heidegger's 'Das Nichts selbst nichtet' ("The nothing nothings"), Carnap concluded, there was only the appearance of a meaningful statement. Behind that appearance, there was Nichts, leading Carnap to suggest that metaphysicians were like "musicians without musical ability." Much as a tone deaf musician would likely misuse an instrument, metaphysicians misused language and presented things that could not be conveyed in words as though they could be. Carnap and others of the Circle argued and debated about just how dangerous this passing off, this bullshitting, was. But it was bullshit all the same, and it met with a similar response: if one wanted to express an attitude towards life, that's fine, but don't pass it off as science or something similar. Better to take up poetry, as Friedrich Nietzsche does, for example, in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (which Carnap cites, incidentally, with approval).

It's almost an intellectual tragedy that the Vienna Circle and its philosophical legacies, logical positivism and logical empiricism, came to be associated with stodgy, dispassionate, irrelevant logic-chopping. That characterization occludes the Circle's raison d'etre, which was nothing less than the cultivation of a critical attitude to concentrations of bullshit in pseudoscience and philosophy that would, when taken up generally, reduce bullshit in government, religion, the market, and everyday life. The Vienna Circle's members thought of themselves not simply as professional philosophers who happened to live and work in Vienna, but as the keepers of a tradition of liberal, Enlightenment thinking that had made Vienna the cradle of progressive housing programs, adult education, architecture, art and design. Oh, and progressive philosophy. Which brings us back to Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Perhaps by now it's clear that we see Frankfurt as the latest carrier of the anti-bullshit torch in the Enlightenment Olympics, now several centuries running. In this light, the real significance of this bullshitmania is that an age-old impulse within philosophy to establish itself as a cultural, and not just an academic, enterprise may finally have found the right formula and the right language. If so, the best explanation for the popular interest in On Bullshit may have been that first one, about the novelty of the word itself. Indeed it may all come down to that word-understood not as a joke, but as a welcome point of connection between what goes on in philosophy seminar rooms and what goes on when the lights go out and philosophers join their fellow citizens in the marketplace, coffee shop, town hall, and voting booth.

How This Book Came to Be

These are the considerations that led us to put together the collection of chapters that is Bullshit and Philosophy. If it's true, as we suspect, that the popularity of Frankfurt's book signals a willingness among the public to see what philosophers have to say about bullshit, then we ought, we thought, to assemble some who were up to the task and tell them to let it rip. What that means, of course, will vary among our authors. That said, though, there are some things this book is not.

For example, the chapters that follow are not a guided tour through various varieties of bullshit in modern culture. Nor does this book intend to equip you with a "bullshit detector" that you might use to finally shut Uncle Ned up about the wisdom of tax cuts or the alien bodies the government is storing at Area 51. Nor do we offer a collection of indignant would-be radio commentators angling for a guest spot on Rush Limbaugh. What this book does, instead, is offer discussions, interpretations, and criticisms related to Frankfurt's essay and other philosophical work on bullshit. Since On Bullshit was originally written for academic philosophers, and our book is written for people intrigued by On Bullshit but otherwise only tourists in the halls of philosophy, some chapters will help explain what philosophical essays like Frankfurt's aim to do and how they work. What does it mean, for example, to propose a "theory" of bullshit, given that theories of this or that usually come from laboratories filled with test tubes and expensive instruments? What does it mean to articulate "the structure of a concept" -- as Frankfurt intends to do for bullshit?

In this regard, we could have called our book A Complete Idiot's Guide to Bullshit. But we didn't. We're not complete idiots, and we have no desire to go to court for copyright infringement. More importantly, the success of On Bullshit makes it plain that neither idiots nor Ivy League professors have a special claim to insights about bullshit. If bullshit is one of the defining marks of modern culture, then everyone has a stake in it, and everyone can benefit from thinking about it and understanding it. With this in mind, and recognizing that thought and understanding are the province of philosophers, we bring you Bullshit and Philosophy.

Part I of Bullshit and Philosophy, "To Shoot the Bull: Rethinking and Responding to Bullshit," contains papers that say something about bullshit itself -- its causes, say, or its effects, or the reactions we have to it. One natural reaction to most forms of bullshit, for example, accuses the bullshitmania of our time (and books like this) of over-reaction. What's so bad about bullshit?, one might ask.

Scott Kimbrough's "On Letting It Slide" takes up this question, noting that in many situations we gladly sacrifice our usual regard for truth for the sake of (among other things) the feelings of others, keeping the peace, or simply entertaining ourselves. Kimbrough reminds us that we let much (though not all) bullshit slide, and perhaps we ought to.

For Conseulo Preti, avoiding bullshit (a "menace," she argues, for which audience as much manufacturer is to blame) might be a matter of emulating a life notably bullshit- free; her "A Defense of Common Sense" offers the early 20th century analytic philosopher G.E. Moore as one such exemplary life.

George Reisch's "The Pragmatics of Bullshit, Intelligently Designed" rejoins the question of bullshit and pseudoscience to argue that bullshit is not an indifference to truth, or meaning, as Frankfurt and Cohen suggest, but rather an attempt by the bullshitter to run two conversations at once, one, as Reisch puts it, "concealed within or downplayed alongside the other." Reisch's approach, he claims, explains why we are often so tolerant of bullshit.

But for Kenneth Taylor and Sara Bernal the interesting questions about bullshit pertain less to its definition or our reaction to it than to the reasons for its ubiquity. Taylor's "Bullshit and the Foibles of the Human Mind," for example, suggests that the institutional bullshit that surrounds us is abetted by mechanisms of reasoning deeply embedded in our shared cognitive architecture. Taylor's chapter illustrates these well- established "foibles" of the human mind, but it also points the way to a culture less steeped in the bullshit these foibles enable. We must, Taylor implores, marshal education to guard ourselves and our children against our own cognitive foibles, and we must deliver "the very means of public representation and persuasion" to a far wider and more diverse array of people. Sara Bernal, in contrast, is struck by a parallel between bullshit and various pathologies of personality; she argues that the extraordinary bullshit of the disordered personality arises from an impaired social cognition and results, naturally, in hobbled social relations.

In "Performing Bullshit and the Post-Sincere Condition," Alan Richardson unveils a variety of bullshit yet unnoted in the chapters so far -- "performative bullshit," exemplified in Customer Service Pledges and Mission Statements. Responding to this bullshit, Richardson suggests, is a matter either of producing "self-evident bullshit that outperforms its covert competitors" (in the manner of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show) or of rethinking our inherited Enlightenment values.

Cornelis de Waal, on the other hand, sees bullshit as a violation of a pragmatism -- inspired "general epistemic imperative" to always "proceed upon the hope that there is a true answer to the questions we ask and act from a desire to find that answer." De Waal's "The Importance of Being Earnest: A Pragmatic Approach to Bullshitting," thus argues that satisfying the imperative-avoiding bullshit -- is largely a matter of sharing the burden of inquiry with our community rather than shouldering it ourselves in the fashion of Descartes.

Part II, "Into the Ring: Defining Bullshit," contains five papers that, in one way or another, try to fix our target -- that is, to define exactly what bullshit is, so that we can more easily spot it, at least, and get rid of it, at best. Leading off this section is G.A. Cohen's classic essay, "Deeper Into Bullshit,"7 a direct response to Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (and the only chapter in this book not written especially for it). In "Deeper Into Bullshit," Cohen suggests that Frankfurt's definition has missed the mark, or at least failed to attend to a kind of bullshit characterizable not in terms of the intention of the person who produces it (per Frankfurt's approach) but in terms of its "unclarifiable unclarity." Many of this book's other chapters respond to Cohen's essay.8

The next three chapters shed light on this debate by bringing various other intellectual resources to the table. For Gary Hardcastle, the dinner guest is the anti-metaphysical thought of the Vienna Circle's Rudolf Carnap. Hardcastle's "The Unity of Bullshit" argues that the anti-metaphysical program of Carnap and his fellow scientific philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s gives us a perspective that unites the sort of bullshit identified by Frankfurt and Cohen.

Andrew Aberdein, by contrast, in his "Raising the Tone: Definition, Bullshit, and the Definition of Bullshit," calls upon Charles Stevenson's notion of a "persuasive definition" to help us place Frankfurt's definition of bullshit in a wider context. Per his title, Aberdein reaches back to the nineteenth century's Gottlob Frege to re-introduce the concept of tone into the debate about bullshit.

And then, Hans Maes's and Katrien Schaubroeck's "Different Kinds and Aspects of Bullshit" raises fundamental and critical questions for Frankfurt's definition of bullshit (including questions about the moral status of bullshit, but more on that below), considers Cohen's thoughts on bullshit on this score, and raises the question of where pseudoscience belongs in the ever-lusher garden of bullshit.

Though it has been enjoying its recent foray through literary and philosophical treatises under its own name, bullshit lives and breaths in the world off the page. Our final section, then, is "It's All Around Us: Bullshit in Politics, Science, Education, and the Law." In On Bullshit, Frankfurt suggested that democracy, in demanding of everyone an opinion on everything, inadvertently promotes bullshit. Mark Evans's chapter, "The Republic of Bullshit, Or: Were Plato, Strauss and Those Guys Right All Along?" examines this suggestion among historically significant criticisms of democracy.

Similarly, Vanessa Neumann's "Political Bullshit and the Stoic Story of the Self" provides a detailed account of the sort of bullshit one is apt to find in international politics. She suggests that we can better understand and manage such bullshit if we attend to Stoic theories of self and the role narrative plays in persons' lives.

In "Bullshit at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems," Heather Douglas treats us to examples of bullshit drawn from the skeptical side of the debate over global warming. She shows how incomplete information and, perhaps more significantly, mistaken understandings of scientific objectivity can serve the ends of bullshit.

David Tietge is concerned to defend rhetoric, understood as the study of language and the role it plays in our lives, from its all-too-frequent association with bullshit. His "Rhetoric Is Not Bullshit" makes the case that a resuscitation of rhetoric in the college and even the high-school classroom may be precisely the antidote to bullshit. Finally, Bullshit and Philosophy closes with an chapter from Steve Fuller, fresh from his role as an expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, et al., concerning the place of Intelligent Design in the ninth-grade public school classroom. Fuller's wide-ranging chapter, "Just Bullshit," draws upon a wealth of examples from popular culture, the history of science, and jurisprudence to call attention to the threat of bullshit in anti- bullshit programs themselves.

As we noted, Frankfurt's On Bullshit did not initiate an interest among philosophers in bullshit; that interest had been there for centuries, if not millennia. But the book's popularity did manage to remind philosophers and non-philosophers alike of academic philosophy's special relation to bullshit. Our hope, of course, is not just that these chapters help others learn and think about bullshit, but that they also remind philosophy itself that its links to popular culture are much closer and mutually rewarding that most of us realize. To borrow from a tale told here by Scott Kimbrough, there is something right in the common reaction -- "that's bullshit" -- many have to academic philosophy. But that's not because philosophy produces it, it's because philosophy is one of our best defenses against it.

Notes

1 "On Bullshit'" first appeared as an essay in The Raritan Review VI.2 (1986) and was then reprinted in Frankfurt's The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 117-133. In 2005, "On Bullshit" was published as the book, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Throughout Bullshit and Philosophy, all references to On Bullshit are to the 2005 edition.

2 Among the many books critical of the second Bush administration are several by former Washington insiders and United Nations officials who offer first-hand accounts of alleged manipulations of intelligence used to promote the Iraq war. There is, for example, Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004); John W Dean's Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W, Bush (New York: Little, Brown, 2004); Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh's Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (New" York: Tauris, 2005); and Hans Blix's Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

3 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12. Emphasis in original.

4 David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 114.

5 Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis. Translated as The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle, and reprinted in S. Sarkar, ed., The Emergence of Logical Empiricism from 1900 to the Vienna Circle (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 321.

6 Rudolf Carnap, "Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache," Erkenntnis 2 (1932): pp. 219-241, translated as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language" in A.J. Ayer, ed.. Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81.

7 Originally published in S. Buss and L. Overtoil, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press), pp. 321-339. Reproduced as Chapter 8 of Bullshit and Philosophy. Throughout Bullshit and Philosophy, all references to "Deeper Into Bullshit" are to the work as it appears in this volume.

8 Frankfurt himself has also replied briefly to Cohen: "Reply to G.A. Cohen," in Contours of Agency, pp. 340-44. Here Frankfurt arguably cedes ground to Cohen's critique, but maintains the significance of the intention-oriented bullshit he defined. Truth-indifferent bullshit, Frankfurt insists, much more than the kind of academic obscurity Cohen targets, threatens our "respect for the distinction between the true and the false" on which the very "conduct of civilized life" depends (p. 343).