Frankfurt on Philosophy Talk

Just wanted to let ya'll know that the next episode of philosophy talk, on January 28th, will feature Harry Frankfurt.  The episode is called, "If Truth is so valuable, why is there so much BS?"  Check out the Philosophy Talk website for more details.

Comments

[John Fischer]

I thought the show was interesting. Here are a few of my own thoughts on the subject, for whatever they're worth:

Harry Frankfurt's view of bullshit is that the bullshitter is indifferent to the truth. (I take it that it is his view that bullshit is necessarily produced by the bullshitter.) But I would think that bs is a more heterogeneous phenomenon. Perhaps Harry Frankfurt captures one notion, a notion that requires a certain kind of motivation on the part of the bullshitter. But surely there is a more content driven notion. Here it is a bit more difficult to say exactly what the content must contain, in order to be bullshit. Recently I was driving and (since Philosophy Talk was not on), I was listening to NPR. They had their "This I Believe" series on (patterned after something started by Edward R. Murrow). What struck me was that the person speaking really was sincere, really wanted to get to the truth, but was somehow "over his head"--I immediately said to myself, "This is bullshit." But he was manifestly not indifferent to the truth. So there is some notion of bullshit that is more content-oriented, having to do with a discrepancy betweent he content of the expression and the subject matter, or something like that.

People might want to have a look at G.A. Cohen's article on the subject in the Buss/Overton volume in honor of Harry Frankfurt, and Harry's reply; that was given at the Wake Forest University conference in honor of Harry, and the whole session was hilarious (and interesting).

[Cihan Baran]

I work for Philosophy Talk (as a student) and it just makes me soooo happy to see its mention here =). Prof. Perry and Taylor are really fun people (especially Prof. Perry is really humorous), as far as I can tell from the two meals I had with them due to Philosophy Talk.

And I agree with that there is more to "bullshit" than the tight conception Frankfurt comes up with. For instance, today when I went to the bathroom of my dorm (I am an undergrad), there was a sheet attached on the wall about body health. The sheet warned about dangers of obsessing oneself with body weight and how %99 of men and women genetically couldn't (not in some mysterianist sense I suppose) obtain the body of supermodels and Calvin Klein models. A fellow student had circled %99 with a pencil and written "Bullshit" next to it.

Now I think that the meaning "bullshit" conveys here is much weaker than the one Frankfurt supposes. I think the student here just wants to say that the idea being conveyed is untrue - he (since it was a male bathroom) has no conception about how or why it is untrue, whether it is a carefully planned out lie, or just an obscure, hazy "bullshit" in the sense Frankfurt claims.

Well maybe the (alleged) untrue statement in question is some sort of a fanciful falseness, with a scientific air and authority, claiming "%99" men and women can't 'genetically' obtain such a good body. Maybe it's this fanciness that the word "bullshit" tries to capture. If this is so, then perhaps Frankfurt's analysis of "bullshit" deserves more credit than I thought at the beginning of this post.

[John Fischer]

Cihan,

Thanks for your great post. Yes, John Perry and Ken Taylor are really wonderful philosophers and they are doing a great service by bringing philosophy to a wider audience. I enjoy the show tremendously, and I'm really glad you have posted here in the past and again now.

I agree with you that somehow the detection of "fanciness" is involved in bullshit-attributions. It is a kind of inappropriate fanciness, a fanciness that doesn't match the subject matter--at least sometimes. Like most phenomena, bs seems to be more heterogeneous and, well, "messy" than we philosophers would like. But I guess that doesn't vitiate the attempt to provide a clear account of at least some core examples of the phenomenon.

I think John Perry (both on the show and in his blogpost) raises good questions about the elevation of the pursuit of truth to inappropriate heights. Yes, we do value truth, but we have many other values and interests, and I wouldn't have supposed that the value we place on truth trumps all the others. There are so many truths we just don't care at all about, and so many other things--such as love (another of Frankfurt's subjects) that we care about as well. I think it is a balancing act, where we balance the importance we place on various things.

[John Perry]

I agree with Fischer's opening comment. There are more kinds of bullshit than Frankfurt's analysis covers, valuable as his book is as a start on consideration of this phenomenon.

Humans are, as someone said, creatures that search for meaning. Now I have a whole theory of meaning and its roots in information, based on the approach we took in Situations and Attitudes (Barwise and I that is) and developed in papers with David Israel, available on my website --- very interesting ones, imho. Also some stuff in my book Identity, Personal Identity and the Self. Pardon the advertisements.

Basically the information contained by an event is what the rest of the world has to be like for the event to have happened, given some constraint. Constraints provide meaning; that is a link between the event and the rest of the world. We often employ constraints that are not true in interpreting events.

It seems to me that the hunger for meaning, and our facility in interpreting events according to dubious contraints, generates a lot of bullshit that really isn't unconcerned with truth.

A case in point might be Kant's moral argument for the existence of God. If we accept the constraint that things can only happen that fit into a just and morally coherent universe, we can get a lot of meaning out of events that isn't really there. Perhaps the whole religious impulse is based on this.

Another possibility is the constraint that human traits have some basis in evolutionary adaptations. If one follows John Dupre's work, he is saying that a lot of what people come up with who accept this constraint is bullshit, although they are not indifferent to truth.

Another possibility are certain version of extensionality and compositionality. Richard Rorty's disillusion with philosophy seems to me largely grounded in the failure of the Quinean program, based on devotion to truth-functionality. It's a constraint he learned in graduate school. We find things we learn in graduate school hard to give up. Rorty's work is valuable in many ways, and not indifferent to truth, even though skeptical about Truth. But the central rejection of analytic philosophy is (imho), BS.

In my own case, I "learned" early in graduate school that there can be no inner processes without outer criteria. When Malcolm applied this to dreams, in his book Dreaming, and came to the conclusion that dreams are not experiences we have when we are sleeping, his conclusions seemed like so much bullshit, although clearly he was concerned with getting at the truth. A whole generation of graduate students at Cornell gave up the constraint we had been taught when we read the book. We were thus spared the burden of carrying a very dubious constraint learned in graduate school with us for the rest of our careers. We've had to base our bullshit on different principles.

The point is, that when we find a large body of alleged insights and discoveries, that are based on careful, painstaking and creative application of constraints in the intepretation of events, but think those constraints have no basis when examined closely, we are inclined to call it bullshit, without implying indifference to truth.

I appreciate the nice things people are saying about philosophy talk! Keep it up.

John Perry

[John Perry]

I meant to say "all human traits" rather than just "human traits". I don't know how to go back and change it.

JP