Editing Bullshit (section)

==In the philosophy of truth and rhetoric{{anchor|Philosophy}}==

===Assertions of fact===
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy. On one prominent occasion, the word itself was part of a controversial advertisement. During the [[1980 United States presidential election|1980 U.S. presidential campaign]], the [[Citizens Party (United States)|Citizens Party]] candidate [[Barry Commoner]] ran a radio advertisement that began with an actor exclaiming: "Bullshit! [[Jimmy Carter|Carter]], [[Ronald Reagan|Reagan]] and [[John B. Anderson|Anderson]], it's all bullshit!" [[National Broadcasting Company|NBC]] refused to run the advertisement because of its use of the expletive, but Commoner's campaign successfully appealed to the [[Federal Communications Commission]] to allow the advertisement to run unedited.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tKGXrbaBWEAC&q=Barry+Commoner+Bullshit&pg=PA507| title=Communication Law in America |author=Paul Siegel |publisher=Paul Siegel |pages=507–508 |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-7425-5387-3}}</ref>

===Harry Frankfurt's concept===
In his essay ''[[On Bullshit]]'' (originally written in 1986, and published as a monograph in 2005), philosopher [[Harry Frankfurt]] of [[Princeton University]] characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking "to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak":<ref name="Frankfurt 2006">{{Cite book |last=Frankfurt |first=Harry |title=On Truth |publisher=Knopf |year=2006 |isbn=9780307264220}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.tauroscatology.com/frankfurt.htm |title=Harry Frankfurt on bullshit |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050308024618/http://www.tauroscatology.com/frankfurt.htm |archive-date=2005-03-08 |access-date=2013-11-05}}</ref>

{{blockquote|text=It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.}}

Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]'s disdain of "non-sense" talk and with the popular concept of a "bull session", in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment. He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon the (at that time) growing influence of [[postmodernism]] and [[anti-realism]] in academia<ref name="Frankfurt 2006"/> as well as situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.

In his 2006 follow-up book, [[On Truth]], Frankfurt clarified and updated his definition of bullshitters:<ref name="Frankfurt 2006"/>

{{blockquote|text=My claim was that bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false. (p. 3-4) }}
 
Several political commentators have noted that Frankfurt's concept of bullshit provides insights into  political campaigns.<ref>{{Citation | last = Shafer | first = Jack | author-link = Jack Shafer | date = December 24, 2015 | title = The Limits of Fact-Checking | magazine = Politico Magazine | url = http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/the-limits-of-the-fact-checker-213461 | access-date = 10 January 2016 }}</ref> [[Gerald Cohen]], in "Deeper into Bullshit", contrasted the kind of "bullshit" Frankfurt describes with a type he referred to as "unclarifiable unclarity" (i.e., nonsensical discourse presented as coherent and sincere but is incapable of being meaningful). Cohen points out that this sort of bullshit can be produced either accidentally or deliberately, but is especially prevalent in academia (what he calls "academic bullshit"). According to Cohen, a sincere person might be disposed to produce a large amount of nonsense unintentionally or be deceived by and innocently repeat a piece of bullshit without intent to deceive others. However, he defined "aim-bullshitters" as those who intentionally produce "unclarifiable unclarity" (i.e., Cohen-bullshit) in situations "when they have reason to want what they say to be unintelligible, for example, in order to impress, or in order to give spurious support to a claim" (p.&nbsp;133).<ref>Cohen, G. A. (2002). "Deeper into Bullshit". Originally appeared in Buss and Overton, eds., ''Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Reprinted in Hardcastle and Reich, ''Bullshit and Philosophy'' (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), {{ISBN|0-8126-9611-5}}.</ref>

Cohen gives the example of [[Alan Sokal]]'s [[Sokal Affair|"Transgressing the Boundaries"]] as a piece of ''deliberate'' bullshit (i.e., "aim-bullshitting"). Indeed, Sokal's aim in creating it was to show that the "postmodernist" editors who accepted his paper for publication could not distinguish nonsense from sense, and thereby by implication that their field was "bullshit".

Another application of Frankfurt's concept of bullshit is with regards to [[Generative artificial intelligence]]. It has been argued that the outputs from [[ChatGPT]] and similar programs should be regarded as bullshit.<ref>{{cite journal | last1=Hicks | first1=Michael | last2=Humphries | first2=James | last3=Slater | first3=Joe | title=ChatGPT is bullshit | journal=Ethics and Information Technology | date= 8 June 2024 | volume=26 | issue=38 | doi=10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5| doi-access=free }}</ref> This is particularly in response to terminology (see [[Hallucination (artificial intelligence)]]) that had been used to describe cases where ChatGPT would utter falsehoods (such as making up references). 

===David Graeber's theory of bullshit work in the modern economy===
Anthropologist David Graeber's book [[Bullshit Jobs|Bullshit Jobs: A Theory]] argues the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive.<ref>{{cite book |last=Graeber |first=David |title=Bullshit Jobs: A Theory |date=2018-05-15 |publisher=Simon & Schuster |isbn=978-1-5011-4331-1 |edition=1st |location=New York, NY |language=English}}</ref>

===Education and reasoning as immunization against bullshit===
[[Brandolini's law]], also known as the "bullshit asymmetry principle", holds that "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than what’s needed to produce it". This truism highlights that while the battle against misinformation more generally must be fought "face to face", the larger war against belief in misinformation won’t be won without prevention. Once people are set in their ways, beliefs are notoriously hard to change. Building immunity against false beliefs in the first place is the more effective long-term strategy.<ref name="The Psychology of Bullshit">{{cite web |last1=Pierre |first1=Joe |title=The Psychology of Bullshit |url=https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202007/the-psychology-bullshit |website=Psychology Today |publisher=Sussex Publishing |access-date=March 31, 2022 |date=February 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=MacMillan |first1=Thomas |title=A Beginner's Guide to Calling BS |url=https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/a-beginners-guide-to-calling-b-s.html |website=New York Magazine, The Cut |publisher=VOX Media, LLC |access-date=April 9, 2022 |date=June 26, 2017}}</ref>

University of Washington biologist [[Carl Bergstrom]] and professor Jevin West began a college course on "Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World".<ref>{{cite web | last=McWilliams | first=James | title='Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news | website=the Guardian | date=2019-04-17 | url=http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/16/calling-bullshit-college-class-news-information | access-date=2023-02-06}}</ref> They then launched the Calling Bullshit website and published a book with the same title.