Abstract
The paper points to gaps in the conceptualization of bullshit as offered by Harry Frankfurt and Jerry Cohen. I argue that one type of bullshit, obscurantism, the deliberate exercise of making one’s text opaque for the purposes of deceiving the readership in various ways, escapes Frankfurt’s radar in tracking those judgments that are unconcerned with truth, and is not given distinct status in Cohen’s framework, which pays more attention to the product of bullshit than its producers and their techniques. First, I offer on overview of the expanding literature on bullshit, with special attention given to accounts by Frankfurt and Cohen. I claim that Frankfurt’s essentialism and Cohen’s product-oriented account are not successful in exhausting our common understanding of what bullshit entails, neither separately, nor in conjunction. In particular, I claim that obscurantist bullshit pushes the envelope of the current conceptual frameworks. Second, following Boudry’s and Buekens’s work on obscurantism, I discuss the usual mechanisms utilized by obscurantists. Third, I reflect on an objection to my argument based on tweaking the permissibility for producing obscurantism by placing the production of obscurities into different contexts of writing style. I argue that there is an important normative difference between being an obscurantist and someone who merely writes obscurely, and that the distinction should bear weight regardless of constraining our capacities to tell between the two. I finish by discussing whether our understanding of obscurantist bullshit aids us in following a principle of clarity.
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Notes
Scott Kimbrough also offers an account that justifies the preference for bullshit instead of (outright) truth-telling in certain life circumstances. See Kimbrough 2006.
Cohen specifically targets Althusserian Marxists, and his characterization of their work as bullshit is his driving force for starting up, together with several other authors such as Jon Elster and John Roemer, the September group, also popularly known as analytical Marxists or Marxists without bullshit.
An objection may be raised here that the bullshitter is not truly concerned with truth, since, the claim goes, he primarily wants to bamboozle an audience. But I believe that would be oversimplifying matters. If we deeply consider the listed reason (apart from, perhaps, the first one), we realize it would be erroneous to isolate deception at the forefront of the author’s intentions. Rather, authors may employ obscurities because they believe their claims, which they consider to be true, will otherwise not be taken seriously (for the stated reasons). These authors then believe using obscurities is necessary for their arguments to capture attention. But surely that is not the same as having the primary intention to bamboozle, or having indifference toward truth. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this objection.
Note here that obscurantism, which is of primary focus here, is not the only way in which authors try to enchant a claim they or others find trivial with an air of relevance and complexity. One such method could be an overuse of perfectly clear and well defined technical language or the needless insistence on logical symbols in cases where such expression is clearly redundant to the points being made. I will not delve into the complexity of whether such methodology might fall under a more extensive conception of bullshit, but the fact that I am bringing it up suggests that I find such practices normatively controversial.
Some might object here that I take for granted that obscurantism and bullshit are strongly related, which is not at all obvious. Note, however, that throughout the paper, I am insistent on relating my account of bullshit to ordinary language, and to the avoidance of strictly technical language. I claim here that one commonplace notion of bullshitting people involves the deceptive utilization of obscurities. This notion, I believe, is prominent enough in ordinary use to claim that its exclusion from an account of bullshit would make it incomplete, and perhaps even arbitrary and technical. As I will show later in the paper, the proposition ‘x is bullshitting y’, which I believe certainly imputes intentions of x to create an effect on y in one way (say, by usage of obscure language), is a fundamental notion of ‘bullshitting’ in our ordinary language, more so than the inadvertent production of nonsense.
See Frankfurt 2002. The quote of Balibar goes as follows: „This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.” However, Frankfurt quite successfully makes “a stab” at its meaning: “The most distinctive point of dialectical explanations is precisely that they are supposed to be particularly helpful in illuminating how class struggle has significantly determined the course of history.”
Cohen’s supporters might object here that the way I am curtailing the conceptions of bullshitter and bullshit is value-laden. They might claim that I have strayed from Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s descriptive approach, and that my (arbitrary and technical) ascription of bullshit to linguistic phenomena stems from my unfounded assessments of different degrees of blameworthiness. As far as the value-ladenness is concerned, these critics would be correct. But their criticism would be misguided in two ways. First, my approach does not stray from Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s, since both their approaches are value-laden – Frankfurt talks about the badness of bullshit compared to lying, while Cohen’s text is underpinned by a recommendation to avoid bullshit in academic texts and cleansing traditions of thought from it (for instance, Marxism). An attempt to engage in a purely conceptual, or a purely ethical discussion on bullshit, is inappropriate, as the character of its blameworthiness, in the particular context in which we are discussing it, is what drives both its conceptual and normative analyses. We want to learn what it means to bullshit, but mainly because we want to know what kind of fault it is, and how it relates to other kinds of faults. Second, it does not follow from the fact that an account is value-laden that it is also technical and arbitrary, as it may nevertheless attempt to capture how users of ordinary language themselves use the concept in a value-laden way. The way in which I differentiate between intentional and non-intentional exercises captures, or so I claim, the tendencies for marking certain categories as bullshit.
I will refrain from calling them obscurantists either.
This is not to say that the concept of ‘the Other’ may not be conceptually pinned down and applied in particular texts, or that we may not have any use for it. The objection from Buekens and Boudry specifically refers to Lacan’s text.
Here, Buekens and Boudry are paraphrasing Lacan’s claims.
If we put informal fallacies aside, a discussion on the remaining immunizing strategies resurfaces the problem of intent. We should be bothered by whether the producer of obscurities intends to utilize relativism or constructivism in order to shield off his obscurations, or he believes one of these positions to be true. In Buekens’s and Boudry’s conception, where every obscure philosopher is equally an obscurantist, regardless of intent, this is irrelevant. It does not matter to them whether you put immunizing strategies into use with full awareness of their power and purpose, or with the belief that the positions characterized as immunizing strategies are true. Like before, I retain my position that intent should be the dividing point between obscurantists and those merely obscure, even at the cost of not always being able to tell between the two. Further inquiry into immunizing strategies does, however, put those merely obscure at some moral fault, if their claims are shielded by such positions with little or no argument, and with no awareness of the shielding that they provide.
I do believe, however, that the consideration of immunizing strategies faces Buekens’s and Boudry’s account with a problem. Positions like relativism and constructivism are “legitimate” and “competitive” positions in philosophical debate, which cannot be cast aside willy-nilly as immunizing strategies. Should Buekens and Boudry offer conditions for when relativism and constructivism are indeed immunizing strategies? In another paper, by Boudry and Braeckman, the claim is that a sincere adoption of positions like relativism and constructivism may still be compatible with the claim that they are being used as immunizing strategies. This is due, the claim goes, to self-deception and rationalization, as authors adopting such positions may unconsciously be driven to look for reasons to dismiss weighty conflicting evidence, rather than consciously deliberating about it. For the full account, see Boudry and Braeckman 2012: 358–359.
I owe the core of this objection to Zsolt Kapelner.
Note that if Boudry and Buekens hold onto their conception of the obscurantist, according to which intention does not play a role, their account is completely unaffected by this objection. That, however, seems strange.
References
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Aleksandar Simić, Zsolt Kapelner, Lovro Savić, Nino Kadić, Mihovil Lukić, and Alexandru Moise for providing me with important feedback and valuable comments and suggestions in the course of my work on this paper.
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Ivanković, V. Steering Clear of Bullshit? The Problem of Obscurantism. Philosophia 44, 531–546 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9709-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9709-8