Our Vision and our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief

Abstract

“Bullshit”, as Harry Frankfurt writes in his recent book, On Bullshit, is a communication that pretends to be genuinely informative, but really is not. The person who talks bullshit, Frankfurt holds, is unconcerned with whether what he says is true, but is very concerned with how he is thought of by the listener. In this paper, I discuss Frankfurt's theory of bullshit, making specific reference to the requirement for deceptive intent on the part of the bullshitter, and to whether bullshitting must involve conscious dishonesty. Some choice examples of bullshit are nosed and the question of whether Frankfurt really has it in for postmodernism is addressed.