On Bullshit

In Michael Lynch’s book about Truth, which I mentioned back here, he mentions Harry Frankfurt’s paper “On Bullshit”. It has just been printed as a very short book. The paper was available on line here and elsewhere, but Frankfurt’s publisher – the Princeton University Press – has been asserting copyright. [Updated March 16/05; it was available when I wrote this post but taken down]. Frankfurt is going to be on The Daily Show. Blog news about that at Crooked Timber.

It’s a short paper – it would come to about 25 pages of a larger font, generously spaced, and it’s a nice piece of writing. It discusses truth and bullshit in ordinary talk, advertising, and politics. Bullshit is what we hear from people who don’t care about the truth. Liars care about the truth – they say things they know aren’t true. Bullshitters don’t care about the truth. It’s not that they are careless about their story – their presentation may be elaborate, beautiful, and even true in some measure. But the bullshitter isn’t trying to tell the truth. The bullshitter is a story-teller. Bullshitters believe in themselves, sincerely. They want you to listen to them and like them, and they want you to believe them. The problem is that their stories aren’t reliable.

It’s a nice piece of work, which has inspired a lot of thought.

[Update/addendum. In 2022, after the Donald Trump presidency had acquainted people with the term “fake news” as a synonym for bullshit, I read the article The Varieties of Bullshit by Peter Ludlow (who has published online under the name E.J. Spode).

Nigerian Bank Fraud

Before e-mail spam started to arrive in torrents, it used to be fun to read some of the messages. Now, most of my spam is screened by my ISP and autoscreened in Mailwasher, and I clean up the rest when I see an obviously suspicious return address or subject line. One in a while I still read one for fun.
The Nigerian Bank scam (also see this link or the RCMP web warning) is so well-known that it ought to obvious, and the pitch is stale. Sometimes the con artist ads a nice touch.

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Parish Mission

Last week I went to a parish mission for the first time in my life. A mission is a short series of homilies or lectures offered over a few days to sharpen religious knowledge and spirituality. It is almost always presented by a guest preacher, and it is common to hold the mission during Lent. This year the mission at St. Ignatius was presented by Father Andrew Britz, a Benedictine who spent about 20 years as the editor of the Prairie Messenger weekly newspaper. He spoke over three nights, February 14-16.

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Moses and the Nice Commandments

British broadcast journalist Jon Snow of TV4 has run a poll to have Britons vote on a modern restatement of the 10 commandments. The new list seems to run to 20 and includes try your best, be honest, be true to yourself, enjoy life, nothing in excess, live within your means, appreciate what you have, never be violent, never kill, be true to your god, enjoy life (sex, drugs, chocolate??) and protect the environment (put the toilet seat down, flush/don’t flush???). Although they sound bland, it isn’t a bad set of moral principles, if we knew what they all really meant. There is a marked underemphasis on worship and fidelity to belief, and some emphasis on being nice. Sweet waffles for principles.

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Healing Energy

A story from the Guardian about the practitioners of energy medicine and faith healing questions studies that claim to show this stuff works. The writer treats New Age therapies like Reiki, some forms of Asian traditional medicine, and prayer as different versions of faith healing and that’s a reasonable approach. They all “work” by mysterious mechanisms.

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