Bullshit and Philosophy Part 13

89.

Strictly, the orator's oration is presented as an example of humbug, rather than bulls.h.i.+t. But it's clear that Frankfurt would also say that he is a bulls.h.i.+tter, precisely in virtue of what makes him a purveyor of humbug, whatever difference between humbug and bulls.h.i.+t Frankfurt might want to affirm.

90.

I do not think Frankfurt means to be stipulating otherwise: we are meant to agree with what he says about the orator on the basis of his initial, first-sentence of the pa.s.sage, description of him. 'Surely', in the second sentence, would otherwise make no sense.

91.

Although this is not, again (see the text to footnote 12 above), their ultimate goal.

92.

See the final paragraph of this section.

93.

Perhaps in contrast with Frankfurt's sense, and certainly in contrast with what Frankfurt says about that sense (see pp. 4748).

94.

That question is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of this section.

95.

For the record, I do not believe that Hegel was a bulls.h.i.+tter, and I am too ignorant of the work of Heidegger to say whether or not he was a bulls.h.i.+tter. But I agree with my late supervisor Gilbert Ryle that Heidegger was a s.h.i.+t. I once asked Ryle whether he had continued to study Heidegger after he had written a long review of Being and Time that was published in Mind. Ryle's reply: "No, because when the n.a.z.is came to power, Heidegger showed that he was a s.h.i.+t, from the heels up, and a s.h.i.+t from the heels up can't do good philosophy." (Experience has, alas, induced me to disagree with the stated Rylean generalization.)

96.

This criterion of bulls.h.i.+t was devised by Professor Arthur J. Brown, to whom I am indebted.

97.

In his wonderful spoof, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"-which was published as a non-spoof in the thereby self-condemning Social Text 4647 (SpringSummer, 1996), pp. 217252.

98.

I am allowing that the unclarifiable may be productively suggestive, but I would not go as far as Fung Yu-lan does: "Aphorisms, allusions, and ill.u.s.trations are . . . not articulate enough. Their insufficiency in articulateness is compensated for, however, by their suggestiveness. Articulateness and suggestiveness are, of course, incompatible. The more an expression is articulate, the less it is suggestive - just as the more an expression is prosaic, the less it is poetic. The sayings and writings of the Chinese philosophers are so inarticulate that their suggestiveness is almost boundless" (A Short History of Chinese Philosophy [New York: Macmillan, 1960], p. 12).

99.

Michael Otsuka comments insightfully on a familiar academic "case in which the two come apart: that is, in which someone is disposed to unclarifiable unclarity without aiming at it. Many academics (including perhaps an especially high proportion of graduate students) are disposed to produce the unclarifiable unclarity that is bulls.h.i.+t, not because they are aiming at unclarifiable unclarity, but rather because they are aiming at profundity. Their lucid utterances are manifestly unprofound, even to them. Their clarifiable unclear utterances can be rendered manifestly not profound through clarification. But their unclarifiably unclear utterances are unmanifestly not profound. Hence it is safe for them to think that they are profound. These utterances are not profound either because they are meaningful (in some subtle way, should there be one, that is consistent with their unclarifiable unclarity) but unprofound or because they are meaningless. They are unmanifestly not profound because it is hard to demonstrate that they are not profound, given their unclarifiability. By aiming at profundity, these academics tend to produce obscurity. But they do not aim at obscurity, not even as a means of generating profundity" (Private communication, 2nd September, 1999).

100.

Let me now list some central differences between the two kinds of bulls.h.i.+t that I have distinguished: 101.

Initially in the article referenced in footnote 23, and then more comprehensively in Intellectual Impostures, which he wrote with Jean Bricmont (London: Profile, 1998).

102.

Consider this sentence from the work of etienne Balibar: "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 cla.s.s struggle in the very fabric of history" (The Philosophy of Marx [New York: Verso, 1995]). If you read that sentence quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly, and you will then recognize it to be a wonderful paradigm of bulls.h.i.+t: yet I know Balibar to be an honest thinker.

103.

The evidence a.s.sembled in Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures proves, so I think, the truth of those beliefs.

104.

We may hope that success in discrediting the product will contribute to extinguis.h.i.+ng the process. I try to contribute to the project of discrediting the product in an unpublished and unpublishable discussion of "Why One Kind of Bulls.h.i.+t Flourishes in France," a draft of which will be supplied upon application to me.

105.

Laura Penny, Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bulls.h.i.+t (New York: Crown, 2005), p. 223.

106.

The good single-volume intellectual history of logical positivism before World War II is still to be written, but see V. Kraft, The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-positivism: A Chapter in the History of Recent Philosophy (New York: Greenwood, 1953); Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Ca.s.sirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000); and A. Richardson and R. Giere, eds., Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). For the period after World War II see G. Hardcastle and A. Richardson, eds., Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

107.

Ayer was logical positivism's Laura Penny. Whether Frankfurt is Rudolf Carnap and Cohen Hans Reichenbach (or vice versa) I leave as an extra credit exercise for Alan Richardson, subject to his agreement that we are all waiting for G.o.del.

108.

Although Cohen, in the last pages of an unpublished addition to his "Deeper Into Bulls.h.i.+t" devoted to the prevalence of bulls.h.i.+t in French intellectual culture, alludes offhandedly to logical positivism's alleged failure to attract French adherents. For that matter, it has been suggested that Rudolf Carnap's 1932 "uberwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische a.n.a.lyse der Sprache," (Erkenntnis 2 (1932): pp. 219241) ("Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical a.n.a.lysis of Language"), an essay famously representative of logical positivism and one to which I will turn to below, ought to have been t.i.tled "Overcoming Bulls.h.i.+t through the Logical a.n.a.lysis of Language," (presumably: "uberwindung der Mist durch Logische a.n.a.lyse der Sprache"). Carnap's essay was reprinted as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical a.n.a.lysis of Language" in A.J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 6081; I follow recent practice in preferring 'overcoming' for 'uberwindung'.

109.

In Ayer, Logical Positivism, pp. 6081.

110.

Martin Heidegger, Was Ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt A.M.: Klostermann, 1929).

111.

Few would raise an eyebrow at an allegation of meaningless leveled at the made-up 'teavy', but Carnap is happy to note some other terms that are "in the same boat" as 'teavy' as far as meaninglessness goes. These include, 'principle', 'essence', 'the Ego', 'the Infinite', and (in one common use, at least) 'G.o.d' (p. 67).

112.

The reader can construct her own contemporary version of this example by replacing 'toovy' with 'terrorist', another term the meaning of which has, I suggest, been toovied.

113.

Hence Carnap's otherwise puzzling yet stinging intellectual a.s.sessment of metaphysicians (especially Heidegger) as "musicians without musical ability" and his (otherwise equally puzzling but) laudatory endors.e.m.e.nt of Friedrich Nietzsche for writing Thus Spake Zarathustra as poetry (quality, apparently, notwithstanding), p. 80.

114.

See Otto Neurath, "The Lost Wanderers of Descartes and the Auxiliary Motive (On the Psychology of Decision)," in Neurath, Philosophical Papers 19131946 (Boston: Reidel, 1983), pp. 112.

115.

Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936) pp. 12223.

116.

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (London: Corgi, 2005) pp. 28081.

117.

Gottlob Frege "On Sinn and Bedeutung" (1892) in Michael Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader (London: Blackwell, 1997), p. 156.

118.

Gottlob Frege, "Logic" (1897) in The Frege Reader, p. 239.

119.

Robert Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking (London: Pan, 1965), p. 15.

120.

Charles Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 210.

121.

Douglas Walton, "Deceptive Arguments Containing Persuasive Language and Persuasive Definitions" Argumentation 19 (2005), p. 173.

122.