{"id":173,"date":"2008-10-09T19:00:52","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T23:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/10\/09\/on-bullshit-at-the-bertrand-russell-society-meeting\/"},"modified":"2008-10-15T12:17:43","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T16:17:43","slug":"on-bullshit-at-the-bertrand-russell-society-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/10\/09\/on-bullshit-at-the-bertrand-russell-society-meeting\/","title":{"rendered":"On Bullshit at the Bertrand Russell Society Meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

I headed to The Bertrand Russell Society<\/a><\/strong> at Verb Café<\/strong> meeting at Writers and Books<\/a><\/strong> (740 University Ave.<\/a>) for Ted Lechman<\/strong>'s discussion of Harry G. Frankfurt<\/a><\/strong>'s On Bullshit<\/a><\/strong>. [Got it?]<\/em><\/p>\n

The tie-in to Russell was a short pamphlet he wrote in 1943 titled An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity<\/strong>. Frankfurt's book was written in 2005 and professed to provide a philosophical definition of bullshit (also known as rubbish, malarkey, hokum, and humbug). Lechman generally spoke from Frankfurt's point of view, adding his own views where necessary.<\/p>\n

The colloquial definition sets bullshit on the true-false spectrum — that bullshitting is a form of lying. Lechman argued that this is a flawed definition: that bullshit is much more anchored in motive than in truthfulness. My analogy is that fitting bullshit into the true-false spectrum is as valid as fitting apathy into the love-hate spectrum.<\/p>\n

I think a linguistic flaw is the concept of opposites: for you can argue that love is the opposite of hate, and (in my opinion more strongly) that apathy<\/em> is the opposite of love. Yet apathy is also the opposite of hate — and now we've got a triangle of opposites which is logically impossible. As the old joke goes, \"two wrongs don't make a right but three lefts do.\" [Which I credit to 2NU in their song, \"This is Ponderous\", but I'm sure it's older than that.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Anyway, Lechman was trying to suggest that bullshit comes from a motive of misdirection, not of deception. Thus, lying is the deliberate act of deceiving — of knowing the truth but professing something else. Bullshit is the deliberate act of misdirecting attention — of not caring about the truth of a statement, but stating it anyway to draw attention to someone else.<\/p>\n

I think his perfectly constructed example was of one who states, \"America is the greatest country in the world\" to other Americans. It's a statement that has no provable truth, for there are statistics that favor America and those that don't. The purpose<\/em> of making such a statement, though, is to suggest that oneself is great — that by complimenting the country and therefore its people, the people then express praise in complementary appreciation.<\/p>\n

However, I deviate from Lechman's and Frankfurt's definition there. I think that bullshit can be as simple as assuming logical fallacy<\/a> is more valid than logical argument. To me, this definition allows for a more innocent form of bullshit, where the bullshitter actually does have truthfulness in mind, but is ill-equipped to make an argument.<\/p>\n

So in the end, I guess I support Lechman's (and presumably Frankfurt's) definition that one form of bullshit requires an apathy toward the truthfulness of a statement and an ulterior motive. However, I feel there is also another form of bullshit which is simply using logical fallacy as if it is superior to logical argument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I headed to The Bertrand Russell Society at Verb Café meeting at Writers and Books (740 University Ave.) for Ted Lechman's discussion of Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit. [Got it?] The tie-in to Russell was a short pamphlet he wrote … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,611,25,26],"tags":[785,789,791,787,790,788,786],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-entries","category-for-the-parents","category-lectures","category-literature","tag-bertrand-russell-society","tag-bullshit","tag-fallacy","tag-harry-g-frankfurt","tag-logical-fallacy","tag-on-bullshit","tag-ted-lechman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}