Bullshit Production

Abstract

This chapter starts with Harry Frankfurt’s pioneering account of bullshit, and goes on to consider Gerald A. Cohen’s criticism of Frankfurt and his alternative view. The chapter maintains, contrary to Cohen, that we should not give up seeing bullshit as a single and unified phenomenon. The thesis it goes on to defend is that bullshitting and its product bullshit are to be characterized by a certain state of mind of the producer, a state of mind that is to be identified by its relation to assertion. But it is not the state of mind Frankfurt suggested (the state of being unconcerned with truth), for which Cohen has provided counterexamples. The state of mind that produces bullshit, it is argued, is the state of not being concerned, as we should be, with knowledge. And that, in its turn, throws an interesting light on what assertion is, and which norm governs it.