Kenny Easwaran (University of California, Irvine), "Bullshit Activities"

Forthcoming, Analytic Philosophy

By Kenny Easwaran

The idea for this paper came from my period of online teaching in the Spring of 2021 - after re-organizing the readings in a philosophy of language class I had taught several times, I happened to juxtapose Austin's "Performative Utterances" and Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" in consecutive weeks. I noticed a superficial similarity between the way the two of them characterized their topics. Austin notes that while philosophers of language have often taken truth and falsity to be central, a lot of utterances function to do something in a way that doesn't depend on truth or falsity, and he calls them "performatives" - "Hello" greets someone, "Watch out!" warns someone, "I do" results in getting married, but truth or falsity is at best secondary to what is going on. Frankfurt notes that what we ordinarily refer to as "bullshit" often takes the form of someone making a bunch of utterances without being particularly concerned about whether they are true or false - a local dignitary speaking at a Fourth of July event might go on and on about the "divine inspiration" of the "great founders of the country", without actually thinking about whether or not what he is saying is true, just because he wants people to see him as the kind of patriotic person who would say that kind of thing. A superficial glance at this similar characterization might make someone think that Austin's performative utterances would always count as bullshit in Frankfurt's sense. A slightly more sophisticated look might make someone think that Austin's performative utterances could never count as bullshit in Frankfurt's sense. But it seemed clear to me that, while performative utterances typically aren't bullshit, they sometimes are. A friend shouting "Watch out!" unexpectedly in order to laugh at your unnecessary cowering seems like they're bullshitting you, even though there was no content in the utterance of the sort that could have been true or false even in the normal case.

The idea I pursue in this paper is that Frankfurt's focus on truth and falsity is just an instance of the same phenomenon Austin was reacting to in his own work a few decades earlier. Philosophy traditionally takes place in the form of sequences of declarative statements, each of which is aimed at the truth, and philosophers mistook this for a general feature of all language. While Austin helped many philosophers pay more attention to all the many linguistic phenomena that aim at goals other than truth, Frankfurt was still just looking at declarative statements. A more general characterization of bullshit, that takes forms other than declarative statements, should plug in these other goals (and their opposites) in the place where Frankfurt puts truth (and falsity).

Much of the paper takes the form of some rough attempts to characterize the goals that play the role of truth for speech acts other than statements, and then to give examples of utterances of these forms that would count as bullshit. Whether or not you agree with my analysis, I hope you find many of the examples fun - they were certainly fun to come up with! (In any case, I aim to have provided a lot more relatively concrete examples of bullshit utterances than Frankfurt provides in his paper, which really doesn't have any other concrete example than the Fourth of July orator mentioned above.) Along the way, I address the fact that it's easy to hear "How are you doing?" as a bullshit question (you don't actually want to know if I'm not doing well!), but I suggest that it's better to think of it as an honest greeting - the grammatical form is misleading, but suggests some era when it might actually have been a bullshit question.

In the last section of the paper I note that nothing about my account requires bullshit to take place in speech acts - any sort of act that has some characteristic goal (like truth for a statement, establishing conversational availability for a greeting, or coming to know for a question) could be classified as bullshit if it is done for some other purpose, particularly in order to put on certain appearances as of having that characteristic goal. I argue that TSA security screenings really are bullshit in something quite close to Frankfurt's sense, even though speech is a relatively small part of it. I then end with some discussion of David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs - I show that there is some significant overlap between his analysis and mine, though they are not precisely coextensive.

Like Frankfurt and Graeber, I don't claim to be giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of the ordinary language word "bullshit" - instead I aim to be doing something more in the spirit of William James or Rudolf Carnap, identifying a theoretically interesting concept that is somewhere in this vicinity, but allowing that there might be many others nearby. I think of my analysis as a refinement of Frankfurt's, while I think Graeber is aiming at something slightly different, as are Gerry Cohen, Michael Wreen, and others that have criticized Frankfurt's account in the past.

For most of the time that I was writing this paper, I thought of it as a foray into topics far from my other philosophical interests (mainly in probability and decision theory, and recently some thinking about collective agency). But as I was reflecting on some alignments and contrasts with Graeber, I realized some important connection to other things I've been thinking about, which leads to what I expect to be the most controversial idea I express in the paper. While we usually think bullshit is bad, I claim that bullshit is often an important part of making the world a better place.

One category of bullshit job that Graeber identifies is what he calls the "box-ticker" - someone tells the company they have to have a diversity officer, so the company hires someone with the title "diversity officer", even though they don't care about the work that person is supposed to do. I noticed that this is a common motivation for bullshit of all forms - my canonical example of bullshit warnings are the warning signs California's Proposition 65 mandates, where a business owner who isn't worried about car exhaust or trace amounts of bisphenol A still has to post a sign warning customers about their presence. I noted that since the 2018 modification of this proposition, the signs are now required to say specifically which chemical from the list is present, and how customers might be exposed, so there might actually be some customers who are noticeably helped by a warning that was just bullshit from the point of view of the person posting it. Similarly, the bullshit TSA security protocol might sometimes achieve something worthwhile, and I argue that Jennifer Lackey's classic "creationist schoolteacher" example can be tweaked into a case where bullshit does some good. We have negative associations with bullshit because, in ideal cases, people do something valuable because they are motivated by the right reasons, and bullshit involves people being motivated for the wrong reasons. But I claim that, while it would be ideal if we were all motivated by the real effects of our actions on all the billions of people in the world to do what is actually the right thing, it's still better if we all do some approximation of the right thing because we are forced to do so than if we all just act authentically on our own individualized motivations. Bullshit is a natural feature of complex collective agency.