The Communication of Bullshit: Engaging Our Values

A Proposal for the Trustee Professorship, 2017-2018

Leonard Shedletsky, Professor of Communication

Part of the reason behind the prevalence of bullshitting and the ease with which it is accepted is a lack of confidence that genuine inquiry is worth pursuing, or even possible. (Cornelis De Waal, 2006)

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(1) Statement of the Project

Do you agree that there is a lot of bullshit in

our world? Princeton University’s Professor

Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) begins his book,

On Bullshit, with this: “One of the most

salient features of our culture is that there is

so much bullshit. Everyone knows this” (p.

1). But have you ever stopped to think about

how you come to label something as

bullshit? In his book, bull-shit: a lexicon,

Mark Peters (2015) tells us there are more

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than two hundred words and phrases for

bullshit. He says, “There is a bullshit

spectrum, which includes the following, in

order of decreasing complexity:

scams

lies

gossip

empty boasts

sentimental crap

insignificant things

rubbish

gibberish (pp. xii-xiii)

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Have you thought about what you mean

when you say, “That’s bullshit”? I never did

before I got interested in this topic. I think I

assumed it was clear—self evident-- when

something was bullshit, and calling it

bullshit expressed my certainty. But think

about it for a moment, what do you mean

when you call bullshit?

This proposed study asks, what does the

concept bullshit mean to people, how do we

decide that something is bullshit, has there

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been empirical research on bullshit, and

what sorts of questions can we ask about

bullshit that we can empirically study? The

study will try to show that ‘bullshit’ is an

important concept, with connections to far-

reaching, important parts of our lives, open

to empirical study. It will propose a

theoretical framework for empirically

studying bullshit.

What sorts of empirical questions might we

ask to more fully come to understand how

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bullshit operates in our lives? When we

asked a convenience sample of college

students to estimate how much bullshit they

encounter on a typical day, 78% thought that

bullshit made up at least 30% and as much

as 75% of their day’s communication.

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It would add to our understanding to know

when you are more likely to think “that’s

bullshit,” and when you are more likely to

say, “that’s bullshit” out loud to someone

concerning what he or she just said? How

long do you have to think before you

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“know” that something is bullshit? What

determines how long you have to think?

What does it imply to label something as

bullshit? Is it another way of calling a claim

a lie? Is it distinct from a lie? What are the

social implications of using the term,

“bullshit”? Does it refer to a claim that is not

true, to an intention to mislead, to mistaken

logic? Is it always about words? Is it

reflective of the attitude of the speaker?

Perhaps it is just a way of emphatically

expressing disapproval. Does it imply

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anything about “the bullshitter” that is not

implied by simply saying, “I disagree”?

Does it imply anything about the person

who utters, “That’s bullshit?” Is the

assessment of bullshit related to our moral

judgments, our values, our political

philosophy, our implicit theory of how we

reason (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz,

1998), how we express politeness, our

disposition to be reflective, our beliefs and

attitudes? If we characterize something as

bullshit are we also saying that the person

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who spoke (wrote, produced) the bullshit is

a bullshitter? Is bullshit always a bad thing

or is it sometimes a good thing, a useful or

pro-social thing? What is the opposite of

bullshit? [Interestingly, a search for

antonyms of ‘bullshit’ brought up a family

of concepts with “truth’ as a good candidate

for the prototype.] Is bullshitting your self

or self-deception the same process as

bullshitting someone else? This study will

review what has been said about bullshit,

report on empirical studies of bullshit, offer

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a theoretical framework for empirically

studying bullshit, and call for empirically

studying ‘bullshit’.

It has come as a surprise to me to find that a

serious consideration of the notion ‘bullshit’

takes us headlong into a shockingly

revealing understanding of

our selves and the communication

environment we inhabit. It may be your first

reaction to reject the topic of ‘bullshit’ as

frivolous, possibly a prank, something to

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disdain and turn away from without much

thought. Or, given that this writing is an

academic work, it may even be seen as a

parody and criticism of academic studies--

academic bullshit--(Eubanks & Schaeffer,

2008).

But Professor Harry G. Frankfurt’s 2005

little book titled, On Bullshit, set in motion a

closer look at ‘bullshit’.i In fact, Frankfurt’s

book was on the New York Times bestseller

list for twenty-six weeks. No doubt

Frankfurt’s lofty station in life and record of

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serious academic work helped to get our

attention on the topic. Some years earlier, in

1969, Neil Postman delivered a talk titled

“Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detectionii,” in

which he urged teachers “ . . . to help kids

learn how to distinguish useful talk from

bullshit.” Recently, a team of medical

scientists has looked into helping kids spot

bullshit health claims

(http://www.sciencealert.com/these-

scientists-are-teaching-school-kids-how-to-

spot-bogus-health-claims).

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A number of thinkers have seen the topic as

particularly apropos to today’s world

(Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006; Jackson, 2010;

Taylor, 2006) connecting it to reasons for

war, a proliferation of fraud and deception,

new technologies allowing for the

manipulation of photographs and

documents, scandals involving the church

and the financial industry, corporate

pronouncements of sincerity (“your call is

important to us”), managerial gibberish,

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titans of the entertainment world, politicians,

much of what passes in the classroom as

discussion, on and on. Bullshit has been

found even in the halls of science, a culture

respected for attempting to consciously keep

out its own bullshit (Earp, 2016). Some have

referred to current times as “an age of

bullshit” (Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006); a

post-truth political environment (Oborne,

2005, p. 6); a ‘crisis of political trust’

(O’Neill, 2002, p. 8); and doublespeak

(Lutz, 1988). Many folks have given up the

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hope of simple, authentic talk. Kenneth

Taylor (2006), as Professor of philosophy

and Chair of the Department of Philosophy

at Stanford University, had this to say:

“Public discourse in our times is in many

ways debased. It contains a depressing stew

of bullshit, propaganda, spin, and outright

lies” (p. 49). In two instances, highly

popular comedians and keen observers of

our times have talked at length about the

quantity and nature of bullshit.

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(See Jon Stewart at:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/video-playlists/i

gf7f1/jon-s-final-episode/ss6u07

and George Carlin at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=lTi9qDJziAM).

Some might write off the idea of paying any

serious attention to bullshit, keeping with

the idea that it is what we disdain, what we

commonly experience and see it for what it

is, bullshit. But this may turn out to be the

most serious harm done by bullshit, our

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casual acceptance of it, our thinking that it

does not matter, or, that it is so obvious, we

need not spend any time discussing it. Some

scholars have taken the position that the

pervasiveness of bullshit and our casual

acceptance of it do matter (Postman, 1969).

That in fact, this state of affairs points to the

value of discussing what bullshit is, it

engages our values of what does matter.

Some have written that tolerating bullshit

calls into question our valuing truth or not

valuing truth (Frankfurt, 2005). It may point

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to other values simultaneously; impression

formation, profit, success, even politeness.

Taylor (2006) maintains that “ . . . bullshit

works best when we don’t recognize it or

acknowledge it for what it is” (p. 51).

Defining ‘Bullshit’

Let’s consider the question of what does

‘bullshit’ mean to people? In two small

surveysiii, convenience samples of subjects

( N = 40; N = 36) were asked for their

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definition of “bullshit’ (See Appendix 1).

Here is a short list of typical responses:

Someone saying things that are not truthful or twisting what the truth is;

When someone is lying or spouting ridiculous concepts;

Someone confidently presenting fallacious information, knowing or unknowingly;

An attempt to impress or influence an audience;

Nonsense, shenanigans that we get waylaid into having to dig ourselves out of;

Making stuff up to better your position, manipulating the facts;

Something that is not true, whether it is intentional fabrication or faulty perspective;

A statement that willfully disregards the truth for the purpose of misleading

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others; False or exaggerated information with

the intention to mislead; Misleading someone about the

importance of something, or the motivations behind it;

Telling an untruth for attaining pleasure (gain) or avoiding pain (loss);

Completely incorrect, invalid information that is far from the truth, when it should be true;

Stretching the facts, making false conclusions up from facts, having no facts at all;

A blatant lie, an exaggeration or stretch of the truth;

Non-truthful information; People lying or trying to convince you of

something you know to be falsefluff, lies, manipulative speech, insincerity the act of creating a false story to appease others or make yourself look better;

A lie;

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Even this short list of definitions of

‘bullshit’ offered by subjects include a

number of attributes that theorists have

discussed, such as intention, lies, the truth,

method of deriving conclusions, impression

management, states of mind and motives.

One feature that does stand out is how often

subjects referred to lying, misrepresenting or

misleading. It appears that our survey

respondents, unlike Frankfurt, believe that

bullshit includes some form of lying or

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falsehood. The majority of our sample of

respondents (N = 76) thinks that lying is

associated with bullshit.

According to these subjects, truth does

matter to the bullshitter.

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Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008) argue that

‘bullshit’ needs to be seen as a group of

concepts held together not by a closed set of

features but rather by features more or less

typical of bullshit. They argue for defining

bullshit with a cognitive science view of

categorization, as a graded category with

some features that constitute a more or less

typical instance of bullshit. For Eubanks and

Schaefer, a prototypical instance of bullshit

“ . . . has to do with a purposeful

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misrepresentation of self, has the quality of

gamesmanship, and—contrary to what

Frankfurt says—is at least potentially a lie”

(p. 380).

Where does academic bullshit fit into this

schema? Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008),

addressing teachers of writing, speak of “ . .

. a productive sort of bullshit: bullshit that

ultimately produces better thought and better

selves. We must acknowledge that benign

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bullshit is inevitable when people are

attempting to write well” (p. 387). They

argue that what counts as academic bullshit

depends on the audience, who makes the

assessment. They hold that what makes the

bullshit judgment a case of prototypical

bullshit for the general audience is that the

writing disregards the truth in speculating

and interpreting, uses odd language, and

engages in gamesmanship. For the general

audience, these are features that make up

prototypical academic bullshit. For the

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academic, the same writing is non-

prototypical bullshit, where it is not trying to

deceive the reader, but it is meant to

enhance the reputation of the writer. To

complicate matters, we can consider for a

moment Marshal McLuhan’s idea of

“strategic gibberish” which he offers in the

form of probes, ideas that are not line by line

reasoning but instead more like poetry or

jokes with a punch line (Griffin and Park

online at

http://media.turnofspeed.com/media/burnuni

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t/mediaecology37050.pdf). But even for the

academic, some academic writing is seen as

prototypical bullshit, where there is “ . . .

loyalty and conviction about one’s own

ideological commitments while disvaluing

those of others. . . . . Theoretical

frameworks probably provoke more cries of

‘Bullshit!’ than any other academic praxis:

new criticism bullshit, Marxist bullshit,

feminist bullshit, Marxist-feminist bullshit,

deconstructionist bullshit, statistical bullshit,

and the list goes on—and on” (Eubank &

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Schaeffer, p. 385).

Do our beliefs and attitudes play a role in

what we judge to be bullshit? Kimbrough

(2006) points out that in calling bullshit we

are concerned with justification but not

always with the truth (p.16). He argues that

our values ultimately inform our judgment

of justification. He offers the example of a

bottom-line businessman finding business

ethics to be bullshit. Shulman (2010) looks

at the everyday device of offering accounts,

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where we attempt to reconcile our behavior

with social expectations to protect our

identities. It is easy to imagine that some

accounts will be seen as bullshit. Kimbrough

argues against a subjective definition of

bullshit. Keep in mind, though, that this

study seeks to understand how people use

the concept and so it does seek to understand

the subjective use. Postman (1969) held “ . .

. that one man’s bullshit is another man’s

catechism” (p.5). Postman also maintained

that values are central to understanding

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bullshit. He said: “In other words, bullshit is

what you call language that treats people in

ways you do not approve of” (p. 5). If our

values play such a central role in deciding

what we count as bullshit, we ought to

explore how this might work. For instance,

when we asked survey respondents if they

would label the teacher’s response, “nice

job,” to a student’s poor work as bullshit, we

found a fairly equal split, which can be

attributed to valuing the encouragement or

the feedback on the task.

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Values are strongly held beliefs that in turn

influence how we respond to arguments,

what we accept as true or not. Taylor (2006)

writes about the human tendency -- called

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confirmation bias, the tendency “ . . . to

ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of

things that would disconfirm one’s beliefs.

. . . .

Confirmation bias helps to explain the

imperviousness of strongly held beliefs to

contravening evidence and it also helps to

explain our tendency to overestimate our

own epistemic reliability” (p. 52). Mooney

(2013, June) explains this same phenomenon

as motivated reasoning. Mooney opens his

Mother Jones article with this:

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“A man with a conviction is a hard

man to change. Tell him you

disagree and he turns away. Show

him facts or figures and he questions

your sources. Appeal to logic and he

fails to see your point.” So wrote the

celebrated Stanford University

psychologist Leon Festinger, in a

passage that might have been

referring to climate change denial—

the persistent rejection, on the part of

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so many Americans today, of what

we know about global warming and

its human causes. But it was too

early for that—this was the 1950s—

and Festinger was actually

describing a famous case study in

psychology.”

If strongly held convictions, beliefs,

attitudes, values, begin to explain how

we think about arguments and evidence

for positions, then strongly held ideas

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begin to account for people viewing the

same set of evidence as you and yet

concluding that what they believe is true

and what you believe is bullshit (See

http://www.ted.com/talks/julia_galef_wh

y_you_think_you_re_right_even_if_you

_re_wrong?

language=en&utm_campaign=social&ut

m_medium=referral&utm_source=faceb

ook.com&utm_content=talk&utm_term

=humanities). We see this phenomenon

in such current day issues as gun control,

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abortion, climate change, and ways to

deal with racial tensions. Understanding

the dynamics behind such disagreements

is central to our well-being.

We can ask what connects any statement

with one’s values? Another way of

putting this question is to ask, why is it

that some statements arouse strong

reactions, including emotional reactions.

It is not difficult to imagine a person

responding to a statement with, “That’s

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bullshit,” with a force suggesting a

strong rejection of the statement. One

way of making sense of this is to

speculate that our attitudes, especially

where they include moral beliefs, are

made up of both emotive and descriptive

meanings (Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, 2015). Stevenson, a

philosopher of ethics, held, “That ethical

language usually has both emotive and

descriptive meanings which often

interact in various ways suggests as it

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should that beliefs, and therefore rational

methods, can be relevant to resolving

moral disagreement or uncertainty. That

emotive meaning is often strongly

independent of descriptive meaning

suggests as it should that non-rational

‘persuasive’ methods can also play a role

in settling or resolving moral

disagreement or uncertainty” (p. 4). It

would seem to follow that statements

concerning the well being of individuals

and groups would activate both

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reference to evidence and emotions and

attitudes. Could this account for those

times when we say, “That’s bullshit”

with force and strong feelings?

Randy Barnett (2016), explains that our

values concerning the rights of

individuals and the rights of society

determine how we interpret the first

three words of the constitution, “We the

people” (p. xii). According to Barnett,

whether you hold the rights of the

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individual as primary or hold the rights

of the group as primary will predict

whether you would see the constitution

as a device for limiting government

where individual rights are in jeopardy

(what he calls a Republican

Constitution), or a device for protecting

the rights of the majority (a Democratic

Constitution).

Avi Tuschman, an evolutionary

anthropologist, presents a strong case for

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differences of opinion on controversial

issues that derive from genetically based

universal personality traits, e.g.,

tolerance for inequality. He points to

three clusters of attitudes, (1) toward

inequality, (2) toward tribalism, and (3)

perceptions of human nature. Tuschman

(2013) argues that these universal

political proclivities exist “ . . . because

[of] political orientations and natural

dispositions that have been molded by

evolutionary forces” (p. 24). Tuschman

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presents strong evidence that genetics

accounts for a sizeable amount of

variation in political differences between

individuals, 40 to 60 percent. Further, he

brings together evidence from political

science to show that income does not

correlate significantly with voting left or

right. Instead, the data show that there is

a strong statistical relationship between

the personality traits of Openness and

Conscientiousness and left-right voting

behavior (p. 41). Hence, one’s tendency

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to respond to the world in certain ways

weighs heavily in how he/she sees

controversial issues.

A few brilliantly executed empirical studies

tested the idea that values concerning the

individual versus the group predict how one

assesses where to stand on a number of

controversial issues. Dan M. Kahan, Donald

Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, & C.K.

Mertz (2007) have argued for “ . . . a form of

motivated cognition through which people

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seek to deflect threats to identities they hold,

and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested

cultural norms. This proposition derives

from the convergence of two sets of

theories, one relating to the impact of culture

on risk perception and the other on the

influence of group membership on

cognition.”

Accordingly, strongly held beliefs may help

to explain both the proliferation of bullshit

and our tendency to not recognize it. It could

be hypothesized that people perceive more

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bullshit as their beliefs become stronger and

more polarized and they are less inclined to

see bullshit when the argument confirms

their own beliefs.

Several theories of attitude change would

also support the idea that holding strong

beliefs would go along with being less

reflective on certain claims and evidence

offered in support of those claims. The

decision to reject or accept ideas is theorized

to operate at high speed, to occur

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‘automatically’. For instance Social

Interaction Theory says that strong ego

involvement in beliefs would predict a larger

area of rejection of ideas (Sherif, M. Sherif,

C and Nebergall, 1965). Elaboration

Likelihood Model describes the cognitive

processing of incoming claims as either

central or peripheral, where central involves

reflective thinking and peripheral is a

mindless sort of processing, focusing on

superficial trappings.

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James Fredal’s paper, “Bullshit and

Rhetoric,” (2011) helps to shed light on the

idea of bullshit as multi-leveled, where

multiple meanings can be derived from one

and the same utterance, where multiple

speech acts can be performed

simultaneously, where more than one

purpose can be served by one expression.

Fredal wrote:

“For Frankfurt, discourse can be divided into two categories: that which is motivated by the truth and that which isn’t. He doesn’t, however, consider discourse that is

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motivated by multiple factors (in addition to a concern for the truth), nor does he consider the variation the speaker may feel in her level of confidence in the truth” (p. 244).

In short, Frankfurt focuses on the truth-value of bullshit. Like Fredal, Mears (quoted in Fredal, 2011) also points to another framework for bullshit in addition to the truth-value. Mears points to the ways in which bullshitting functions in creating and maintaining social relations between people. Fredal (2011) explains Mears’ thinking on bullshit in this excerpt:

Like Frankfurt, Mears locates the source of bullshit in the speaker herself and her desire to craft a creditable self-image. But whereas Frankfurt sees bullshitting as a species of deception worse than lying (because at least liars have to know the truth if only to lead us

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away from it, whereas bullshitters have no concern at all for the truth), Mears understands bullshit as a significant social phenomenon that serves several prosocial functions.7

For Mears, we engage in bullshit for purposes of socialization and play, for self-exploration and self-expression, for the resolution of social tensions and cognitive dissonance, and for gaining an advantage in encounters. (p. 246)

To put it another way, Mears described

bullshit as a communication transaction, a

negotiation, and a social phenomenon. With

this definition, the focus is not solely upon

the text and the speaker’s interest in the

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truth. For Mears, bullshit is involved with

the state of mind of the bullshitter with

regard to dealing with relationships with

people. Levine and Kim (2010), writing

about deception, put it this way: “In short,

speaker intent and message consequence in

conjunction define deception, not the

objective qualities of messages or

information dimensions” (p. 17). They are

pointing to what goes on between people as

they communicate, with an emphasis on the

assessment of motives (p.31).

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Some of us have trouble with small talk.

“How you doing?” “Nice day.” “Gee, you

are up and out early.” One possible reason

for this is that small talk may be a good

example of the tug of war between different

levels of meaning in an exchange. If one

values and focuses on the relational

meanings, then small talk is to be valued. If

stating the truth and only what is necessary

is foremost, then small talk may be seen as

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bullshit and (for that reason) hard for some

to do.

Bullshit as Communication

What we suspect is that an exploration of

bullshit will benefit greatly from both a

serious analysis of the text, usually

utterances or written words, where the focus

tends to be upon its truth-value-- and also

from a communication theory point of view

—where the focus is on a transaction

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between people (or communication within

one’s self), involving social actions. What

this means is that bullshit appears to operate

as speech acts and indirect speech acts

(Searle, 1969) which involve truth-value but

also conditions of sincerity, context

(including power), rules that define social

actions of various kinds, such as promising,

threatening, suggesting, offering and

reporting, to name a few. If you bag food

items at the supermarket and your boss says

to you:

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“I need someone to sweep up isle 12,”

she/he is referring to an abstract someone

not himself or herself who they are speaking

to, a physical part of a supermarket, and an

act of cleaning, in other words, the

semantics of the utterance. Or, they may be

expressing their need at one level, making a

suggestion at another level and ordering you

to sweep up as well. The indirectness of the

command softens the relational message, but

given your roles and the immediate context

of the utterance, including the loud sound of

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a bottle breaking in isle 12, perhaps your

background knowledge of the boss’s style,

you understand what appears to be a mild

suggestion or expression of need is really a

command, a directive in speech act theory

terms. As for sincerity, Lutz (1988) reminds

us that George Orwell wrote, “ . . . the great

enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Bullshit functions at more than one level

simultaneously. Bullshit, we hypothesize,

functions at the level of direct content, (1)

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the semantic meaning of the words

uttered/written and (2) underlying relational

messages, underlying value/belief messages,

implied or insinuated meanings. There can

be a tension between these levels and

messages. To offer a simple example, a

bullshit response to a student’s poorly

facilitated discussion may be something like,

“great job.” We may know this is not true

but it serves the underlying task of being

supportive. One can see a tug of war already

in values attached to this example. If we

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consider the key underlying components of

bullshit as the words uttered (possibly non-

verbal’s as well), the state of mind of the

speaker (sender) and the nature of the

receiver (interpretation of the utterance,

history involved between sender and

receiver, cultural outlook of the receiver,

receiver’s relationship to sender), then we

see that bullshit not only operates at multiple

levels and for multiple possible motives, but

in potentially very different kinds of

meaning, semantic and pragmatic.

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Philosophers have recognized this

multiplicity of bullshit. Reisch has referred

to the bullshitter as running two

conversations at once. He wrote:

Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit

crucially involves semantics insofar

as bullshitters, as he defines them,

don’t care whether or not their

utterances are true. But some of his

examples of bullshit also point to the

pragmatic aspects of language. To

see these, we must expand our

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picture of language to include not

just meaning and truth but also the

uses and purposes to which language

may be put (p. 41). To put it simply,

we are mistaken to view bullshit as a

package that is moved from one

person to another. Instead, the other

plays a role in determining that the

symbols are or are not bullshit.

Hence, it is important to understand

how we come to the determination,

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“that’s bullshit,” and what follows

from that.

Tracy (2002) opens her book,

Everyday Talk, with reference to the idea

that every utterance carries both

semantic meaning and its meaning in

context—the interactional meaning, the

social or interpersonal talk.  Tracy

writes: “The interactional meaning of an

utterance is its meaning for the

participants in the situation in which the

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utterance (or more usually, a sequence of

utterances) occurred. Interactional

meaning arises from and depends on the

context, and may be given or given off”

(p. 8).

Another scholar of discourse put it this

way[1][1]:

In telling a story, expanding an

argument, or producing some other

conversational structure, a

participant may design utterances

to invoke knowledge assumed to

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be held in common with a specific

other participant. This is some item

of background knowledge or

shared experience that each person

‘knows, presumes that the other

knows, and presumes that the other

presumes [that he or she knows]’

(Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984, p.

303, n. 5).  The other participant

may then respond in a way that

displays a recognition of what that

knowledge is.  Such an interactive

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display that two participants share

a certain item of knowledge and

thus have a “history” together may

make their relationship (or some

aspect of it) momentarily relevant

to the conversation.  (Nofsinger, p.

163)

 

Similarly, in the closing chapters of her

book, Tannen (2001) focuses upon the

relationship between talk and friendship. 

She makes the point that we cannot tell

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from the words just what the meaning is. 

She explains that this is the case, since the

words are embedded within a system, e.g.,

of cultural ritual, or relationship history, or

style (e.g., genderlect). 

A communication (or pragmatics)

perspective promises to shine a great deal of

light upon this exchange. Some of this

framework comes from communication

theory (e.g., Baxter and Montgomery, 1997)

and some more broadly from discourse

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analysis (Tracy, 2002). For instance, we can

draw upon Baxter and Montgomery’s

Relational Dialectics (1997), which helps us

see the flux in our exchanges, the moment to

moment push and pull as we take up stances

that contradict one another in underlying

dimensions of things like closeness and

distance. Face work points to our concern

for maintaining our own and the other’s

identity (Goffman, 1959). Discourse

analysis has shown us that messages draw

their meaning from many sources

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simultaneously, semantics, culture,

relationship and context more generally.

What this framework encourages is an

analysis that considers multiple objectives in

the exchange, both for the sender and the

receiver. It allows us to see contradictions

and how they are resolved and opens the

door to considering our valuing truth,

politeness, success and so on. It also holds

out the possibility of exploring gender

differences in perceptions of bullshit.

A pragmatics perspective on bullshit entails

68

that there are many kinds of bullshit, some

benign and conventional, where it is

understood that the discourse is not intended

to express accurate information, and some

kinds of bullshit that evoke strong negative

reactions, where there is pretentiousness, an

obvious use of power to get away with

something (Richardson, 2006). Richardson

writes about the conventions of bullshitting

in proposal writing, letters of

recommendation, patriotic gatherings, and

moments of courtesy. These are benign

69

instances of bullshit. Perla and Carifio (June,

2007) argue that an important function of

bullshit is in developing new ideas. They

wrote: “But something as ubiquitous as BS

may exist for a reason and perhaps an

important and good reason. In the RIBS

[revised interpretation of bullshit]

view, it was stated that bullshit is a matrix

for the development of

higher-order thinking” (p. 124). In short,

there are many sorts of bullshit, and

understanding bullshit as focusing on truth

70

and pragmatics helps to explain this wide

field and our reactions to it.

71

i Harry Frankfurt originally published the essay "On Bullshit" in the Raritan Quarterly Review journal in 1986. "On Bullshit." Raritan Quarterly Review 6, no. 2 (Fall 1986).

ii Neil Postman, “Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection” (Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)

iii My student, Timothy Sprague worked with me on this survey as part of a Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant from the University of Southern Maine, 2015-2016.

(2) Method

Communicating Bullshit

I. Our experience with bullshit needs to be taken seriously.

A. It is widely agreed that there is a lot of bullshit in our world and it is important to understand its place.

1. What does the concept ‘bullshit’ mean to each of us?2. Bullshit is important not just because we experience

a lot of it, but because it is linked to numerous important parts of our lives, fundamentally through our values and beliefs.

3. Bullshit influences our positions on controversial issues, politics, morality, interpersonal communication, intrapersonal communication, work.

4. What sorts of empirical questions might we ask about bullshit?

5. Data on what ‘bullshit’ means to people.6. Bullshit engages our values.

B. The goals of this study are:

1. To review what has been said about bullshit

2. To offer a view of bullshit as a communication

transaction

3. To report on empirical studies of bullshit

4. To call for empirically studying ‘bullshit’

C. A review of the literature on bullshit

1. Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005

2. Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006

3. Kenneth Taylor (2006)

4. Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008)

5. Postman (1969)

6. Randy Barnett (2016)

7. Kahan, Braman, Gastil, Slovic,

& Mertz (2007)

8. Fredal (2011)

9. and more

D. Bullshit as a communication transaction

1. Bullshit as speech acts

2. Semantics of bullshit (literal meanings) and

pragmatics of bullshit (the uses and purposes to

which language may be put)

3. Bullshit as both misrepresentation

and pro-social

1. Bullshitting in proposal writing,

letters of recommendation,

patriotic gatherings, and moments

of courtesy

2. Bullshit as multi-leveled

meaning

3. Bullshit as a matrix for the

development of higher-order thinking

(e.g., speculation)

4. Bullshit and values, beliefs, and

attitudes

a. Bullshit and confirmation bias

b. Bullshit, values and what is taken

to be true

II. A Proposed Framework for the Empirical Study

of “bullshit’

A. The Text plus Communication

Transaction

1. Speech Acts

2. Discourse Analysis

B. Strongly Held Beliefs and the

Perception of bullshit

III. Empirical Studies of Bullshit

A. Few empirical studies have been done explicitly on ‘bullshit’.

1. Values (strong beliefs) appear to be a particularly powerful variable involved in the pragmatics of bullshit.

2. Studies of values have suggested that values have a strong impact on assessing the truth-value of arguments.

3. Individualism-communitarian and hierarchist-egalitarian worldviews and bullshit.

4. Individual differences in detecting bullshit.

IV. Future Directions

A. Call for more empirical studies on bullshit.

B. Replication and extension of survey data collected in my earlier survey studies.

C. Proposed research on values and assessment of bullshit using reaction time technique.

(3) Outcome

A number of outcomes from this study are expected.

A chapter prepared for The Handbook of Deception, Tony Docan-Morgan (Ed.), Palgrave Macmillan. Professor Docan-Morgan, University of Wisconsin, has expressed interest in including my work in a proposed book on deception expected to come out in 2018.

A CMS senior seminar on communicating bullshit offered Fall, 2017.

Preparation of an empirical study on reaction time to [perceived bullshit and non-bullshit] statements in connection with measured values. This study is in early stages of design and includes computer programming for the reaction time measure, in collaboration with Professor David Bantz in computer science. In brief, this study will explore the connection between the strength and direction of values held and the cognitive task of identifying bullshit.

A public talk on the topic.

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