The Deep Structure of Bullshit

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L. Shedletsky Created on 8/11/15 9:27 AM

The Deep Structure of Bullshit

L. Shedletsky

University of Southern Maine

T. Sprague

University of Southern Maine

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)

Introduction

It may come as a surprise to you 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 downplay the topic of “bullshit” as not terribly important, possibly a prank, pointing to what we generally disdain and turn away from without much thought. Or, given that this is an academic study, it may even be read as a criticism of academic studies.

But Princeton University’s Professor Harry G. Frankfurt’s 2005 little book titled, On Bullshit, set in motion a closer look. 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 serious academic work helped to get our attention on the topic. A number of thinkers have seen the topic as particularly apropos to today’s world, 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”), 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. Some have referred to current times as “an age of bullshit” (Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006). Many folks have given up the hope of simple, authentic talk. Kenneth Taylor (2006), 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.

(See Jon Stewart at:
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/video-playlists/igf7f1/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 casual acceptance of it, our thinking that it does not matter. 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 heart of bullshit, and that is that it engages our values of what does matter. Some have written that bullshit calls into question our valuing truth or not valuing truth. It may point 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).

This study explores the relationship between strongly held beliefs and bullshit.

Values are strongly held beliefs which in turn influence how we respond to arguments, what we accept as true or not. Taylor (2006) writes about the human tendency -- called confirmation bias, “ . . . to ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of things that would disconfirm one’s beliefs.

. . . .

Confirmation bias helps to explain the imperviousness of already adopted 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:

“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 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.

Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, John Gastil Paul Slovic, & C.K. Mertz have argued for “ . . . a form of motivated cognition through which people 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. We predict that we perceive more bullshit as our beliefs become stronger and more polarized and we are less inclined to see bullshit that does not confirm our own beliefs.

James Fredal’s paper, “Bullshit and Rhetoric,” (2011) helps to shed light on the idea of bullshit as multi-leveled. 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 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 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 defined bullshit as a communication transaction, a negotiation, a social phenomenon. With this definition, the focus is not solely upon the text and the speaker’s interest in the truth. For Mears, bullshit is involved with the state of mind of the bullshitter with regard to dealing with relationships with people.

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 bullshit and (for that reason) hard to do.

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 between people, 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, rules that define social actions of various kinds, such as promising, threatening, offering and reporting, to name a few. If you bag food items at the supermarket and your boss says to you:

“I need someone to sweep up isle 12.”

They are referring to someone not themself who they are speaking to, a physical part of a supermarket, 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 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.

Bullshit functions at more than one level simultaneously. Bullshit, we hypothesize, functions at the level of direct content, (1) the semantic meaning of the words uttered/written and (2) underlying relational messages, underlying value/belief messages, implied 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 consider the key underlying components of bullshit as the words uttered (possibly non-verbals 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. 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 picture of language to include not just meaning and truth but also the uses and purposes to which language may be put (p. 41).

Tracy (2002) opens her book, Everyday Talk, with reference to the idea that every utterance carries 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 instances of bullshit. In short, there are many sorts of bullshit, and understanding bullshit as focusing on truth or pragmatics helps to explain this wide field and our reactions to it.