On Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of Princeton

short, and contains a few interesting observations about the supposed nature of “bullshit”–the sort of deceptive claptrap/hogwash which Frankfurt sees as utterly ubiquitous.  While I wouldn’t award the book any prizes for exhibiting exhaustiveness  or exceptional reasoning–nor for providing any earth-shaking conclusions or consequences–it is illustrative at least insofar as it demonstrates that there is much to be said about this odd phenomenon so prevalent that we hardly take note of it (though, frankly, I think a good, in-depth psychological approach might have been more  revealing).

Still, the work’s pertinence and timeliness for me is a testament to its broad applicability.  I speak, of course, of my recent attempts at engaging the Graduate Recognition Examination’s analytical writing component.  To be most fair, I am scarcely a fan of academic grades and testing in general (I think they ought to be used, but in moderation and with somewhat restricted authority over one’s grades, future, and so on), but let us reserve this point for a later journal entry… Quite frankly, after reading some sample questions and “ideal” answers from test practice experts (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Peterson’s, ETS, Barron’s, and friends), I have come to the conclusion that the GRE’s writing component is a carefully-crafted attempt at getting one thing from its victims: bullshit.

This is not a mere ad-hominem (ad-examinem?) attack on my part.  As Frankfurt illuminates, the term, though it does have a pejorative connotation, does not denote an outright lie.  Rather, I mean to accuse the writing component of encouraging the creation of drivel, and nursing the already-commonplace skillset that allows people to promulgate misleadingly content-devoid hogwash.  This may seem pretty benign, in fact, especially to many of my close friends who (like myself, surely) have already developed a rather acute attachment to this sort of rhetoric.  I disagree.

Most of the writing prompts seem to follow a similar form; basically, an uncontextualized nugget of text presents or assumes an overly generalized dichotomization of some topic, and then selects one of the options with little or no substantiation or reason.  The example which I randomly chose to write about today fits this norm pretty well:

In most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Perhaps I am so steeped in the tradition of philosophical dichotomy-smashing, or perhaps it has been too long since I have been trapped in some middle-school classroom bombarding me with inspirational posters lauding generic goods like imagination and knowledge, but offhand it seems to me that vague concepts like knowledge and imagination can neither be neatly separated nor have their quasi-practical features like “importance” compared without proper practical context.  In general, is knowledge more important than imagination?  This question seems to me to be inane.  At the extremes, knowledge devoid of imagination seems to me to be impotent, likewise with  imagination devoid of knowledge.  In the abstract, I simply don’t think that these two generic mental states can be organized hierarchically, and I suspect that those who think that they can be have not been very reflective about the topic–in other words, in responding to such an essay prompt, they would simply select their choice capriciously or based on a loose, unreflective preference for whichever option they desire.

I am not arguing, of course, that there is no difference between imagination and knowledge, nor that we cannot distinguish the two notions.  Rather, I am arguing that to make a determination about practical aspects of these vague general terms, one has to consider the specific contexts, and probably only the best results in any case will be achieved by utilizing the highest possible levels of both manners of thinking (again, given the allowance of the circumstances).  If I am given an example in situ, I can actually make some kind of real determination about whether to emphasize my imagination or my knowledge.  If I am, for instance, drafting a legal document to articulate an already agreed-upon end, then I had best focus on my knowledge of established court procedures to ensure the validity of the document.  Yet it may be almost entirely by virtue of my imagination that I can reconceptualize the arrangement of court evidence which allows me to prove my client’s innocence (or as a prosecutor to prove his guilt).  With proper context, examples like these can certainly allow us to distinguish one of these vague terms from another and place a value on each by which they may be compared.  When the only situational information provided is limited to presumably all the activities which occur “in most professions and academic fields”, then I could utilize either of these aforementioned examples to demonstrate the superior “importance” of either of these two concepts.  In other words, the truth does not matter–neither to ETS nor to the student responding to the seemingly meaningless prompt.¹

I think that a reasonable argument could be made as to the harmlessness  of the essay in itself.   Indeed, of the forms of B.S. described by Frankfurt, this seems to be the least overtly dangerous–a rather unintentional variety  which “is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about”.  Furthermore, the essay’s influence will be quite limited.  Presumably, it will only ever be read by two (or in some cases three) likely jaded professional test-graders, who will get only a couple of minutes during which to reflect on the work.

I wonder, though, if there are broader consequences of accepting the authority of such a component on an exam like this.  Undoubtedly, the GRE has an influence on who is admitted into graduate schools in the USA.  I anticipate the counterargument that one’s admittance into any school is probably almost never alone decided by his or her score on the GRE’s writing component; this is true.  However, my impression is that GRE scores are often taken as one of the first excuses for filtering out applicants, if only because these scores are a quick and dirty method for getting some objective value for the level of education from applicants from such diverse educational backgrounds.  This is significant because it means that most applicants to most programs leading ultimately to many, many professional and academic jobs will have been forced to score well on their GRE’s, and more specifically to demonstrate their ability to excel at generating bullshit².

I recently took it upon myself to read Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz‘s work Naturalism (for sale here).  I highly recommend the book for anyone looking for a good summary of some considerations of modern philosophy on the topic of naturalism.  The work is pithy, cogent, and I think easy to follow even for those not well-versed in the technical jargon and historic arguments surrounding this traditional metaphysical debate.  I would caution, though, that I think that the book seems to me overly critical of some features of naturalism, and also to me seems to overgeneralize many characteristics which I think abound in naturalists and non-naturalists alike.

I had the great pleasure of being introduced to Taliaferro last fall, and will likely be meet him again in a few days, so I took the time to throw together a little gut-reaction response to the work Natualism (which, I rather think might be better titled “Against Naturalism”, which indicates better that the purpose of this book seems to be the construction of an argument against naturalism, rather than some merely informational and “objective” presentation of historic facts and debates).

Here is my response to their work (in either ogg vorbis or mp3 format).

If you don’t feel like taking the 15 minutes to listen, here’s the gist of my thoughts, without most of the explanatory substance:

1. Yes, I agree with Goetz and Taliaferro that naturalism as they characterize it (through examples) stands on shaky ground, but…
2. Naturalist perspectives, being based on the ever-expanding realm of scientific advancement, are not simply reductionist.  Rather, their role can expand as our empirical observations and theories about these observations expand.  My feelings on this follow from my (mildly Kuhnian, i think) view that science is a primarily pragmatic rather than epistemological endeavor.
3. Because science offers us the opportunity to challenge traditional “supernatural” explanations, it bears the possibility to act as a corrective check for, or at least calls us to critically reflect upon, our folk psychology/physics/philosophy/metaphysics/dogmas.
4. Finally, I think that a strict, parsimonious, positive naturalism is not just likely epistemically problematic–it is psychologically untenable even for its most outspoken adherence (but so is anti-naturalism in some ways).  In the long run, though, if the apparent choice is between accepting on or the other tradtional dogma (either naturalist or unnaturalist), I would just assume have both perspectives around as long as possible duking it out, as neither seems wholy cogent to me.  With the argument preserved, we can pragmatically utilize one assumption in one context generally (say, anti-naturalism for religion; naturalism for science), but allow these perspectives to challenge each other in their own contexts as well.  In this way, I hope we can either realize that these distinctions are irrelevant, or that they are somehow complimentary, or that some better alternatives exist instead–and enjoy the fruits of continued argument.

What struck me as interesting, was that when I was looking for some alternative perspectives on naturalism while writing my response, one of the first results provided by my friend Google was lil’ ol me.  Yes, on the first page of my google results was an entry that I posted in October last year, entitled “Hobbes and Modern Science v. Descartes“.  Back in October, though, I was sort of on the other side of the argument.  Back then, I was chastizing modern science for its naturalist assumptions, rather than lauding it for bringing options to the table–at least until the end of the article.  In the end, though, it seems that both today and last october, I was arguing from one side (first against naturalists, then against anti-naturalists) in order to get to the middle.  In both places, I criticized dogmatism, dualism, and hubristic assumptions that we already know what types of substances make up the entirety of the cosmos.

The major discrepancy between my old article and my new one, it seems to me, is that I was content to characterize science in my October post as presuming the sort of materialistic naturalism that Goetz and Taliaferro seem to see in it, but this week I argued that that view of science is short-sighted.  Which description is more accurate?  In a way, I think both.  I think the end paragraph of my recorded response hints at the answer.  It seems that real human beings simply don’t portray stable, context independent dispositions of this sort.  In one context, we might all predictably be naturalists (say, when you consider whether or not you should worry about a 1,000 anvil falling on you from above), and in others we may all be anti-naturalists (say, when considering our plans for the future or interpreting our emotions).  It may simply not be possible to separate these two categories in a way that is both meaningful and able to be held by a real person over time.

Also, if you’re in the Sioux Falls area, I heartily implore you to come to Charles Taliaferro’s talk at the Augustana Naturalism Symposium this week; it will make your life better.

Also, I tried to stream my recorded response to Naturalism, but it does not seem to work for me.  Try it, if it shows up for you:

image courtesy of princeton press; apparently only aesthetic philosophers get pretty covers

In my attempt to learn a bit more from some “post”-analyitic philosophers, I’ve decided to begin by revisiting Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (sold here).  I rather regret going back to this text before having had direct experience with the work of Heidegger in particular, but I am also displeased that I have yet to read any substantial works from Wilfrid Sellars, David Donaldson, Rudolph Carnap and W.V.O. Quine.  However, I suspect that I will be aided by the fact that I have ventured at least gotten my feet wet in exploring John Dewey, Hans Gadamer, Richard J. Bernstein, Quine, and Wittgenstein since i first rushed through parts of Rorty’s work two years ago.

I have chosen to start with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a number of reasons.  First, it seems to me something of a seminal work–for Rorty, for philosophy internally, and about philosophy from an external perspective.  Rorty’s criticisms are, if I remember well and if my sources are accurate, poignant, reflective, but not pleasing to the ears of most philosophers.  As such, he cannot be ignored.  Either Rorty’s harsh words are valid and philosophy must reform itself in some dramatic ways or philosophers must make a cogent rejoinder.  Since the writing of Rorty’s book, I suspect both have been done with countless subtle incarnations of each, and perhaps some not so subtle.

I have also selected this work for pragmatic reasons, because I think it represents a noteworthy pastiche of early Neopragmatist/postanalytic philosophers’ works (namely Quine, Sellars, and Davidson), as well as those of some of their influences (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and to some extent Dewey).  Furthermore, there is a marked lack of analytic tradition philosopherss in my formal education in philosophy–a deficiency which I hope to allay at least to some degree by reading this work.  Finally, I have selected Rorty’s text over those of his peers because the philosophical exploration that I have just begun was encouraged by epistemological criticisms of Rorty’s later work–work which is foreshadowed very strongly in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

No doubt that one of the most salient sources of the flak that philosophers receive from others is that they are willing to engage in serious discussion about otherwise seemingly worthless minutiae–apparently that includes pragmatists, too.  However, when I happened again upon this piece by William James, I simply could not keep myself from asking a few hair-splitting questions.

From William James What Pragmatism Means: Lecture II [1909]

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

While I appreciate James’ attempt to illustrate pragmatism by example in this case, I think this is a great opportunity to nitpick a bit, hopefully to better elucidate the meaning and uses of pragmatism.

I have a few outstanding criticisms of James’ use of this story above.  First, I am not confident that when James says “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel” [emphasis mine], that the word practically brings any additional meaning its sentence, given the assumption that the rest of James’ paragraph is the explanation of what might be meant practically.  In other words, James might just as well have said that it “depends on what you mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”, because there is no difference in meaning between the two sentences.  When William James goes on to describe the two potential definitions for “going round”, he supplies definitions which do not really touch on the pragmatic nature of the situation.  Each definition is, it seems to me*, metaphysical–as is the question of going round the squirrel (*for the sake of simplicity, I’m proposing a metaphysical v. pragmatic dichotomy here, let’s not bring language/psychology/etc. into the equation).

This is not to say, however, that a pragmatic distinction cannot be made for this metaphysical squirrel question.  Indeed, it seems to me that a clarification drawn between what our squirrel-watching friends “mean” and what they “practically mean” might help us get a better grasp on pragmatism, if we can simply get away from the positions James offers us.

I will begin by examining James’ two potential definitions for “going round” the squirrel.

“Going Round”

First, James says one approach is to claim that going round said squirrel means “being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again”.  My complaint with this description is that it does not satisfy what we expect when we say “going round”; to illustrate this, I’ve composed a little animation (go easy on me, it’s my first attempt ever) which shows a man–William James himself, actually– “going round a squirrel” by this definition:

apposite version of James going round a squirrel

I suspect most people will agree that this does not really illustrate what we mean when we say “going round”; therefore, James’ apposite approach to defining the motion is unsuccessful.  I should say that there are other options for satisfying the conditions of this apposite definition, but they are more difficult to animate.

Now on to the directional approach to defining “going round”.  I have made another animation in a like manner to illustrate a scenario that falls within the bounds of James description “passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again”:

directional version of James going round a squirrel

Again, I think most of us will agree that this is not what is meant by going round, and, again, this is only one animation of a number of possible configurations.

So…what’s the point?

My intent, here, was not merely to disapprove of William James’ options for defining a man going round a squirrel.  Rather, it is to question whether merely defining things in simple relations to each other–and abstracted from the reality of motives and consequences–presents us with metaphysical answers, not pragmatic answers (pragmatic in both the sense of philosophy and of practical use).

My alternative approach, and one which seems to me more indicative of the goals of pragmatism (please correct me if I am wrong), is that the definition of “going round” can be precise, but it must be fluid depending on our ends, our experiences and knowledge, and the prospective consequences of the ends and knowledge which we bring to the table.  I’ll attempt to make this clearer with a quick and dirty example.

A truly pragmatic distinction in meaning requires application.  In this sense, we might need not only to “go round the squirrel”, but to “go round the squirrel for [some reason] “.  For example, if I ask you to go round the squirrel to get a full-view 3D picture for mapping into a computer, and you keep chasing the squirrel around with the camera, but can only ever get the little beast to show its belly to you, then you might rightly tell me “I simply could not get round the squirrel to get those pictures”.  Yet if your task was merely to go round the squirrel to set up pylon cameras to get those same images, you might rightly explain to me that you were able to go round the squirrel in order to complete this task, though in this case you never beheld the rodent’s dorsal side.  In these cases, the definition is formed through the situation and its consequences; there appears to be a real cash value (on the converse, what does James’ situational and definitional distinction get for us?  Perhaps we receive nothing, if we have no interest vested in either consequence).

Perhaps, then, the difference between what we mean and practically mean might not be a difference in denotation.  What I mean by going round the squirrel might be confined to a simple definition, but what I practically mean in the given example is that the act of “going round the squirrel” is an act the whose completion belongs to the category of things required in order for me to accomplish my end goal, one of the things which would get me closer to obtaining the cash-value of the 3D computer image of said squirrel.