Blatant Bullshit as a threat to linguistic agency

What exactly is wrong with bullshitting? Here I am interested in bullshit as a non-cooperative linguistic move that is related to but distinct from lying, as Harry Frankfurt (1986/2005) first noticed. Many who have written about bullshitting (including Frankfurt himself, but also, more recently, Quassim Cassam) think it is wrong because it channels a distinctive epistemic vice, related to intellectual laziness or carelessness. Here I want to defend a different approach. I’ll first discuss some under-explored types of bullshit to motivate a departure from its classical definition as speech that is indifferent to truth. Next, I’ll argue that the wrong of bullshitting, properly understood, is not specifically epistemic. Rather, it lies in its potential to undermine the agency of the audience. This is best shown through a close look at bullshit of a certain kind: what I will call “blatant bullshit”, a move that can be used in public speech to shut down the debate, by making it impossible for good-faith participants to perform the speech-acts they intend to perform. Part of the aim of this kind of bullshit, I will argue, is to communicate contempt for the rules governing the conduct of the linguistic exchange, and ultimately to weaken those norms, resulting in a distinctive type of silencing. 

Marie Guillot currently works at the University of Nanterre in France. She is interested in issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially indexicality and other forms of context-sensitivity, the first person, self-knowledge and ‘de se’ content, phenomenal consciousness and phenomenal concepts. She is also working on the ethics and politics of speech acts, especially transgressive ones.