Frankfurt on bullshit: "How would our culture change without BS in it?"

"Defining Bullshit - A philosophy professor says it's a process, not a product"

"'We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production,' observes Laura Penny, author of the forthcoming (and wittily titled) Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. But what is bullshit, exactly? By which I mean: What are its defining characteristics? What is its Platonic essence? How does bullshit differ from such precursors as humbug, poppycock, tommyrot, hooey, twaddle, balderdash, claptrap, palaver, hogwash, buncombe (or 'bunk'), hokum, drivel, flapdoodle, bullpucky, and all the other pejoratives favored by H.L. Mencken and his many imitators? The scholar who answers the question, 'What is bullshit?' bids boldly to define the spirit of the present age."

(Timothy Noah, Slate, March 2, 2005)

On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not--or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept."