What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise.

Went in to the bookstore yesterday to get Harry G. Frankfurt's new book, On Inequality. I am hearing good things about it. While looking for that, I came across an earlier book of his, similarly brief, On Bullshit. So of course I came home with both books.

Frankfurt's earlier book echoes Neil Postman's 1969 speech Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection. Clearly the problem is not new. I prefer the term cognitive pollution to cover those statements issued without due diligence or regard for the truth. Ideologues have a tendency to have a high proportion of cognitive pollution in that they already believe their own statements and have little compulsion to check their own facts. Cognitive pollution covers untruths, half-truths, and all statements where the speaker has no concern whether the statement is true or not. The latter is a lot closer to the definition that Frankfurt settles on.

An enjoyable, if brief, read. Only 67 pages.

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.