Thus it is important for us to take bullshit
seriously, and understand the nature of bullshit. We
need to know what constitutes “bullshit” and reflect on when and why we
bullshitted in the past, in order to avoid doing so in the future.
In the excerpt of "on Bullshit," Frankfurt uses Wittgenstein's reaction to Pascal's
statement "I feel just like a dog that has been run over" to
illustrate the nature of bullshit. "To the Wittgenstein in Pascal's
story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit." (par. 3).
How so?
According to Frankfurt,
"because he perceives what Pascal says as being - roughly speaking, for
now - unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not
germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she
knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her description of
her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up.
She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she
is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really
are. It is for this mindlessness that Pascal's Wittgenstein chides
her." (par. 4 & 5). For Wittgenstein, "[h]er fault is not
that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying"
(par. 6)
Through the discussion of Wittgenstein's
reaction to Pascal's statement, Frankfurt
defines bullshit as such " It is just this lack of connection to a concern
with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of
the essence of bullshit. . . . .. To be more precise, when a person says
something, s/he does not care about whether what s/he says is true, and does
not even bother to find out, this person is a bullshitter, and what s/he says
is bullshit.
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