indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false. Insofar as the authority of this distinction is undermined by the prevalence of bullshit and by the mindlessly frivolous attitude that accepts the proliferation of bullshit as innocuous, an indispensable human treasure is squandered” (2002: 343).
These dangers seem to manifest regardless of whether there is an intention to deceive about the enterprise a speaker is engaged in. Compare the deceptive bullshitter, who does aim to mislead us about being in the truth-business, with someone who harbours no such aim, but just talks for the sake of talking (without care, or indeed any thought, about the truth-values of their utterances).
One of Frankfurt’s examples of bullshit seems better captured by the wider definition. He considers the advertising industry, which is “replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” (2005:22). However, it seems to misconstrue many advertisers to portray their aims as to mislead about their agendas. They are expected to say misleading things. Frankfurt discusses Marlboro adverts with the message that smokers are as brave as cowboys (2002: 341). Is it reasonable to suggest that the advertisers pretended to believe this?
Frankfurt does allow for multiple species of bullshit (2002: 340).[1] Following this suggestion, we propose to envisage bullshit as a genus, and Frankfurt’s intentional bullshit as one species within this genus. Other species may include that produced by the advertiser, who anticipates that no one will believe their utterances[2]or someone who has no intention one way or another about whether they mislead their audience. To that end, consider the following distinction:
- Bullshit (general)
Any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance.
- Hard bullshit
Bullshit produced with the intention to mislead the audience about the utterer’s agenda.
- Soft bullshit
Bullshit produced without the intention to mislead the hearer regarding the utterer’s agenda.
The general notion of bullshit is useful: on some occasions, we might be confident that an utterance was either soft bullshit or hard bullshit, but be unclear which, given our ignorance of the speaker’s higher-order desires.[3] In such a case, we can still call bullshit.
Frankfurt’s own explicit account, with the positive requirements about producer’s intentions, is hard bullshit, whereas soft bullshit seems to describe some of Frankfurt’s examples, such as that of Pascal’s conversation with Wittgenstein, or the work of advertising agencies. It might be helpful to situate these distinctions in the existing literature. On our view, hard bullshit is most closely aligned with Cassam (2019), and Frankfurt’s positive account, for the reason that all of these views hold that some intention must be present, rather than merely absent, for the utterance to be bullshit: a kind of “epistemic insouciance” or vicious attitude towards truth on Cassam’s view, and (as we have seen) an intent to mislead the hearer about the utterer’s agenda on Frankfurt’s view. In Sect. 3.2 we consider whether ChatGPT may be a hard bullshitter, but it is important to note that it seems to us that hard bullshit, like the two accounts cited here, requires one to take a stance on whether or not LLMs can be agents, and so comes with additional argumentative burdens.
Soft bullshit, by contrast, captures only Frankfurt’s negative requirement – that is, the indifference towards truth that we have classed as definitional of bullshit (general) – for the reasons given above. As we argue, ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users’) agenda.
It’s important to note that even this more modest kind of bullshitting will have the deleterious effects that concern Frankfurt: as he says, “indifference to the truth is extremely dangerous…by the mindlessly frivolous attitude
- ↑ In making this comment, Frankfurt concedes that what Cohen calls “bullshit” is also worthy of the name. In Cohen’s use (2002), bullshit is a type of unclarifiable text, which he associates with French Marxists. Several other authors have also explored this area in various ways in recent years, each adding valuable nuggets to the debate. Dennis Whitcomb and Kenny Easwaran expand the domains to which “bullshit” can be applied. Whitcomb argues there can be bullshit questions (as well as propositions), whereas Easwaran argues that we can fruitfully view some activities as bullshit (2023).
While we accept that these offer valuable streaks of bullshit insight, we will restrict our discussion to the Frankfurtian framework. For those who want to wade further into these distinctions, Neil Levy’s Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review (2023) offers a taxonomical overview of the bullshit out there.
- ↑ This need not undermine their goal. The advertiser may intend to impress associations (e.g., positive thoughts like “cowboys” or “brave” with their cigarette brand) upon their audience, or reinforce/instil brand recognition.
Frankfurt describes this kind of scenario as occurring in a “bull session”: “Each of the contributors to a bull session relies…upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be understood as being what he means wholeheartedly or believes unequivocally to be true” (2005: 37). Yet Frankfurt claims that the contents of bull sessions are distinct from bullshit.
- ↑ It’s worth noting that something like the distinction between hard and soft bullshitting we draw also occurs in Cohen (2002): he suggests that we might think of someone as a bullshitter as “a person who aims at bullshit, however frequently or infrequently he hits his target”, or if they are merely “disposed to bullshit: for whatever reason, to produce a lot of unclarifiable stuff” (p334). While we do not adopt Cohen’s account here, the parallels between his characterisation and our own are striking.
