The Communication of Bullshit:
Engaging Our Values
A Proposal for the Trustee Professorship, 2017-2018
Leonard Shedletsky, Professor of Communication
Part of the reason behind the prevalence of bullshitting and the ease
with which it is accepted is a lack of confidence that genuine inquiry is
worth pursuing, or even possible. (Cornelis De Waal, 2006)
2
3
(1) Statement of the Project
Do you agree that there is a lot of bullshit in
our world? Princeton University’s Professor
Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) begins his book,
On Bullshit, with this: “One of the most
salient features of our culture is that there is
so much bullshit. Everyone knows this” (p.
1). But have you ever stopped to think about
how you come to label something as
bullshit? In his book, bull-shit: a lexicon,
Mark Peters (2015) tells us there are more
than two hundred words and phrases for
4
bullshit. He says, “There is a bullshit
spectrum, which includes the following, in
order of decreasing complexity:
 scams
 lies
 gossip
 empty boasts
 sentimental crap
 insignificant things
 rubbish
 gibberish (pp. xii-xiii)
5
Have you thought about what you mean
when you say, “That’s bullshit”? I never did
before I got interested in this topic. I think I
assumed it was clear—self evident-- when
something was bullshit, and calling it
bullshit expressed my certainty. But think
about it for a moment, what do you mean
when you call bullshit?
This proposed study asks, what does the
concept bullshit mean to people, how do we
decide that something is bullshit, has there
6
been empirical research on bullshit, and
what sorts of questions can we ask about
bullshit that we can empirically study? The
study will try to show that ‘bullshit’ is an
important concept, with connections to farreaching, important parts of our lives, open
to empirical study. It will propose a
theoretical framework for empirically
studying bullshit.
What sorts of empirical questions might we
ask to more fully come to understand how
7
bullshit operates in our lives? When we
asked a convenience sample of college
students to estimate how much bullshit they
encounter on a typical day, 78% thought that
bullshit made up at least 30% and as much
as 75% of their day’s communication.
8
It would add to our understanding to know
when you are more likely to think “that’s
bullshit,” and when you are more likely to
say, “that’s bullshit” out loud to someone
concerning what he or she just said? How
9
long do you have to think before you
“know” that something is bullshit? What
determines how long you have to think?
What does it imply to label something as
bullshit? Is it another way of calling a claim
a lie? Is it distinct from a lie? What are the
social implications of using the term,
“bullshit”? Does it refer to a claim that is not
true, to an intention to mislead, to mistaken
logic? Is it always about words? Is it
reflective of the attitude of the speaker?
Perhaps it is just a way of emphatically
10
expressing disapproval. Does it imply
anything about “the bullshitter” that is not
implied by simply saying, “I disagree”?
Does it imply anything about the person
who utters, “That’s bullshit?” Is the
assessment of bullshit related to our moral
judgments, our values, our political
philosophy, our implicit theory of how we
reason (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz,
1998), how we express politeness, our
disposition to be reflective, our beliefs and
attitudes? If we characterize something as
11
bullshit are we also saying that the person
who spoke (wrote, produced) the bullshit is
a bullshitter? Is bullshit always a bad thing
or is it sometimes a good thing, a useful or
pro-social thing? What is the opposite of
bullshit? [Interestingly, a search for
antonyms of ‘bullshit’ brought up a family
of concepts with “truth’ as a good candidate
for the prototype.] Is bullshitting your self
or self-deception the same process as
bullshitting someone else? This study will
review what has been said about bullshit,
12
report on empirical studies of bullshit, offer
a theoretical framework for empirically
studying bullshit, and call for empirically
studying ‘bullshit’.
It has come as a surprise to me to find that a
serious consideration of the notion ‘bullshit’
takes us headlong into a shockingly
revealing understanding of
our selves and the communication
environment we inhabit. It may be your first
reaction to reject the topic of ‘bullshit’ as
13
frivolous, possibly a prank, something to
disdain and turn away from without much
thought. Or, given that this writing is an
academic work, it may even be seen as a
parody and criticism of academic studies-academic bullshit--(Eubanks & Schaeffer,
2008).
But Professor Harry G. Frankfurt’s 2005
little book titled, On Bullshit, set in motion a
closer look at ‘bullshit’.i In fact, Frankfurt’s
book was on the New York Times bestseller
14
list for twenty-six weeks. No doubt
Frankfurt’s lofty station in life and record of
serious academic work helped to get our
attention on the topic. Some years earlier, in
1969, Neil Postman delivered a talk titled
“Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detectionii,” in
which he urged teachers “ . . . to help kids
learn how to distinguish useful talk from
bullshit.” Recently, a team of medical
scientists has looked into helping kids spot
bullshit health claims
(http://www.sciencealert.com/these-
15
scientists-are-teaching-school-kids-how-tospot-bogus-health-claims).
A number of thinkers have seen the topic as
particularly apropos to today’s world
(Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006; Jackson, 2010;
Taylor, 2006) connecting it to reasons for
war, a proliferation of fraud and deception,
new technologies allowing for the
manipulation of photographs and
documents, scandals involving the church
16
and the financial industry, corporate
pronouncements of sincerity (“your call is
important to us”), managerial gibberish,
titans of the entertainment world, politicians,
much of what passes in the classroom as
discussion, on and on. Bullshit has been
found even in the halls of science, a culture
respected for attempting to consciously keep
out its own bullshit (Earp, 2016). Some have
referred to current times as “an age of
bullshit” (Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006); a
post-truth political environment (Oborne,
17
2005, p. 6); a ‘crisis of political trust’
(O’Neill, 2002, p. 8); and doublespeak
(Lutz, 1988). Many folks have given up the
hope of simple, authentic talk. Kenneth
Taylor (2006), as Professor of philosophy
and Chair of the Department of Philosophy
at Stanford University, had this to say:
“Public discourse in our times is in many
ways debased. It contains a depressing stew
of bullshit, propaganda, spin, and outright
lies” (p. 49). In two instances, highly
popular comedians and keen observers of
18
our times have talked at length about the
quantity and nature of bullshit.
(See Jon Stewart at:
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videoplaylists/igf7f1/jon-s-final-episode/ss6u07
and George Carlin at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTi9qDJ
ziAM).
Some might write off the idea of paying any
serious attention to bullshit, keeping with
the idea that it is what we disdain, what we
commonly experience and see it for what it
19
is, bullshit. But this may turn out to be the
most serious harm done by bullshit, our
casual acceptance of it, our thinking that it
does not matter, or, that it is so obvious, we
need not spend any time discussing it. Some
scholars have taken the position that the
pervasiveness of bullshit and our casual
acceptance of it do matter (Postman, 1969).
That in fact, this state of affairs points to the
value of discussing what bullshit is, it
engages our values of what does matter.
Some have written that tolerating bullshit
20
calls into question our valuing truth or not
valuing truth (Frankfurt, 2005). It may point
to other values simultaneously; impression
formation, profit, success, even politeness.
Taylor (2006) maintains that “ . . . bullshit
works best when we don’t recognize it or
acknowledge it for what it is” (p. 51).
Defining ‘Bullshit’
Let’s consider the question of what does
‘bullshit’ mean to people? In two small
21
surveysiii, convenience samples of subjects (
N = 40; N = 36) were asked for their
definition of “bullshit’ (See Appendix 1).
Here is a short list of typical responses:
 Someone saying things that are not
truthful or twisting what the truth is;
 When someone is lying or spouting
ridiculous concepts;
 Someone confidently presenting
fallacious information, knowing or
unknowingly;
 An attempt to impress or influence an
audience;
 Nonsense, shenanigans that we get
waylaid into having to dig ourselves out
of;
 Making stuff up to better your
position,
manipulating the facts;
 Something that is not true, whether it is
22
intentional fabrication or faulty
perspective
;
 A statement that willfully disregards the
truth for the purpose of misleading
others;
 False or exaggerated information with
the intention to mislead;
 Misleading someone about the
importance of something, or the
motivations behind it;
 Telling an untruth for attaining pleasure
(gain) or avoiding pain (loss);
 Completely incorrect, invalid
information that is far from the truth,
when it should be true;
 Stretching the facts, making false
conclusions up from facts, having no
facts at all;
 A blatant lie, an exaggeration or stretch
of the truth;
 Non-truthful information
;
 People lying or trying to convince you of
23
something you know to be false
fluff,
lies, manipulative speech, insincerity
the act of creating a false story to
appease others or make yourself look
better;
 A lie;
Even this short list of definitions of
‘bullshit’ offered by subjects include a
number of attributes that theorists have
discussed, such as intention, lies, the truth,
method of deriving conclusions, impression
management, states of mind and motives.
One feature that does stand out is how often
subjects referred to lying, misrepresenting or
24
misleading. It appears that our survey
respondents, unlike Frankfurt, believe that
bullshit includes some form of lying or
falsehood. The majority of our sample of
respondents (N = 76) thinks that lying is
associated with bullshit.
25
According to these subjects, truth does
matter to the bullshitter.
Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008) argue that
‘bullshit’ needs to be seen as a group of
26
concepts held together not by a closed set of
features but rather by features more or less
typical of bullshit. They argue for defining
bullshit with a cognitive science view of
categorization, as a graded category with
some features that constitute a more or less
typical instance of bullshit. For Eubanks and
Schaefer, a prototypical instance of bullshit
“ . . . has to do with a purposeful
misrepresentation of self, has the quality of
gamesmanship, and—contrary to what
Frankfurt says—is at least potentially a lie”
27
(p. 380).
Where does academic bullshit fit into this
schema? Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008),
addressing teachers of writing, speak of “ . .
. a productive sort of bullshit: bullshit that
ultimately produces better thought and better
selves. We must acknowledge that benign
bullshit is inevitable when people are
attempting to write well” (p. 387). They
argue that what counts as academic bullshit
28
depends on the audience, who makes the
assessment. They hold that what makes the
bullshit judgment a case of prototypical
bullshit for the general audience is that the
writing disregards the truth in speculating
and interpreting, uses odd language, and
engages in gamesmanship. For the general
audience, these are features that make up
prototypical academic bullshit. For the
academic, the same writing is nonprototypical bullshit, where it is not trying to
deceive the reader, but it is meant to
29
enhance the reputation of the writer. To
complicate matters, we can consider for a
moment Marshal McLuhan’s idea of
“strategic gibberish” which he offers in the
form of probes, ideas that are not line by line
reasoning but instead more like poetry or
jokes with a punch line (Griffin and Park
online at
http://media.turnofspeed.com/media/burnuni
t/mediaecology37050.pdf). But even for the
academic, some academic writing is seen as
prototypical bullshit, where there is “ . . .
30
loyalty and conviction about one’s own
ideological commitments while disvaluing
those of others. . . . . Theoretical
frameworks probably provoke more cries of
‘Bullshit!’ than any other academic praxis:
new criticism bullshit, Marxist bullshit,
feminist bullshit, Marxist-feminist bullshit,
deconstructionist bullshit, statistical bullshit,
and the list goes on—and on” (Eubank &
Schaeffer, p. 385).
31
Do our beliefs and attitudes play a role in
what we judge to be bullshit? Kimbrough
(2006) points out that in calling bullshit we
are concerned with justification but not
always with the truth (p.16). He argues that
our values ultimately inform our judgment
of justification. He offers the example of a
bottom-line businessman finding business
ethics to be bullshit. Shulman (2010) looks
at the everyday device of offering accounts,
where we attempt to reconcile our behavior
with social expectations to protect our
32
identities. It is easy to imagine that some
accounts will be seen as bullshit. Kimbrough
argues against a subjective definition of
bullshit. Keep in mind, though, that this
study seeks to understand how people use
the concept and so it does seek to understand
the subjective use. Postman (1969) held “ . .
. that one man’s bullshit is another man’s
catechism” (p.5). Postman also maintained
that values are central to understanding
bullshit. He said: “In other words, bullshit is
what you call language that treats people in
33
ways you do not approve of” (p. 5). If our
values play such a central role in deciding
what we count as bullshit, we ought to
explore how this might work. For instance,
when we asked survey respondents if they
would label the teacher’s response, “nice
job,” to a student’s poor work as bullshit, we
found a fairly equal split, which can be
attributed to valuing the encouragement or
the feedback on the task.
34
Values are strongly held beliefs that in turn
influence how we respond to arguments,
what we accept as true or not. Taylor (2006)
35
writes about the human tendency -- called
confirmation bias, the tendency “ . . . to
ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of
things that would disconfirm one’s beliefs.
....
Confirmation bias helps to explain the
imperviousness of strongly held beliefs to
contravening evidence and it also helps to
explain our tendency to overestimate our
own epistemic reliability” (p. 52). Mooney
(2013, June) explains this same phenomenon
36
as motivated reasoning. Mooney opens his
Mother Jones article with this:
“A man with a conviction is a hard
man to change. Tell him you
disagree and he turns away. Show
him facts or figures and he questions
your sources. Appeal to logic and he
fails to see your point.” So wrote the
celebrated Stanford University
psychologist Leon Festinger, in a
passage that might have been
37
referring to climate change denial—
the persistent rejection, on the part of
so many Americans today, of what
we know about global warming and
its human causes. But it was too
early for that—this was the 1950s—
and Festinger was actually
describing a famous case study in
psychology.”
If strongly held convictions, beliefs,
attitudes, values, begin to explain how
38
we think about arguments and evidence
for positions, then strongly held ideas
begin to account for people viewing the
same set of evidence as you and yet
concluding that what they believe is true
and what you believe is bullshit (See
http://www.ted.com/talks/julia_galef_wh
y_you_think_you_re_right_even_if_you
_re_wrong?language=en&utm_campaig
n=social&utm_medium=referral&utm_s
ource=facebook.com&utm_content=talk
&utm_term=humanities). We see this
39
phenomenon in such current day issues
as gun control, abortion, climate change,
and ways to deal with racial tensions.
Understanding the dynamics behind such
disagreements is central to our wellbeing.
We can ask what connects any statement
with one’s values? Another way of
putting this question is to ask, why is it
that some statements arouse strong
reactions, including emotional reactions.
40
It is not difficult to imagine a person
responding to a statement with, “That’s
bullshit,” with a force suggesting a
strong rejection of the statement. One
way of making sense of this is to
speculate that our attitudes, especially
where they include moral beliefs, are
made up of both emotive and descriptive
meanings (Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 2015). Stevenson, a
philosopher of ethics, held, “That ethical
language usually has both emotive and
41
descriptive meanings which often
interact in various ways suggests as it
should that beliefs, and therefore rational
methods, can be relevant to resolving
moral disagreement or uncertainty. That
emotive meaning is often strongly
independent of descriptive meaning
suggests as it should that non-rational
‘persuasive’ methods can also play a role
in settling or resolving moral
disagreement or uncertainty” (p. 4). It
would seem to follow that statements
42
concerning the well being of individuals
and groups would activate both
reference to evidence and emotions and
attitudes. Could this account for those
times when we say, “That’s bullshit”
with force and strong feelings?
Randy Barnett (2016), explains that our
values concerning the rights of
individuals and the rights of society
determine how we interpret the first
three words of the constitution, “We the
43
people” (p. xii). According to Barnett,
whether you hold the rights of the
individual as primary or hold the rights
of the group as primary will predict
whether you would see the constitution
as a device for limiting government
where individual rights are in jeopardy
(what he calls a Republican
Constitution), or a device for protecting
the rights of the majority (a Democratic
Constitution).
44
Avi Tuschman, an evolutionary
anthropologist, presents a strong case for
differences of opinion on controversial
issues that derive from genetically based
universal personality traits, e.g.,
tolerance for inequality. He points to
three clusters of attitudes, (1) toward
inequality, (2) toward tribalism, and (3)
perceptions of human nature. Tuschman
(2013) argues that these universal
political proclivities exist “ . . . because
[of] political orientations and natural
45
dispositions that have been molded by
evolutionary forces” (p. 24). Tuschman
presents strong evidence that genetics
accounts for a sizeable amount of
variation in political differences between
individuals, 40 to 60 percent. Further, he
brings together evidence from political
science to show that income does not
correlate significantly with voting left or
right. Instead, the data show that there is
a strong statistical relationship between
the personality traits of Openness and
46
Conscientiousness and left-right voting
behavior (p. 41). Hence, one’s tendency
to respond to the world in certain ways
weighs heavily in how he/she sees
controversial issues.
A few brilliantly executed empirical studies
tested the idea that values concerning the
individual versus the group predict how one
assesses where to stand on a number of
controversial issues. Dan M. Kahan, Donald
Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, & C.K.
47
Mertz (2007) have argued for “ . . . a form of
motivated cognition through which people
seek to deflect threats to identities they hold,
and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested
cultural norms. This proposition derives
from the convergence of two sets of
theories, one relating to the impact of culture
on risk perception and the other on the
influence of group membership on
cognition.”
Accordingly, strongly held beliefs may help
to explain both the proliferation of bullshit
48
and our tendency to not recognize it. It could
be hypothesized that people perceive more
bullshit as their beliefs become stronger and
more polarized and they are less inclined to
see bullshit when the argument confirms
their own beliefs.
Several theories of attitude change would
also support the idea that holding strong
beliefs would go along with being less
reflective on certain claims and evidence
offered in support of those claims. The
49
decision to reject or accept ideas is theorized
to operate at high speed, to occur
‘automatically’. For instance Social
Interaction Theory says that strong ego
involvement in beliefs would predict a larger
area of rejection of ideas (Sherif, M. Sherif,
C and Nebergall, 1965). Elaboration
Likelihood Model describes the cognitive
processing of incoming claims as either
central or peripheral, where central involves
reflective thinking and peripheral is a
50
mindless sort of processing, focusing on
superficial trappings.
James Fredal’s paper, “Bullshit and
Rhetoric,” (2011) helps to shed light on the
idea of bullshit as multi-leveled, where
multiple meanings can be derived from one
and the same utterance, where multiple
speech acts can be performed
simultaneously, where more than one
purpose can be served by one expression.
Fredal wrote:
51
“For Frankfurt, discourse can be divided
into two categories: that which is motivated
by the truth and that which isn’t. He doesn’t,
however, consider discourse that is
motivated by multiple factors (in addition to
a concern for the truth), nor does he consider
the variation the speaker may feel in her
level of confidence in the truth” (p. 244).
In short, Frankfurt focuses on the truth-value
of bullshit. Like Fredal, Mears (quoted in
Fredal, 2011) also points to another
framework for bullshit in addition to the
truth-value. Mears points to the ways in
which bullshitting functions in creating and
maintaining social relations between people.
Fredal (2011) explains Mears’ thinking on
bullshit in this excerpt:
Like Frankfurt, Mears locates the
source of bullshit in the speaker
herself and her desire to craft a
52
creditable self-image. But whereas
Frankfurt sees bullshitting as a
species of deception worse than
lying (because at least liars have to
know the truth if only to lead us
away from it, whereas bullshitters
have no concern at all for the truth),
Mears understands bullshit as a
significant social phenomenon that
serves several prosocial functions.7
For Mears, we engage in bullshit for
purposes of socialization and play,
for self-exploration and selfexpression, for the resolution of
social tensions and cognitive
dissonance, and for gaining an
advantage in encounters. (p. 246)
To put it another way, Mears described
bullshit as a communication transaction, a
negotiation, and a social phenomenon. With
53
this definition, the focus is not solely upon
the text and the speaker’s interest in the
truth. For Mears, bullshit is involved with
the state of mind of the bullshitter with
regard to dealing with relationships with
people. Levine and Kim (2010), writing
about deception, put it this way: “In short,
speaker intent and message consequence in
conjunction define deception, not the
objective qualities of messages or
information dimensions” (p. 17). They are
pointing to what goes on between people as
54
they communicate, with an emphasis on the
assessment of motives (p.31).
Some of us have trouble with small talk.
“How you doing?” “Nice day.” “Gee, you
are up and out early.” One possible reason
for this is that small talk may be a good
example of the tug of war between different
levels of meaning in an exchange. If one
values and focuses on the relational
meanings, then small talk is to be valued. If
55
stating the truth and only what is necessary
is foremost, then small talk may be seen as
bullshit and (for that reason) hard for some
to do.
Bullshit as Communication
What we suspect is that an exploration of
bullshit will benefit greatly from both a
serious analysis of the text, usually
utterances or written words, where the focus
tends to be upon its truth-value-- and also
56
from a communication theory point of
view—where the focus is on a transaction
between people (or communication within
one’s self), involving social actions. What
this means is that bullshit appears to operate
as speech acts and indirect speech acts
(Searle, 1969) which involve truth-value but
also conditions of sincerity, context
(including power), rules that define social
actions of various kinds, such as promising,
threatening, suggesting, offering and
reporting, to name a few. If you bag food
57
items at the supermarket and your boss says
to you:
“I need someone to sweep up isle 12,”
she/he is referring to an abstract someone
not himself or herself who they are speaking
to, a physical part of a supermarket, and an
act of cleaning, in other words, the
semantics of the utterance. Or, they may be
expressing their need at one level, making a
suggestion at another level and ordering you
to sweep up as well. The indirectness of the
command softens the relational message, but
58
given your roles and the immediate context
of the utterance, including the loud sound of
a bottle breaking in isle 12, perhaps your
background knowledge of the boss’s style,
you understand what appears to be a mild
suggestion or expression of need is really a
command, a directive in speech act theory
terms. As for sincerity, Lutz (1988) reminds
us that George Orwell wrote, “ . . . the great
enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
59
Bullshit functions at more than one level
simultaneously. Bullshit, we hypothesize,
functions at the level of direct content, (1)
the semantic meaning of the words
uttered/written and (2) underlying relational
messages, underlying value/belief messages,
implied or insinuated meanings. There can
be a tension between these levels and
messages. To offer a simple example, a
bullshit response to a student’s poorly
facilitated discussion may be something like,
“great job.” We may know this is not true
60
but it serves the underlying task of being
supportive. One can see a tug of war already
in values attached to this example. If we
consider the key underlying components of
bullshit as the words uttered (possibly nonverbal’s as well), the state of mind of the
speaker (sender) and the nature of the
receiver (interpretation of the utterance,
history involved between sender and
receiver, cultural outlook of the receiver,
receiver’s relationship to sender), then we
see that bullshit not only operates at multiple
61
levels and for multiple possible motives, but
in potentially very different kinds of
meaning, semantic and pragmatic.
Philosophers have recognized this
multiplicity of bullshit. Reisch has referred
to the bullshitter as running two
conversations at once. He wrote:
Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit
crucially involves semantics insofar
as bullshitters, as he defines them,
don’t care whether or not their
utterances are true. But some of his
62
examples of bullshit also point to the
pragmatic aspects of language. To
see these, we must expand our
picture of language to include not
just meaning and truth but also the
uses and purposes to which language
may be put (p. 41). To put it simply,
we are mistaken to view bullshit as a
package that is moved from one
person to another. Instead, the other
plays a role in determining that the
symbols are or are not bullshit.
63
Hence, it is important to understand
how we come to the determination,
“that’s bullshit,” and what follows
from that.
Tracy (2002) opens her book,
Everyday Talk, with reference to the idea
that every utterance carries both
semantic meaning and its meaning in
context—the interactional meaning, the
social or interpersonal talk. Tracy
writes: “The interactional meaning of an
64
utterance is its meaning for the
participants in the situation in which the
utterance (or more usually, a sequence of
utterances) occurred. Interactional
meaning arises from and depends on the
context, and may be given or given off”
(p. 8).
Another scholar of discourse put it this
way[1][1]:
In telling a story, expanding an
argument, or producing some other
conversational structure, a
65
participant may design utterances
to invoke knowledge assumed to
be held in common with a specific
other participant. This is some item
of background knowledge or
shared experience that each person
‘knows, presumes that the other
knows, and presumes that the other
presumes [that he or she knows]’
(Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984, p.
303, n. 5). The other participant
may then respond in a way that
66
displays a recognition of what that
knowledge is. Such an interactive
display that two participants share
a certain item of knowledge and
thus have a “history” together may
make their relationship (or some
aspect of it) momentarily relevant
to the conversation. (Nofsinger, p.
163)
Similarly, in the closing chapters of her
book, Tannen (2001) focuses upon the
67
relationship between talk and
friendship. She makes the point that we
cannot tell from the words just what the
meaning is. She explains that this is the
case, since the words are embedded within a
system, e.g., of cultural ritual, or
relationship history, or style (e.g.,
genderlect).
A communication (or pragmatics)
perspective promises to shine a great deal of
light upon this exchange. Some of this
68
framework comes from communication
theory (e.g., Baxter and Montgomery, 1997)
and some more broadly from discourse
analysis (Tracy, 2002). For instance, we can
draw upon Baxter and Montgomery’s
Relational Dialectics (1997), which helps us
see the flux in our exchanges, the moment to
moment push and pull as we take up stances
that contradict one another in underlying
dimensions of things like closeness and
distance. Face work points to our concern
for maintaining our own and the other’s
69
identity (Goffman, 1959). Discourse
analysis has shown us that messages draw
their meaning from many sources
simultaneously, semantics, culture,
relationship and context more generally.
What this framework encourages is an
analysis that considers multiple objectives in
the exchange, both for the sender and the
receiver. It allows us to see contradictions
and how they are resolved and opens the
door to considering our valuing truth,
politeness, success and so on. It also holds
70
out the possibility of exploring gender
differences in perceptions of bullshit.
A pragmatics perspective on bullshit entails
that there are many kinds of bullshit, some
benign and conventional, where it is
understood that the discourse is not intended
to express accurate information, and some
kinds of bullshit that evoke strong negative
reactions, where there is pretentiousness, an
obvious use of power to get away with
something (Richardson, 2006). Richardson
writes about the conventions of bullshitting
71
in proposal writing, letters of
recommendation, patriotic gatherings, and
moments of courtesy. These are benign
instances of bullshit. Perla and Carifio (June,
2007) argue that an important function of
bullshit is in developing new ideas. They
wrote: “But something as ubiquitous as BS
may exist for a reason and perhaps an
important and good reason. In the RIBS
[revised interpretation of bullshit]
view, it was stated that bullshit is a matrix
for the development of
72
higher-order thinking” (p. 124). In short,
there are many sorts of bullshit, and
understanding bullshit as focusing on truth
and pragmatics helps to explain this wide
field and our reactions to it.
i
Harry Frankfurt originally published the essay "On Bullshit" in the Raritan Quarterly Review journal in
1986. "On Bullshit." Raritan Quarterly Review 6, no. 2 (Fall 1986).
ii
Neil Postman, “Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection” (Delivered at the National Convention for the
Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)
My student, Timothy Sprague worked with me on this survey as part of a
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant from the University of
Southern Maine, 2015-2016.
iii
(2) Method
Communicating Bullshit
I. Our experience with bullshit needs to be taken
seriously.
73
A. It is widely agreed that there is a lot of bullshit in
our world and it is important to understand its place.
1. What does the concept ‘bullshit’ mean to
each of us?
2. Bullshit is important not just because we
experience a lot of it, but because it is linked
to numerous important parts of our lives,
fundamentally through our values and
beliefs.
3. Bullshit influences our positions on
controversial issues, politics, morality,
interpersonal communication, intrapersonal
communication, work.
4. What sorts of empirical questions might we
ask about bullshit?
5. Data on what ‘bullshit’ means to people.
6. Bullshit engages our values.
B. The goals of this study are:
1. To review what has been said about bullshit
2. To offer a view of bullshit as a communication
transaction
74
3. To report on empirical studies of bullshit
4. To call for empirically studying ‘bullshit’
C. A review of the literature on bullshit
1. Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005
2. Hardcastle & Reisch, 2006
3. Kenneth Taylor (2006)
4. Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008)
5. Postman (1969)
6. Randy Barnett (2016)
7. Kahan, Braman, Gastil, Slovic,
& Mertz (2007)
8. Fredal (2011)
75
9. and more
D. Bullshit as a communication transaction
1. Bullshit as speech acts
2. Semantics of bullshit (literal
meanings) and pragmatics of bullshit
(the uses and purposes to which
language may be put)
3. Bullshit as both misrepresentation
and pro-social
1. Bullshitting in proposal
writing, letters of
recommendation, patriotic
76
gatherings, and moments of
courtesy
2. Bullshit as multi-leveled
meaning
3. Bullshit as a matrix for the
development of higher-order
thinking (e.g., speculation)
4. Bullshit and values, beliefs,
and attitudes
a. Bullshit and confirmation
bias
77
b. Bullshit, values and what is
taken to be true
II. A Proposed Framework for the Empirical
Study of “bullshit’
A. The Text plus Communication
Transaction
1. Speech Acts
2. Discourse Analysis
B. Strongly Held Beliefs and the
Perception of bullshit
III. Empirical Studies of Bullshit
78
A. Few empirical studies have been done
explicitly on ‘bullshit’.
1. Values (strong beliefs) appear to
be a particularly powerful variable
involved in the pragmatics of
bullshit.
2. Studies of values have suggested
that values have a strong impact on
assessing the truth-value of
arguments.
3. Individualism-communitarian and
hierarchist-egalitarian worldviews
and bullshit.
4. Individual differences in detecting
bullshit.
IV. Future Directions
A. Call for more empirical studies on bullshit.
79
B. Replication and extension of survey data
collected in my earlier survey studies.
C. Proposed research on values and assessment
of bullshit using reaction time technique.
(3) Outcome
A number of outcomes from this study are expected.
 A chapter prepared for The Handbook of
Deception, Tony Docan-Morgan (Ed.),
Palgrave Macmillan. Professor DocanMorgan, University of Wisconsin, has
expressed interest in including my work in a
proposed book on deception expected to
come out in 2018.
 A CMS senior seminar on communicating
bullshit offered Fall, 2017.
 Preparation of an empirical study on
reaction time to [perceived bullshit and nonbullshit] statements in connection with
measured values. This study is in early
stages of design and includes computer
80
programming for the reaction time measure,
in collaboration with Professor David Bantz
in computer science. In brief, this study will
explore the connection between the strength
and direction of values held and the
cognitive task of identifying bullshit.
 A public talk on the topic.
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