Pure, Unadulterated BS

“It’s not lies. It’s just… bullsh*t!”
(Dan Ackroyd as Elwood Blues in the 1980 hit movie Blues Brothers)

     In his book On Bullsh*t, Harry Frankfurt contrasts bullsh*tting and lying. Where the liar makes deliberately false claims, the bullsh*tter is simply uninterested in the truth. Rather, bullsh*tters aim primarily to impress their audiences. Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the bullsh*tter, interested solely in pretense, has no use for the truth. Bullsh*tters are people “who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak.” By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, “bullsh*t is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
     What Frankfurt describes is the modern version of the infamous sophists[1] of Ancient Greece whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle exposed for their vain and empty twisting of reality to profit and gain advantage over others. Today, we have on one side of the reality-shifting spectrum the particularly repulsive anti-truth views of postmodern deconstructionists,[2] while on the other side we have the artifically-narrow “truth only as naturalism,” scientism-promulgating atheists.[3] The positions of both these camps is incoherent and self-defeating, but that doesn’t stop their attempts to pull the unsuspecting and the careless down into the dark depths of Plato’s Cave.
     Postmodernism and Atheism are bullsh*t.
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     [1] Sophists intentionally mislead for personal gain. They “… destroy discussion and reasoning in general. Thus there is no use arguing with people of this kind.” [Metaphysics, 1063b]
     [2] See, for example Alan Sokal’s lovely parody of typical postmodern incoherence “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252, spring/summer 1996) found here.
     [3] See, for example, links to reviews on Richard Dawkins’ philosophically inept The God Delusion here and here. See also here and here.