Bullshit (indifference to truth)

Working Definition

In strict philosophical usage, bullshit is speech or writing produced with fundamental indifference toward whether its statements are true or false, governed instead solely by the goal of making a particular impression on the audience. The concept draws a sharp structural boundary between the liar and the bullshitter: a liar knows the truth (or believes they know it) and deliberately tries to steer the listener away from it, thereby remaining in a negative but genuine cognitive relation to facts; the bullshitter steps outside the game of truth altogether, deploying true and false claims interchangeably so long as they advance self-presentation or persuasion. In everyday speech the word simply means nonsense or falsehood; in Harry G. Frankfurt’s technical sense it names a distinct epistemic posture that is more corrosive to a culture of truth than lying, because it erodes the underlying norm that words answer to reality.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The concept was brought into contemporary analytic philosophy by the American moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay On Bullshit, first published in Raritan Quarterly Review in 1986 and reissued as a standalone book by Princeton University Press in 2005. Frankfurt built on Max Black’s analysis of humbug (1983) and traced the ancient archetype to Plato’s critique of sophistry—the art of manufacturing appearances of wisdom without care for knowledge. In 2002, the Oxford philosopher Gerald A. Cohen published an influential critique, Deeper into Bullshit, distinguishing Frankfurt’s agent-centered bluffing (characteristic of advertising, PR, and political spin) from output-centered academic bullshit—hermetic, unclarifiable theoretical prose whose propositions cannot be tested or disproved even when the author writes in dead earnest. Over the following two decades, the category expanded into the sociology of organizations (David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, 2018) and data science (Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West’s analysis of quantitative bullshit, 2020).

Central European Lineage

Although Frankfurt’s essay grew out of late twentieth-century American media and advertising culture, Central European thinkers had twice—first from analytic logic and later from anti-totalitarian dissidence—formulated remarkably close diagnoses of discourse severed from accountability to truth. At the turn of 1919 and 1920 in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), Kazimierz Twardowski—a Vienna-trained student of Franz Brentano and founder of the Lvov–Warsaw School of logic and analytic philosophy—published his manifesto On Clear and Unclear Philosophical Style (O jasnym i niejasnym stylu filozoficznym). Rejecting the romantic excuse that obscure prose reflects the depth of the subject, Twardowski showed that stylistic fog functions as a shield insulating an author’s claims from verification or refutation—directly anticipating Gerald A. Cohen’s later analysis of academic bullshit. A second Central European lineage runs through Polish and Czechoslovak analyses of Communist bureaucratic language (nowomowa, or Newspeak, studied by literary theorist Michał Głowiński in Warsaw and Václav Havel in Prague). In The Power of the Powerless (1978), Havel captured the moment when late-socialist propaganda ceased to be an Orwellian lie attempting to falsify economic statistics and became a ritual of compliance in which both the party apparatus and the citizen were utterly indifferent to the truth-value of the slogans displayed.

Why Now

Between 2022 and 2026, Frankfurt’s concept acquired a precise engineering application with the mass deployment of large language models (LLMs). After the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the AI industry adopted the psychological metaphor of “hallucination” to describe fabricated citations and false assertions. In June 2024, philosophers Michael T. Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater at the University of Glasgow published the widely debated paper ChatGPT is bullshit in Ethics and Information Technology. They demonstrated that calling LLM fabrications “hallucinations” or “lies” anthropomorphizes the software by implying a perceptual apparatus or an intention to describe the world that momentarily malfunctioned. By contrast, a next-token prediction architecture is by design indifferent to propositional truth: it generates accurate summaries and invented court cases through the exact same mechanism—optimizing the statistical plausibility of sounding like a convincing human speaker.

Explanatory Power

Distinguishing lying from truth-indifference explains three contemporary communication pathologies where traditional fact-checking fails. The first is the political strategy of “flooding the zone”: a demagogue who fires off twenty contradictory claims in a single speech is not trying to maintain a coherent falsehood (like a classic liar who must remember yesterday’s alibi), but is staging a display of dominance over the news cycle; journalists who spend a week fact-checking one sentence lose because they treat performative bullshit as a botched factual assertion. The second example is corporate sustainability and governance jargon (ESG), where phrases about “holistic stakeholder synergy” are engineered to be legally unfalsifiable so no regulator or shareholder can sue for breach of promise. The third is quantitative bullshit (Bergstrom and West): dashboards packed with composite indices, cherry-picked time windows, and p-hacked regressions designed to intimidate lay audiences with the authority of numbers rather than test a hypothesis.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

Cognitive and organizational research (including Gordon Pennycook’s 2015 studies on “pseudo-profound bullshit”) reveals that inside modern bureaucracies, universities, and corporations, the proliferation of bullshit is rarely driven by personal dishonesty; far more often, it is a rational defensive adaptation to pathological evaluation metrics. When a university, ministry, or company forces staff to fill out endless grant rubrics, “vision statements,” and “social impact” forms while starving them of time and resources for substantive work, the institution itself mandates the production of smooth, unfalsifiable prose. In such an environment, a practitioner who writes plainly and makes testable commitments immediately exposes themselves to audit and blame if an experiment fails, whereas a producer of rounded bureaucratic bullshit becomes untouchable—because a claim that means nothing specific can never be caught in contradiction with reality.