“Bullshit and the Foibles of the Human Mind, or: What the Masters of the Dark Arts Know”

1. “Bullshit and the Foibles of the Human Mind, or: What the Masters of the Dark Arts Know” Kenneth A. Taylor, In Bullshit and Philosophy, 2006

2. Some excerpts from the Foibles chapter (chapter 4) to kick off discussion • I offer these quotations because they were lines that struck me as interesting and important in exploring what BS is and how it functions. I will present these to you with the hope that you have reactions to these quotes. But first, I have some questions for you. Please feel free to react as you wish.

3. Question—take your time and think of your response. • Do you agree with Taylor that at least in part “the fault for the pervasiveness of bullshit must lie partly within ourselves”?

4. Ways in which Taylor holds us all accountable • Bullshit works best when we don’t recognize it or acknowledge if for what it is; • Allowing oneself to be taken in by a misrepresentation, but not quite consciously so, is, perhaps, an effective means of self-deception, one requiring less torturous mental gymnastics than the wholly self-driven variety; • Even with this idea about our propensity to be comforted by false ideas over discomforting truths, Taylor is still not sure why there is as much bullshit around; • Taylor addresses this problem—why we are so often taken in by BS-- in the rest of his essay (chapter);

5. Why do we find it so hard to distinguish bullshit from its contraries? Taylor responds to his question by discussing the foibles of the human mind; In other words, his answer focuses on ways in which our minds have difficulty in recognizing BS; We are subject to confirmation bias; Prone to self deception; We are bad at many forms of reasoning (statistical reasoning, reasoning about conditionals, and the assessment of risks and rewards;

6. Reasoning Difficulties Confirmation bias: the tendency to notice and seek out things that confirm one’s beliefs, and to ignore, avoid, or undervalue the relevance of things that would disconfirm one’s beliefs; Confirmation bias helps to explain the imperviousness of already adopted beliefs to contravening evidence and it also helps to explain our tendency to overestimate our own epistemic reliability (p. 52); Some if-then reasoning presents difficulty for us (the Wason selection task, p. 57;

7. Wason Selection Task • Take the Wason Selection Task • Descriptive Rule vs. Social Rules Reasoning

8. Reclaiming the Public Square • Taylor is not claiming that current day humans are any more susceptible to BS than earlier humans; • Our minds are as they have always been. Only our circumstances have changed; • So, why is there more cognitive BS in our times? • First, the masters of bullshit are astute students of the foibles of the human mnd; • Second, the means of public representations and persuasion available to the masters of the dark arts have a vastly greater reach than they have ever had;

9. Combating BS in our Time . • The battle must be waged on at least 2 different fronts: • In education; • We must seek to instill in our children distaste for all dogma, • a suspicion of all easy and comforting falsehoods; • In public discourse; • We must reconfigure the very means of public representation and persuasion; • In our times, a narrow, self-serving elite, interested mostly in its own power, wealth and prestige enjoys a certain privileged access to the means of public representations and persuasion

10. Cohen Bullshit • Cohen is most interested in academic bullshit; • This sort of bullshit cannot be explained by reference to the indifference or insincerity of the producer; • Often academic bullshit is the result of honest, academic efforts; • What is missing in these efforts is the truth, not the state of mind of the producer but with connection to the text; • For Cohen it is the unclarifiableunclarity of the texts that accounts for it being bullshit; • The unclarifiable text is incapable of being rendered clear;

11. Does Frankfurt & Cohen Bullshit Account for Pseudoscientific Bullshit? • No; • Neither provides an appropriate explanation for this form of bullshit; • Pseudoscientists typically have a firm and sincere belief in their practice; • They go to great lengths to prove the truth of the doctrines they endorse; • They are not indifferent to the truth; • So Frankfurt’s definition does not seem to apply;

12. Does Frankfurt & Cohen Bullshit Account for Pseudoscientific Bullshit? • Cohen’s definition also does not seem to explain pseudoscience because the predictions and statements of pseudoscience are often very specific and explicit as opposed to unclear and unclarifiable; • The bullshit of pseudoscientists is at least as damaging and therefore as deserving of scrutiny as the bullshit produced by advertisers and academics; • Yet pseudoscience bullshit is not covered by either Frankfurt or Cohen;

13. A Final Thought—your reactions, please. • Perhaps in ordinary use of the concept bullshit we are not consistent and that is why firm definitions or theories of bullshit do not hold; • Maybe in the case of pseudoscience we use bullshit to mean “not correct” or “I don’t agree”.