Is Sincerity itself Bullshit? Interаct with Frаnkfurt's аrgument that sincerity as he describes it is bullshit. Here is the оutline tо help guide yоu. Below the outline is the full text from the class reading in case you would like to quote it. Please make sure to proofread your written response. Disagree with Frankfurt. Explain why it is the case that sincerity is not bullshit. Provide a compelling counterexample, and then defend that counterexample from what you foresee as objections to it. A solid counter example is one with that is clearly a case of sincerity in the sense described by Frankfurt, and also not a case of bullshit. This is to get you started by rebuffing his conclusion. Then show point by point how Frankfurt's argument goes wrong. This will involve Are their ambiguous terms? How do these weaken his argument. Are some of the proposition false or entail a contradiction. Give examples and support why they are false. Does his argument take unreasonable leaps? Does one thing not follow from another and why? Agree with Frankfurt. Explain why sincerity is bullshit. Specify possible objections to each of the points that Frankfurt makes, and then defend his points from those objections. Might someone argue that one of his terms are ambiguous? Then clarify those terms so that his conclusion still follows. Might someone argue that one of the premises of his argument are false? Then give examples as to why those premises are true, and how to defend the truth of those premises further. Might someone argue that his conclusion does not follow from his premises? Then show why it makes the most sense that the conclusion does follow. Here is the text. Another side of issues concerning truth is whether or not someone is concerned with the truth at all. In an influential little essay titled "On Bullshit" American Philosopher Harry Frankfurt tries to tackle the issue. Here is how he explains his goal: I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis . . . My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not – or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept. His initial line of inquiry involves looking at an analysis of the concept of "Humbug" by the philosopher Max Black. Frankfurt's verdict is that Humbug and Bullshit are similar but not exactly the same thing, he says, "Nonetheless, I do not believe that [humbug] adequately or accurately grasps the essential character of bullshit." Frankfurt thinks that a tale about the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ( say the w's like v's) can start to point us in the right direction. Wittgenstein thought that the following verse could have been his lifetime motto: In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part For the Gods are everywhere. Frankfurt explains, The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work which would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps also say, there was no bullshit. Much of Wittgenstein's philosophical career was focused on "identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of 'nonsense'. In his personal and professional life Wittgenstein was a singularly intense individual. Most of us would probably regard him as annoying and a buzz kill. And in fact people in his own time thought the same, but it was hard to dispute his philosophical ingenuity. An example of his personal attitude as it relates to nonsense is recounted by Frankfurt. He tells us a story from Fania Pascal in the 1930's: I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: " I feel just like a dog that has been run over." He was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like. Wittgenstein might be joking to lighten the mood. But given his personal intensity he might be serious. So what exactly does Wittgenstein object to in her statement? Obviously Pascal is not a dog and has not been run over, so technically she couldn't feel 'just like a dog that has been run over'. But what is likely being expressed in this sentence is that she feels bad, and so as Frankfurt says "she is plainly not lying." So what is it? Frankfurt seems to think that the issue at hand is more Pascal's attitude, not the particular statement. The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad… Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality… The point that troubles Wittgenstein is manifestly not that Pascal has made a mistake in her description of how she feels. Nor is it even that she has made a careless mistake. Her laxity, or her lack of care, is not a matter of having permitted an error to slip into her speech on account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent lapse in the attention she was devoting to getting things right. The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying. For Frankfurt this illustration provides one of the essential components of the concept of bullshit. It is just this lack of connection to a concern for truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit. Frankfurt then uses the Oxford English Dictionary to look at some standard definitions of words like 'bull', ' bull session', and 'bullshit'. He finds issues in each dictionary definition, and thinks while helpful none of these give us a clear philosophical understanding of what bullshit is. But what he does find is that something about the activities of bullshiting are not to be taken seriously. And this leads to his second essential component of the concept of bullshit. This is done in discussion with concepts like 'lying' and 'bluffing'. Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. But wait. If Bullshit is indifferent to the truth, and its fakery, then how exactly is it different from lying? Isn't that what the liar does? They don't care about the truth, they tell falsehoods, and they clearly aren't serious in their attempt to get things right. Here again Frankfurt gives an illustration, this time from the novel Dirty Story by Eric Amber, where a character reflects on advice they were given by a parent: Although I was only seven when my father was killed, I still remember him very well and some of the things he used to say . . . One of the first things he taught me was, "Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through." So it seems that someone could be engaged in a program or enterprise of bullshiting. Frankfurt thinks a lie "is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs," and in so doing "requires a degree of craftsmanship," because it must deal with all the truths surrounding the lie in order for the lie to be successful. The liar has to be concerned with the truth in their craftsmanship of lying. But this is not so for the bullshitter. Bullshit "is more expansive and independent with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play." After these preliminaries Frankfurt provides us with a clear statement of the difference between lying and bullshitting: What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. While we could imagine someone that lies just for the pure pleasure of deceiving people, this doesn't seem to be what bullshitting does. The liar has to pay regard to the truth, and the bullshitter doesn't. And according to Frankfurt this has major consequences. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshiting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the later activity which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost. . . By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. The last sentence above is the problem with bullshit. It is not good for human life, at least insofar as the truth is important for human life. But Frankfurt has not given us any reason for why there is so much bullshit in our world. What follows is the concluding paragraphs of his essay and is an argument with far reaching philosophical consequences. Read it carefully, we are going to interrogate it in class. Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great. Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needles to say for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world. The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself. But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while suppose that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
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Of the five types оf prisоn-bаsed prоgrаms, the аuthors recognize that rehabilitation is the most controversial.