Deeper into Bullshit
G.A. Cohen
* * *
2. Two Species of Bullshit
I should like to explain how this chapter
reached its present state. I read Frankfurt’s article [i.e. Harry Frankfurt,
“On Bullshit”] in 1986, when it first appeared. I loved it, but I didn’t think
critically about it.
Having been asked to contribute to the present
volume, I reread the article, in order to write about it. I came to realize
that its proposal about the “essence” of bullshit worked quite badly for the bullshit
… that has occupied me. So I wrote a first draft which trained counter-examples
drawn from the domain of the bullshit that interests me against Frankfurt’s
account. But I then realized that it was inappropriate to train those examples
against Frankfurt, that he and I are, in fact, interested in different
bullshits, and, therefore, in different explicanda. Frankfurt is
interested in a bullshit of ordinary life,1 whereas I am interested in a
bullshit that appears in academic works, and, so I have discovered, the word
“bullshit” characteristically denotes structurally different things that
correspond to those different interests. Finally, and, belatedly, I considered,
with some care, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) account of
“bullshit”, and, to my surprise, I discovered (and this was, of course, reassuring)
that something like the distinct explicanda that I had come to
distinguish are listed there under two distinct entries.2
