Back in 2017, two philosophers, Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg, wrote an essay titled-
Beyond Bullshit: Donald Trump’s Philosophy of Language
Which was simple enough. Trump was and is a politician. His language is 'imperative', not 'alethic' save when striking a deal with a specific counter-party. The Philosophy of Language is stupid shit because it does not concede that our species evolved to communicate very well with dogs while hunting, doing guard duty, etc.
In 2005 the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a charming little book called On Bullshit.
It is shit. Franfurt's dog tried to tell him that by saying 'woof! woof!' Sadly, he thought it just wanted to be taken for walkies.
In it Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from humbug and lies.
Humbug isn't exactly a modern American idiom.
Donald Trump, we submit, isn’t (usually) a humbugger or a liar. He’s a bullshitter. But he extends the qualities of bullshit beyond Frankfurt’s definition. We’d like to show you how.
Frankfurt gives an example of humbug:
“Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind. This is surely humbug.”
Trump can do this well enough. He professes to lurve uneducated people like me- provided we have votes.
Frankfurt explains that the orator isn’t lying:
He is speaking in an 'imperative' not an alethic register.
“He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind.
No. He still wouldn't be lying. He would be speaking in an imperative manner- e.g. a Doctor who thinks we are going to die but who says 'champ! you're going to pull through!'
But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country’s history, or the like…
He wants them, on this occasion, to think well of them or at least not to run riot burning down everything and beating up all the distinguished guests.
He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him.”
He may do or he may not.
Trump has also talked about the greatness of America’s past. Yet Trump’s statements aren’t humbug. He’s not in it only for self-aggrandizement, like Frankfurt’s orator: he’s trying to say something about America. Nor is Trump’s intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false. Trump might really think that America was and will again be great. So he isn’t lying, either. Instead, Trump is bullshitting.
Nope. Trump is articulating a belief of his own which many Americans happen to share. That isn't bullshit. It is a personal credo, shared by millions of Americans.
What’s bullshit?
It is Professors of shite subjects shitting higher than their arseholes and pretending to be smart by quoting equally useless Professors.
Frankfurt considers an anecdote in which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein chides his friend Pascal for saying “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.”
She'd had her tonsils out. She felt the way she imagined a whimpering dog, which had been run over by a car, might feel.
According to Wittgenstein, Pascal doesn’t know how a dog would feel about that.
Fania could have replied 'you don't how I feel. Fuck the fuck off you stupid cunt.'
“Her fault,” Frankfurt elaborates, “is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”
Rubbish! She was merely guilty of eliding the phrase 'I think' in 'I feel like I think a dog would feel if..' But it is obvious that, if she is speaking in propria persona, rather than quoting someone else, then it is her own thoughts she is expressing.
Wittgenstein, Frankfurt contends, “construes her as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial,
No. He thinks she is engaged in an activity in which something she thinks is knowable isn't actually knowable. Truth or Falsity don't come into the matter. Humans can't know anything about how dogs feel because of some stupid theory of his own. But even if this were the case- and it isn't because of co-evolution between humans and dogs- it would still be the case that Fania knows better than Witlesstein what she thinks she knows.
and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false…
A dog which is run over is in pain. She was in pain. She compares herself to such a dog. Witlesstein should have offered her his boner. Still, at least he didn't beat her- the way he had beaten a girl student of his in a village school- and then lie about beating her. It seems, his stay in England had made him less fucking Austrian. Sadly, it had also made him more unfeeling towards the suffering of a fellow Jew.
That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth,
Sure she does. We know that a dog that has been injured is in pain. We are co-evolved with that species and recognize its whimpers for what they are. Speaking generally, we treat it in a tender and sympathetic manner though we may have to put it down if its agony is too intense and no cure can be offered.
and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true.”
Her statement was true. She was in pain. Dogs which have been run over are in pain. Only an utter shithead like Witless could fail to see this.
Frankfurt concludes: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”
In which case, the essence of bullshit is shit produced by shitheads who teach worthless shite because they are too fucking stupid to do anything else.
Consider what Frankfurt wrote-
Now who knows what really happened?
We do. Witlesstein had some stupid theory about private languages and so forth. Also he was a self-obsessed swine lacking in basic human compassion.
It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings — so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be? So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired.
The nutter had previously confessed to her about beating a girl and then lying about it. But the reason he made the confession was because he thought he was super-duper special. Fania wasn't. She had a vagina. Vaginas are yucky.
He was only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he was disgusted by her remark,
as he was disgusted by her vagina.
when in fact he was only trying to cheer her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing.
Women know when they are being joshed. They also know when they are being told, to shut their ugly twats. How dare you compare yourself to a dog? I like it when my dog licks me. If you tried to lick me, I'd throw up. That's because you don't have a dick. Also you bleed from your kooch once a month. That's utterly repulsive.
In that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all.
But if Pascal failed to recognize that Wittgenstein was only teasing, then perhaps the possibility that he was serious was at least not so far out of the question. She knew him, and she knew what to expect from him; she knew how he made her feel. Her way of understanding or of misunderstanding his remark was very likely not altogether discordant, then, with her sense of what he was like.
Fania was well aware that some homosexuals in Cambridge really loathed women. But so did some of the more old fashioned dons. Women don't really have brains, you know. They are like parrots except they have vaginas- which are totes gross.
We may fairly suppose that even if her account of the incident is not strictly true to the facts of Wittgenstein’s intention, it is sufficiently true to her idea of Wittgenstein to have made sense to her.
It makes sense to us.
For the purposes of this discussion, I shall accept Pascal’s report at face value, supposing that when it came to the use of allusive or figurative language, Wittgenstein was indeed as preposterous as she makes him out to be.
No. He was taking a position similar to Nagel in 'what is it like to be a bat'. But, it did not apply because what was at issue was the question what is it like to think you are like a particular animal or object'.
Then just what is it that the Wittgenstein in her report considers to be objectionable? Let us assume that he is correct about the facts: that is, Pascal really does not know how run-over dogs feel. Even so, when she says what she does, she is plainly not lying.
She is eliding the phrase 'I think' which any sensible interlocutor would read in. What she didn't do was say to Witlesstein- 'you don't know what I know or think or feel. If you did, you would run away from me before I fucking stabbed you. Fuck the fuck off.'
She would have been lying if, when she made her statement, she was aware that she actually felt quite good. For however little she knows about the lives of dogs, it must certainly be clear to Pascal that when dogs are run over they do not feel good. So if she herself had in fact been feeling good, it would have been a lie to assert that she felt like a run-over dog.
No. Her statement was imperative, not alethic. Witless wasn't a Doctor. I suppose it could be called 'phatic'. She was sharing something with a guy who may not have had many friends. It backfired because he was a stupid cunt.
Pascal’s Wittgenstein does not intend to accuse her of lying, but of misrepresentation of another sort. She characterizes her feeling as “the feeling of a run-over dog.” She is not really acquainted, however, with the feeling to which this phrase refers.
Yes she is. She has seen injured dogs and cats. She belongs to a species which has found it advantageous to evolve sympathy of this sort. Sadly, Witless belonged to a lower order of animal. Still, he was good at beating the shit out of little girls.
Of course, the phrase is far from being complete nonsense to her; she is hardly speaking gibberish. What she says has an intelligible connotation, which she certainly understands. Moreover, she does know something about the quality of the feeling to which the phrase refers: she knows at least that it is an undesirable and unenjoyable feeling, a bad feeling. The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad.
Indeed. It engages our emotions. We, as a species, like dogs. Motorcars are a recent invention. Dogs did not evolve to avoid motorcars- indeed, they may chase after them. When a dog is hit by a car, some deep, even atavistic, feelings are released in us. Fania had just undergone a medical procedure in a sterile hospital environment- something relatively new in our evolutionary history. She feels she has been run over by something modern which is beyond her ken. We sympathize. When I was young, some elderly people felt that the worst fate was to die in a hospital bed. The thing was unnatural. Even to have to go to hospital for a minor procedure was an occasion for dread.
There's another point, mention of dogs normally causes us to want to stroke the hand or make some other such supportive gesture to the patient. Affection too is part of the healing process.
Her characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. To the Wittgenstein in Pascal’s story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit.
No. Witless came from a cultured enough family. Also he wasn't really high IQ. He understood well enough that the woman wanted him to stroke her hand and make sympathetic noises. He could have done so easily enough. But that sort of behaviour is a bit Jewy. Would an Aryan aristocrat stroke a Jewess's hand? Fuck off! He'd send her to some nice gas chamber while maintaining a very stiff upper lip. Homos care a lot about stiffness, you know.
Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal’s characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it strike him that way? It does so, I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being — roughly speaking, for now — unconnected to a concern with the truth.
She wasn't concerned with telling Witless the truth- viz. that he was a fucking maniac who should have gone to jail for beating and then lying about beating a little girl.
Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels.
We all know dogs don't feel good about being run over by cars or wheeled vehicles which haven't existed for very long in our evolutionary history.
Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up.
Nope. What she said was allusive and highly informative. The proper response is to show sympathy and then say how you find the nurses and Doctors at this place to be full of compassion though, for professional reasons, they try to conceal their tender concern for their patients. Next time you visit, you bring lots of flowers to brighten the place up. Also, why not bring a teddy bear or chocolate box with a nice picture of a puppy dog or cute little kitten on it?
She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.
Fania didn't have a dick. Thus she was either a liar or was utterly mindless. Good to know philosophy is as misogynistic as it was in Aristotle's time.
It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct. There is every likelihood, of course, that she says what she does only in a somewhat clumsy effort to speak colorfully, or to appear vivacious or good-humored; and no doubt Wittgenstein’s reaction — as she construes it — is absurdly intolerant. Be this as it may, it seems clear what that reaction is.
He ignores all relevant facts of the case- viz. Fania has undergone a medical procedure and is recovering, far from the bosom of her family, in a sterile atmosphere which seems to work like a factory rather than a place of healing and recovery. She compares herself to a dog hit by a car. She is literally whimpering with pain but is denied such caresses as even Witless would not with-hold from a dog. The truth is, some Jews at that time thought that the emotional and sympathetic part of their psyche was something which needed to be suppressed. The Aryan master-race laughed heartily when they saw a sick woman and quickly arranged for her to be gassed. Maybe a tasteful lampshade could be made from her skin.
He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the relevant facts. Her statement is not “wrought with greatest care.”
As I have shown, it was better than that. Both Pascals were literary scholars. It was their business to use language in a skilful manner.
She makes it without bothering to take into account at all the question of its accuracy.
So does Witless. So does Frankfurt. So did Aristotle and Frege and Russell. But Fania hits the nail on the head. She had studied Russian and German and English literature to some good purpose.
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.
She gets things right and then some. She knew about the 'Imagism' of people like Pound and Hulme. There is a concrete image here- whose 'haecceity' is also an epiphany of a universal type. A cultured literary scholar adrift in the age of, not Pushkin and Goethe but Hitler and Stalin, was indeed like a dog that had been run over by a type of contraption it could have no conception of.
This is important to Wittgenstein because, whether justifiably or not, he takes what she says seriously, as a statement purporting to give an informative description of the way she feels. He construes her as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false.
This is not the case. He is merely giving expression to a bee in his own philosophical bonnet. But his philosophy was stupid and had been superseded by Godel, Gentzen, Tarski or Turing (who used Brouwer choice sequences to some good purpose).
It is in this sense that Pascal’s statement is unconnected to a concern with truth: she is not concerned with the truth-value of what she says.
Imperative statements aren't alethic. Get over it.
That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
Bullshit is jargon of a pedantic or professional type. 'I feel like the phlogiston in the haemoglobin of my Pineal gland is adversely affecting the peristalsis of my endocrine system- just like that Manchurian dog studied by Pavlov which was hit by a Ukrainian tractor. That's why I'd appreciate it if you could buy me some heroin. Also cocaine. Prof. Rumpelstilskin recommends cocaine very highly for people like me because of our very large penises.'
Now I shall consider (quite selectively) certain items in the Oxford English Dictionary that are pertinent to clarifying the nature of bullshit. The OED defines a bull session as “an informal conversation or discussion, esp. of a group of males.”
Bulls are masculine. A bunch of guys may be referred to as bulls unless they kissing each other in which case they are as gay as fuck.
Now as a definition, this seems wrong.
It isn't a definition. It is a focal solution to a coordination game. The term bull-session arose spontaneously and was used in different ways by different people. It became convenient to give it one higher salience meaning though others were welcome to say 'in our State, 'bull session' means 'Chatham House rules' or else 'where I come from, 'bull session' involves bawdy talk and the drinking of beer'.
For one thing, the dictionary evidently supposes that the use of the term bull in bull session serves primarily just to indicate gender. But even if it were true that the participants in bull sessions are generally or typically males, the assertion that a bull session is essentially nothing more particular than an informal discussion among males would be as far off the mark as the parallel assertion that a hen session is simply an informal conversation among females.
In England we speak of 'hen nights'. Nothing wrong in that at all.
It is probably true that the participants in hen sessions must be females. Nonetheless the term hen session conveys something more specific than this concerning the particular kind of informal conversation among females to which hen sessions are characteristically devoted.
No it doesn't. Women can be very bawdy indeed.
What is distinctive about the sort of informal discussion among males that constitutes a bull session is, it seems to me, something like this: while the discussion may be intense and significant, it is in a certain respect not “for real.”
It may be, it may not. You may not be called on your bullshit at a faculty meeting but may be forced to stop pretending to be woke in a bull session.
Returning to Gavaler & Goldberg we find that they think Trump is as nice and as cultured as the lovely Favia.
Trump is a lot like Pascal.
She was a nice lady. Witless wasn't a nice man.
After the heating and cooling systems manufacturer Carrier announced it would keep jobs in Indiana due to tax incentives, Trump talked about watching an interview with a Carrier employee. The Washington Post quoted Trump describing the employee:
“He said something to the effect, ‘No we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.” Trump added, “I actually said I didn’t make [the promise]. When they played [my statement back], I said, ‘I did make it [to Carrier], but I didn’t mean it quite that way’.” As he explained: “I never thought I made that promise – not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.” The promise was, he said: “A euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in, because they made the decision a year and a half ago.”
This is a bit garbled but we get what Trump meant. He hadn't made a secret deal with a particular company. The tax incentives could be claimed by any company.
Aaron Blake, who included Trump’s explanation in an opinion piece in the Post, rejoined,
“You can make an argument that Trump was perhaps speaking more generally and using Carrier as an example of the type of company that would no longer be leaving under his presidency.”
Why bother? The thing is clear enough. Trump created tax incentives for everybody. He wasn't playing favourites.
If so, Trump was employing a synecdoche – a part used to refer to the whole. That would mean that ‘Carrier’ meant, say, all U.S. manufacturers. Except Trump apparently meant ‘everybody else’: that is, everybody except Carrier.
He misspoke. So what?
Blake continued:
“But this is a statement he made while in Indiana – in front of people who had a very strong interest in taking him literally. They did, and yet he was apparently surprised by that. Any studied politician would know that if you are in Indiana and you say Carrier won’t leave, you had better mean those exact words.”
Nonsense! You say what your audience wants to hear. Maybe you do something to bring about that outcome. Maybe you don't. 'Studied' politicians know that. But so do voters. That's why actual tax incentives, not imaginary ones, matter.
By “you had better mean those exact words”, Blake is
showing his utter naivete.
getting at what philosopher H. Paul Grice calls ‘implicature’ (see especially Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, 1989).
No he isn't. Blake is saying explicitly, not implicitly, that 'studied' politicians must keep promises they make. But this simply isn't true. We often want people to promise to do things which we don't want them to do. Thus, when my wife promised my Mum she would not deflower me, Mum hoped she would not keep her promise. This is because Mum wanted a grandchild. She didn't really care if I suffered horribly at the hands of my lustful bride.
Implicature is concerned not only with what you actually say, but with what you imply by what you say.
Or what you hope the other party will consider was implied by what you said or didn't say or the fact that you were farting with vim and vigour all through the interview.
Speakers communicate the meaning of their words in one of two ways: conventionally, by the words themselves, or conversationally, by their use of words in a specific context. Both ways require speakers and audience working together.
Nope. There are umpteen ways you can communicate. I do it with farts. You do it with flowers. Others prefer deeds to words. Yet others just expose their vaginas and point at it in an emphatic manner.
According to Grice, all good communication follows the Cooperative Principle:
He was wrong. If I see a crowd of people screaming hysterically and running in one direction, I join them. There is probably some clear and present danger I need to get the fuck away from.
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”
Fuck that! Ex ungue leonem- scream and run away if you see the paw of a lion- is a good way of communicating to others that they need to run the fuck away. Cows don't bother with the 'cooperative principle'. Nor do hunters with their dogs.
Grice divides this Principle into four maxims:
Because Stupidity can always be further subdivided.
Quantity: Make your contribution as – but only as – informative as required.
Fuck that. Just run away and others will get the idea that they need to run away too.
Quality: Try to make your contribution true.
Thus, if you say 'I feel like shit' you should also shit yourself and smear yourself with shit so that you will feel truly shitty.
Relation: Be relevant.
e.g. when talking about a politician don't drag in Witlesstein and Grice and other such useless shitheads.
Manner: Be clear by avoiding obscurity and ambiguity, and by striving for brevity and order.
in other words, don't do philosophy of any kind. The thing is just a cascade of intensional fallacies.
Speakers routinely flout those maxims, which is part of Grice’s point.
In other words, Grice is saying 'I have a theory which does not fit the facts. This does not mean I'm a shithead. It means everybody else is.'
Flouting a maxim conventionally indicates that a speaker is instead communicating conversationally.
Or is a philosopher. Nothing which these two nutters has been 'informative', 'true', 'relevant' or 'brief'.
So if I ask you whether you had a good holiday, and you reply, “Beautiful weather we’re having!” then you’re flouting (at least) the Relation maxim.
Nope. You are saying 'we aren't close. I tell my friends about my holidays. To acquaintances, I only speak about the weather.'
Today’s weather isn’t relevant to my question.
But the answer clearly establishes you aren't a friend. You are an acquaintance. Don't get above yourself.
Taken conversationally, however – that is, by understanding what you said in terms of the context in which you said it – what you said makes communicative sense. You’re indirectly telling me that your holiday wasn’t good.
Nonsense! If I ask my boss about his holiday he puts me in my place by mentioning the weather. This is the polite way of doing things. If I persist in treating him like a comrade, he might sack me.
Does Trump follow the Cooperative Principle of communication?
At times, very successfully indeed. At others he is all over the place. Still, once Comey at the FBI raised the red-herring of Hilary's emails, Trump stayed on point for 12 whole days and thus won the election.
According to journalist Salena Zito, “his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
Just as they took Obama and Biden seriously but not literally.
If so, Trump flouts the maxims conventionally in order to communicate conversationally.
These two nutters think a good conversation goes like this-
'I feel like shit.'
'No you don't! Shit has no feelings!'
'Go fuck yourself you fat cunt!'
'I have a dick, not a vagina. I can't fuck myself because my dick isn't long enough and bendy enough to reach my asshole. Why are you punching me? What is the Gricean implicature of this illegal assault?'
In the above quote he flouted Quantity. Saying ‘Carrier’ when he avowedly meant every U.S. manufacturing giant apart from Carrier, gave his audience too little information.
Nope. His audience got that his tax incentives had helped keep jobs in the State- e.g. Carrier.
He flouted Relation: ‘Carrier’ isn’t relevant to companies other than Carrier.
Yes it is. What other firms find it profitable to do is highly relevant to any given enterprise.
He flouted Manner: he was embracing rather than avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.
Not in any material sense. Anyway, Biden and Bush and Kamala often indulged in worse word-salads.
And Quality? If by ‘Carrier’ Trump genuinely meant everyone except Carrier, he did try to make his contribution true. He just flouted the other maxims. But if by ‘Carrier’ Trump meant what everyone else took him to mean – namely, Carrier – he didn’t try to make his contribution true. Yet he didn’t lie, since he didn’t mean to deceive. Trump just said something that felt right at the time. He wasn’t concerned with the truth of what he was saying at all. That’s the essence of bullshit.
No. This is merely fractured syntax where your intended meaning is clear enough. The essence of bullshit is to start gassing on about Witlesstein and Grice and pedants more obscure yet.
But Trump one-ups Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit. While Trump wasn’t concerned with the truth, and his intent wasn’t to deceive, he nevertheless was concerned with what his audience thought. He wanted people in Indiana to think he was going to make America great again, whether or not Carrier – or everyone except Carrier – had anything to do with it.
Nothing wrong with that. Americans want America to be Great. They don't want it to be a shithole.
Yet it’s hard to see what could have conversationally clued his audience into this meaning.
My tax incentives ensure there will be jobs for youse guys. That was the meaning.
As Blake observes, many in Indiana weren’t clued in.
Only because they were cows.
By flouting all of Grice’s maxims conventionally, and not clearly communicating even conversationally, Trump wasn’t communicating with his audience so much as talking at them.
He got his message across to them well enough. These two nutters are talking at us not to us because they are not concerned with the relevance, informativity or truth value of their claims which, in nuce, is that they teach a subject which will enable you to become a Professor like Jason Stanley or Amia Srinivasan who says 'boo to Trump! He is a bad man. Also, he has a dick. Dicks cause RAPE! Did you know that Professor Grice raped Wittgenstein with his dick due to Hitler was actually Donald Trump?'
His speech was governed by what we might call the Anti-Cooperative Principle:
you might call it that because you have shit for brains.
Make your conversational contribution seem such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged, even though it’s not.
The purpose is to say 'boo to Trump! Did you know he has a dick? Dicks cause RAPE! Also Neo-Liberalism.'
That’s beyond bullshit.
Nope. It is philosophy as a failed research program adversely selective of idiots.
The plain fact is, language is about Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. It isn't about Truth or 'Bullshit' or 'epistemic systems'. Now, it is certainly true that certain types of language or certain 'Structural Causal Models'- e.g. using the N-word and saying 'Country X is a shithole because it is run by Niggers'- can put you at risk of having your head kicked in and thus the Schelling focal solution to the coordination game can change. But that's because what matters is coordination not on what basis that coordination occurs.
In their latest book 'Revising Reality' these two nutters ask
What happened to the original, green-scaled dinosaurs after scientists decided dinosaurs had multi-colored feathers?
Nothing. Birds are descended from dinosaurs. Big whoop.
When overturning Roe v. Wade, did the Supreme Court end the right to abortion,
No. America has dual sovereignty. Each State can decide the matter for itself.
or did the Court claim that the right of the previous half century never existed?
Nope. The right existed for a period and then ceased to exist. The Supreme Court decides matters relating to Dual Sovereignty.
Since Ronald Reagan increased taxes,
he cut them and then Congress forced him to raise them
expanded government,
he didn't want to. Still, 'politics is the art of the possible'. Had Reagan faced the type of Congress America had in 2012, he would have been able to do much more.
and championed amnesty for undocumented immigrants,
he listened to the farmers. He had been a two term Governor of California. But immigration wasn't a hot potato back then.
who is the Ronald Reagan whom today's conservatives champion as a model president?
The guy who defeated the 'Evil Empire'
When a trans person comes out as trans, has their gender changed or has their gender remained consistent?
It hasn't changed till there is a medical procedure or determination. Some argue that I should be allowed to claim to be a woman even though I still have my dangly bits. Women don't seem to be too keen to embrace me as a sister. Indeed, they don't want to embrace me period.
Are our memories accounts of real events or some kind (or kinds) of revision?
They are largely revisions or confabulations.
And if our memories are in flux, what does that say about our memory-dependent identities?
Nothing. Identities are linked to physical bodies even if, after a blow to the head, I become convinced I am Beyonce. True, if I am a homicidal maniac with a machine gun, people may say 'Beyonce! How lovely to meet you' rather than 'look at that crazy fat cunt'. But this has nothing to do with philosophy.
