On Bullshit Review: Why Indifference to Truth Is Not the Same as Lying
Some books linger not because they change your mind, but because they give a precise name to something you had already noticed. Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is one of those.
I first noticed it when the essay appeared as a small standalone book in 2005. Part of its appeal was the contrast: a distinguished philosopher taking a word normally excluded from formal discourse and examining it with complete analytical seriousness. The joke carried the book into public attention, but the distinction at its centre is what allowed it to remain useful.
Bullshit, in Frankfurt’s account, is not a weaker or less offensive version of lying. The difference does not depend primarily on whether a statement is true or false. It depends on whether truth has been allowed to govern what the speaker is doing.
A liar must keep track of reality closely enough to conceal or contradict it. A bullshitter may use truth, falsehood, exaggeration or ambiguity with equal willingness, provided the result produces the desired impression.
An Essay Built Around One Distinction
On Bullshit first appeared in Raritan in 1986, nearly two decades before Princeton University Press published it as a short book. Its origin explains both its concentration and its limits.
Frankfurt is not attempting a history of propaganda, advertising or political manipulation. He describes his analysis as tentative and exploratory. His aim is to identify the structure of the concept: what makes bullshit recognisably different from lying, error, nonsense and other neighbouring forms of speech.
That narrowness is why the essay works. “Bullshit” ordinarily functions as a flexible term of abuse, capable of meaning falsehood, pretension, verbosity, empty ritual or simply something the listener dislikes. Frankfurt asks whether one specific failure lies beneath at least an important group of those cases.
The answer he develops is indifference to how things actually are. The defining failure is not necessarily deception about a particular fact. It is speaking as though one were engaged in truth-directed communication while allowing another purpose to determine what may be said.
The Liar Needs the Truth
A liar, in Frankfurt’s framework, remains tethered to truth. To construct a deliberate falsehood, the speaker must believe that they know the relevant facts and then design a statement intended to hide or replace them. Reality guides the lie negatively by determining what must be denied, omitted or distorted.
The bullshitter does not require the same commitment. Their statement may be false, but falsity is not essential. It may be accurate by accident, or may combine correct facts in a way that produces a misleading impression. Its suitability for the speaker’s purpose matters more than its relationship to the subject.
That purpose may be to appear knowledgeable, compassionate, confident, original or morally serious. It may be to satisfy an expectation, avoid admitting ignorance, flatter an audience or create the emotional atmosphere required for a sale, speech or institutional ritual.
This is why fact-checking alone cannot identify every instance. A false statement made after a serious but mistaken investigation is an error. A true statement selected without any concern for whether it is true may still form part of a bullshit performance.
Frankfurt’s most interesting claim concerns what the bullshitter necessarily fakes. The deception is not always about the facts or even about the speaker’s private beliefs. It concerns the nature of the enterprise. The speaker presents themselves as reporting, explaining or judging according to the truth when their attention is actually fixed on managing an impression.
That performance can be meticulous. Bullshit does not have to be careless, improvised or badly made. Advertising, public relations and political rhetoric can involve extensive research, testing and craftsmanship while refusing to let accuracy determine the final product. The laxity lies in the governing standard, not necessarily in the quality of execution.
Error, Nonsense and Exploratory Speech
Frankfurt’s definition is useful partly because it separates bullshit from other failures that may look similar from the outside. An honest mistake is not bullshit simply because it is wrong. A person can investigate carefully, care intensely about accuracy and still reach a false conclusion.
The cognitive biases and motivated errors discussed in the Journal’s review of Steven Pinker’s Rationality often belong to this category. People may sincerely want to reason well while remaining poor at recognising the distortions in their own thinking. Failure to reach truth is different from refusing to let truth govern the attempt.
Nonsense is not automatically bullshit either. A confused or meaningless statement may be produced without anyone attempting to simulate knowledge, authority or seriousness. The result can be useless without involving the distinctive fakery Frankfurt wants to isolate.
Nor does every speculative conversation qualify. Frankfurt discusses the “bull session,” where participants try out opinions, attitudes and exaggerated positions without presenting them as settled commitments. Everyone understands that the ordinary connection between speech and belief has been temporarily loosened.
That shared understanding changes the activity. The participants are not pretending that every statement expresses a carefully established judgement. Bullshit, by contrast, depends on preserving the appearance that the normal constraints remain in force.
Why Speech Outruns Knowledge
Frankfurt does offer an explanation for why bullshit is so common, although not a complete sociology of it. It proliferates when people’s obligations or opportunities to speak become greater than their knowledge of the relevant facts.
Public figures are expected to offer immediate positions on complicated events. Employees must express confidence in strategies they barely understand. Applicants are asked to describe a vacancy as the fulfilment of a long-standing ambition. Commentators are rewarded for reacting before enough evidence exists to know what happened.
Silence, uncertainty and “I do not know” often perform badly in institutions that reward fluency, certainty and continuous participation. The required impression may be clear even when the information needed to support it is absent.
Under those conditions, bullshit need not originate in unusually dishonest personalities. It can be generated by a role. A person may learn that their function is to provide reassurance, enthusiasm or interpretation on demand and that admitting the limits of their knowledge is treated as failure.
The problem becomes structural when the institution measures the success of the performance without testing its relationship to reality. A confident presentation can satisfy everyone in the room even when nobody has established whether its claims are sound.
Why Frankfurt Calls It a Greater Enemy
Frankfurt’s most provocative conclusion is that bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies. The claim sounds implausible if interpreted as a comparison of immediate consequences. A calculated lie can destroy a life, start a war or conceal an obvious danger, while an instance of harmless social bullshit may do very little damage.
His comparison concerns the speaker’s orientation. The honest person and the liar occupy opposite sides of the same activity. Both recognise a difference between getting the facts right and getting them wrong. One submits to that distinction; the other deliberately works against it.
The bullshitter steps outside the contest. Accuracy and falsity are considered only when they affect the success of the performance. The statement is selected because it is useful, impressive or convenient, not because the speaker has judged it to describe reality.
Repeated practice may therefore damage a habit that lying still requires: attending to how things are. A practised liar must continue tracking the truth in order to conceal it effectively. A practised bullshitter can become skilled at producing persuasive speech without asking the question at all.
This does not make every bullshitter more dangerous than every liar. It identifies a different form of epistemic damage. Lying violates a recognised standard; bullshit trains the speaker and audience to behave as though the standard were optional.
A Useful Definition with Porous Borders
The clarity of Frankfurt’s distinction is also its weakness. Ordinary language does not sort itself into clean philosophical categories. A person can lie about one fact while surrounding the lie with exaggeration, jargon and improvised assertions whose accuracy does not matter to them.
In a critical review of Frankfurt’s account, Karl Pfeifer argues that bullshitting can overlap with lying and may not always require either misrepresentation or an intention to deceive. The many ordinary uses of the term may be related by family resemblance rather than by one essential property.
That criticism seems persuasive. We use “bullshit” for empty verbosity, irrelevant detail, fake enthusiasm, bureaucratic ceremony, intellectual pretension and confidently repeated claims that the speaker may sincerely believe. Some cases fit Frankfurt’s model more comfortably than others.
Frankfurt partly anticipates the problem by describing his own analysis as rough and acknowledging that the phenomenon is too broad for a perfectly clean definition. His success does not depend on capturing every possible use. He isolates one important paradigm: communication that resembles truth-seeking while being controlled by an objective other than getting the subject right.
The paradigm remains especially valuable because its output can look responsible. A bullshitter may cite sources, use correct terminology and display every outward sign of serious inquiry. The failure lies in what would happen if the evidence pointed somewhere inconvenient.
Sincerity Is Not an Escape
The final pages take the argument in a more surprising direction. Frankfurt considers forms of scepticism that weaken confidence in objective truth and encourage a retreat towards sincerity. If the external world cannot be described with certainty, perhaps the speaker can at least be authentic and express their own nature honestly.
Frankfurt rejects the assumption that the self is uniquely transparent. There is no obvious reason to believe that people understand their own motives, identities and dispositions more reliably than they understand anything else. A person cannot avoid the difficulty of accuracy merely by changing the subject from the world to themselves.
Sincerity can therefore become another performance detached from truth. Emotional intensity does not establish that a self-description is accurate, and conviction does not prove that an identity has been examined rather than rehearsed. Bullshit does not require cynicism or emotional emptiness; it can be delivered with complete passion.
This is where the book’s narrow definition reaches beyond rhetoric. Frankfurt is defending the authority of reality over speech, even when reality is difficult to know. Uncertainty may justify caution, investigation or silence. It does not justify replacing accuracy with whatever account best expresses the image the speaker wants to inhabit.
On Bullshit did not radically change how I understood public discourse. Its achievement is smaller and more durable. It separates being wrong from not caring whether one is right, and it distinguishes deliberate falsehood from the simulation of inquiry by someone unwilling to accept its discipline.
Truth is often difficult, incomplete and contested. Frankfurt’s point is that none of those difficulties releases us from the obligation to let it constrain what we say.
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