Bullshit and Philosophy Part 7

This, of course, presents a challenge for the consumer of bulls.h.i.+t, namely, to ascertain the speaker's intent and to surmise the speaker's state of mind. Does the speaker intend to obfuscate? This is no simple task, but one that is certainly facilitated by the Cohen strategy: identifying the content will lead to an eradication of the process, and eradicate it we must, if we are to maintain our human dignity and maintain our capacity to reason and be moved by ideas, especially the ideas of right and wrong that allow us to lead lives we value.

14.

Bulls.h.i.+t at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems.

HEATHER DOUGLAS.

In recent public discussions about the use of science in policy-making, confusion has bred bulls.h.i.+t. The interface between science and policy is notoriously difficult, requiring technical competence and political savvy. At this difficult boundary, the need for quality science advice remains a pressing concern.

Ever since Plato's parable about the stargazer as expert navigator for the s.h.i.+p of state in The Republic, governments have grappled with the problem of how to get accurate and reliable expert advice on technical matters central to policy-making. In recent decades, as the scope of government concern has expanded and the need for technical advice becomes more acute, the debate surrounding the quality of science advice for policy-making has s.h.i.+fted, from excluding pseudoscience, to worries over "junk science," to the most recent concern over "politicized science." These s.h.i.+fts, however, merely rephrase the same question: On whom should we rely for expert advice? The question is not easily answered, and the resulting confusion allows bulls.h.i.+t to proliferate.

Two different kinds of bulls.h.i.+t flourish at the science-policy interface. The first trades on the complexities of evidence and technical detail on which many substantive policy choices rest-complexities that make it easy to confuse the public about the extent of uncertainties and contravening evidence in particular cases. This leads to a pervasive kind of bulls.h.i.+t in which statements are made that are not false, and thus not lies, but are deeply misleading. Operators on the interface can propagate these true but misleading statements, thus building support for desired policy choices.

The second kind of bulls.h.i.+t is more pervasive. It occurs when critics of scientific claims suggest that the evidence on which a decision is based is insufficient to support the decision. What makes this argument bulls.h.i.+t in most cases is that it often presupposes that we have a universal standard of evidential support which all claims must meet in order to be "scientific." Yet there is no such standard-particularly in cases where one must take into account evidence from multiple sources-and thus any appeal to such a standard is pure bulls.h.i.+t. Usually, what the critic really thinks is that the evidence is insufficient in this case to overcome their concerns about the implications of the claims, particularly if the claim is wrong and is accepted (or correct and is rejected). The consequences of error, of making an inaccurate empirical claim with political implications, is what is of concern to the critic, but rather than discuss these concerns openly, the critic simply declares that the evidence available does not meet the standards of "sound science" or is an example of "politicized science." This move confuses genuine cases of junk or politicized science from cases where burdens of proof are disputed, helping only to obscure the issues at stake.

Both of these kinds of bulls.h.i.+t are prevalent in discussions of science and policy-making, and they will be difficult to eliminate. The technical and esoteric nature of much of the evidence on which policy is based will make the first kind of bulls.h.i.+t attractive to anyone seeking to score political points in a science-based dispute. Constant vigilance is the only remedy. The second kind of bulls.h.i.+t is more amenable to cure, but only if we adjust our ideas about scientific reasoning to emphasize the weighing of evidence, uncertainty, and the consequences of error. Unfortunately, this will make science-based policy debates more complicated, and the temptation to oversimplify things and a.s.sume the existence of a universal standard of proof will always have an allure, especially in our sound bite age. Bulls.h.i.+t is more compact, portable, and convenient than full and open discussion.

Bulls.h.i.+t of the Isolated Fact In many policy disputes that depend on technical or scientific backgrounds, a welter of facts are relevant to the issue at hand. Even in the relatively simple cases of regulating toxic substances, for example, one needs to know the details of animal toxicology studies, whether there have been any accidental human exposures studied, what is known about the biochemistry of the substance, and how humans are currently exposed and to what levels. This welter of facts must then be considered in total to figure out whether and how to regulate a substance. Missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle can throw the whole picture off. For example, if a chemical causes liver cancer in rats, and is consumed by many people (although no studies of human effects have been conducted), it would seem prudent to regulate the chemical. But if one also knows that the rats have a substance in their livers that interacts with the chemical of concern to produce their cancers, a substance that is absent in humans, one will likely be much less alarmed. One must have as much of the available picture as possible.164 But having that takes a lot of work to develop, takes time to present to others, and even worse, may undermine the political outcome you desire. It's much easier in these inherently complex cases to pick and choose one's facts rather than grapple with all of the available evidence.

Cherry-picking one's facts, thus producing bulls.h.i.+t of the isolated fact, is particularly problematic in the case of the climate change debate. If the case of toxic substances seems complex, the case of global climate change magnifies this complexity many times over. Here we need to reflect upon past climate and its variability, current climate measurements, and future climate projections, which need to take into account as much of the earth's energy dynamics as possible. At the same time, we need accurate descriptions of atmospheric chemistry and physics, including the particulars on the many greenhouse gases that have been identified.165 All this complexity is in place before one even begins to address the possible effects of climate change on human and natural systems. It is little wonder that with such a complicated issue and such high stakes, the lure of selecting particular facts, even true ones, that in isolation prove totally misleading, is so tempting.

One example of this selectivity, and the bulls.h.i.+t that results, can be found in the use of recent climate records in the debate over climate change. Modestly reliable global temperature readings became available in the late nineteenth century, as climate data collection locations spread across the globe and regular sea surface temperature data began to be taken. The temperature records based on this data indicate a climate warming from 1890 to 1940, and then a climate cooling from 1940 to 1975. In the mid-1970s, the earth began to warm again according to these records, and has continued to do so. At first glance, this recent climate record does little to support the idea that humans, in producing greenhouse gases, are warming the climate. The early warming period corresponds to a modest increase of greenhouse gas production, but greenhouse gas production really went up after 1940, when the cooling began. This means that the world warmed during the smaller increase in greenhouse gases, and then cooled during the larger increase in greenhouse gases. If humans were influencing the climate between 1940 and 1975, why were global temperatures dropping?

This was a legitimate scientific question during the 1980s. Although global temperatures had begun to rise again by the mid-1970s, why temperatures had dropped during one of the most intensive periods of industrial expansion-and the accompanying increase of greenhouse gas productions-was unclear. In the early 1990s, however, as more research was completed on the functioning of the global climate, scientists discovered the importance of aerosols for the climate. Aerosols are particulates, including dust and sulfates, that cool the atmosphere. They tend to be short-lived in the atmosphere, was.h.i.+ng out after a few days (or a few years at most), but their impact on global climate can be dramatic. Research on aerosols allowed climate modelers to successfully predict the amount of global cooling that would follow from the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991, an eruption that spewed significant quant.i.ties of aerosols into the atmosphere.166 Volcanoes are not the only important source for aerosols however. The burning of fossil fuels also produces aerosols, aerosols that not only cool climate, but can cause acid rain. When we became concerned about acid rain in the 1970s and began to reduce the release of sulfates into the atmosphere (using "scrubbers" on smokestacks), we reduced the amount of aerosols that could cool the climate. The excess aerosols left in the atmosphere washed out in a few years, and when combined with the continued build-up of greenhouse gases, the warming trend reappeared. Thus, the increased industrial output from 1940 to 1975 produced both more greenhouse gases and more aerosols. The cooling effect of the aerosols likely masked the warming effect of the greenhouse gases during this period, and with the reduction of aerosol releases by industry, the warming trend re-emerged. The longer-lasting greenhouse gases were finally having their impact.

Including the fact of aerosols in one's understanding of climate records could be inconvenient, but ignoring aerosols produces bulls.h.i.+t. The research on aerosols was widely available by 1993. Several prominent articles and essays had appeared in Science, the foremost journal for scientific research in the United States.167 The research was summarized for a more popular audience in Scientific American in 1994.168 While questions remained about the precise impact of aerosols on the climate, aerosols had become an important part of understanding the climate and a likely explanation for the decrease in global temperatures between 1940 and 1975. Anyone who honestly partic.i.p.ated in the climate change debate was aware of this crucial scientific development.

Yet skeptics of global warming continued to point to the 19401975 decline in temperature as being out of sync with what one would expect were humans really changing the climate. For example, in his essay from The True State of the Planet, published in 1995, Robert Balling Jr. reinforces his skepticism over human-caused global warming by pointing to the lack of warming between 1940 and 1975.169 As he complains about how pre-1990 models predict more warming (based on greenhouse gas increases) than was actually measured, he fails to mention the research on aerosols and their masking effect. This slight omission was probably unnoticed by the casual reader, but it allowed Balling to suggest that the entire global warming scenario was poppyc.o.c.k. Such is the effectiveness of isolated fact bulls.h.i.+t.

Fred Singer is probably the most egregious spreader of this brand of bulls.h.i.+t for the global climate change debate. In a series of essays published in newspapers and other public sources, Singer repeatedly casts doubt on the reliability of climate models because of this warming, then cooling trend in the temperature record.170 He never mentions the possibility that human-produced aerosols might account for this record, nor that research was continuing on the topic. And the bulls.h.i.+t spread beyond Singer and Balling. In his report in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper in 1997, Guy Crittenden cited Singer and Balling as two of the "four hors.e.m.e.n of the nonapoca-lypse," giving heavy credence to Singer and Balling's claims, emphasizing the pre-1940 warming trend.171 So much the worse for public debate about climate change.

This is not to say that there were no problems with global climate models and the theory of climate change in the 1990s, or that they are all settled today. One concern was the discrepancy between land-based and satellite temperature readings of the planet. Satellites launched in the late 1970s had been collecting temperature data for over a decade, but the results did not square with ground-level temperature readings. The satellite data showed almost no warming where the ground level readings showed significant warming for the period 19801995.

Skeptics legitimately made much of this discrepancy, which was quite baffling to climate scientists. Indeed, the satellite data, coming from the purity of s.p.a.ce, uncontaminated by human error or local land-use changes, seemed to have a prima facie claim to greater reliability. Eventually, however, closer examinations of the data revealed that the satellite data agreed with the ground-level readings after all.172 The absolute reliability of satellite data, both in terms of instrumental purity and ability to capture global temperature accurately, could not be sustained. When the systemic errors of satellite readings were accounted for, and the raw data properly processed, there was a steady and significant warming trend. Although this re-examination of satellite readings has been widely publicized among scientists (with articles and news stories in Science and a National Academy report on the issue, cited in footnote 9), we can expect some skeptics to once again ignore this development as they claim that the earth is not really warming.

This bulls.h.i.+t of the isolated fact, the selected emphasis on particular data, is seductive. Science is a continually changing body of knowledge, and few can claim to be fully up-to-date on any given issue. Even scientists working in the field have difficulty in maintaining a cutting-edge awareness of every new piece of evidence, of every new interpretation. By bringing forth an isolated fact, and ignoring the complexities that undermine the desired significance of that fact, bulls.h.i.+tters play upon our intellectual limitations. They may succeed in some cases, but repeated emphasis on the isolated fact-especially after new evidence and its significance have been placed in prominent scientific outlets (such as Science, Nature, or a National Academy report)-is to show oneself to be playing a disingenuous intellectual game. As Harry Frankfurt suggests, it is to reveal oneself to be unconcerned with the truth. It is to show that one is willing to spread bulls.h.i.+t to win.

Bulls.h.i.+t of Universal Standards While isolated-fact bulls.h.i.+t trades on the impossibility of staying well-informed about every technical issue central to modern governance, universal standards bulls.h.i.+t has a more philosoph-ical source. Rather than showing a lack of concern for available evidence as with the isolated fact bulls.h.i.+t, universal standards bulls.h.i.+t appeals to a nonexistent standard of proof for science. It a.s.sumes that there is one standard met by all scientific claims worthy of the name, and that we can tell what is sound science or good science from what is junk science or bad science (or non-science or pseudoscience) by simply checking with this standard. Lately, the universal standards bulls.h.i.+t has found new employ in bolstering arguments about the politicization of science. This is a disturbing trend, increasing not only the spreading of this bulls.h.i.+t, but also obfuscating crucial issues in the use and misuse of science in political life.

Where does a sense of universal standards in science come from? Most likely, it comes from the way most of us were taught science in school-from a textbook. The textbook lays out the complexities of science, both theory and fact, and then uses exercises at the end of each chapter to test our comprehension. How to apply the newly learned science to the specific case in the problem can be a challenge, but we were all rea.s.sured that there is a right answer, if not in the back of the book, then in the back of the teacher's book. This leads us to think of science as a black-and-white affair of facts, organized by theories into concrete knowledge. Occasionally, textbooks may hint at the frontiers of science, where the theories and facts are not so well nailed down. But they generally make science look like a done deal, ready to be applied to any problem situation. And the answers are all there, in the back of the book.

Any honest look at science in action, however, shows that things are far messier. For many problems, even the experts disagree over which theory to apply, and how to apply it. And, frustratingly, most of our science policy issues sit in areas like this where science is developing and textbooks have yet to be written. While some facts are undisputed-indeed that something is undisputed among scientists is the only reliable marker that it is a scientific fact-there is much that remains controversial. Universal-standards bulls.h.i.+t a.s.sumes that there is some threshold that any body of evidence must meet before it is "scientific" and "proven" and only then can we act on it. It a.s.sumes there is a universal standard of proof that allows some ideas into the vaulted halls of science, and keeps the rest out. What I want to suggest here is that not only is there no such standard, but that we don't want one. Thus appealing to this standard as if it both existed and could solve all of our problems at the science-policy interface perpetuates a pernicious form of bulls.h.i.+t.

Appeals to the universal standard of proof appear in criticisms of politicized science from all sides. The Union of Concerned Scientists, in their report on Scientific Integrity in Policy-Making, rightly points to suppression of evidence and the refusal to release studies as examples of politicizing science.173 If the evidence cannot be made public and discussed, then science's open forum of debate is severely compromised. But the report also considers the weighing of uncertainty by the Bush administration to be a politicization of science. It says that "Bush administration spokespersons continue to contend that the uncertainties in climate projection and fossil fuel emissions are too great to warrant mandatory action to slow emissions" (p. 5). If this is politicizing science, however, then there must be some objective universal threshold that once pa.s.sed make the uncertainties irrelevant.

But there is honest debate about both the level of uncertainty in climate projections (although that uncertainty is generally decreasing each year) and about what level of certainty we would need to have to warrant mandatory fossil fuel use reductions. The latter choice is clearly a political decision, and depends on how protective one wants to be of the fossil fuel industry versus the global climate's stability. We might lambaste the Bush administration for valuing the former too much over the latter, but any appeal to some universal standard of proof, a nonexistent ideal, to address this issue would be bulls.h.i.+t.

A similar example can be found in the introductory chapter of the volume Politicizing Science,174 in which Michael Gough, in providing an overview of the book, writes that: The authors of the chapters . . . describe scientists masking policy decisions as 'scientific', and politicians labeling politically driven decisions as scientific, attempting thereby to place them outside the realm of political discussion, debate, and compromise. But this is an illusion. All policy matters involving human health and the environment are political. The more that political considerations dominate scientific considerations, the greater the potential for policy driven by ideology and less based on strong scientific underpinnings. (p. 3) This sounds like a useful unmasking of politicized science, but only until one asks what those strong scientific underpinnings are supposed to be. When is a body of evidence enough to be considered "strong"? Surely we want evidence to serve as one basis for our decisions, but is evidence alone sufficient? Even Gough admits it is not. He writes a few pages later that Karl Popper has informed us science requires two things: hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing175 (Gough p. 12). He then claims that neither models underlying predictions of human cancer rates nor climate change models can be tested. (The ability to predict the cooling following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo mentioned earlier can be considered a fair short-term test of climate models.) Yet hypothesis formation and testing are not sufficient for something to be an acceptably strong scientific underpinning for a policy decision. The crucial issue is usually how much evidence and testing there has been, what kinds of testing have been done, and whether the available evidence is enough. Deciding that it is enough is in part a political decision, as it requires the weighing of the acceptability of uncertainty. Gough is implicitly relying upon a non-existent universal standard of proof for science, one that he never articulates or defends. Thus is it easy to claim that those who attempt to martial evidence in favor of increased regulation have failed to provide sufficiently strong evidence. Unnamed universal standards can always be adjusted higher when desired.

Why is there not one standard of proof, one hurdle for evidence before a claim becomes credible and scientific? In part, it is because the evidence that supports claims about the world comes in so many different forms. The evidence that would support a claim of causation about a chemical substance causing cancer in a mammal (evidence from animal toxicology and perhaps biochemistry) looks quite different from evidence that would support a claim about a geological causal process that leads to certain mountain formations. Even statistical significance claims, arguably a "gold standard" in science (commonly thought to be p < 0.05="" or="" a="" less="" than="" a="" one-in-twenty="" chance="" that="" the="" results="" are="" spurious)="" are="" not="" universally="" applicable.="" not="" all="" evidence="" is="" statistical,="" and="" some="" studies="" require="" more="" stringent="" or="" less="" stringent="" standards="" for="" the="" results="" to="" be="" "statistically="" significant."="" among="" different="" disciplines="" and="" fields,="" what="" it="" takes="" to="" convince="" the="" scientists="" in="" those="" fields="" will="" vary,="" depending="" on="" what="" they="" already="" take="" to="" be="" accepted="" knowledge="" and="" accepted="" techniques.="" as="" the="" adage="" goes,="" extraordinary="" claims="" require="" extraordinary="" evidence.="" but="" what="" an="" extraordinary="" claim="" is="" can="" vary="" with="" disciplinary="" background="" and="" personal="">

Perhaps we could standardize all this complexity, and require that scientists keep to a single standard for sufficient evidence. One could argue that drug testing has developed such standards-that a statistically significant result from a double-blind control study with placebos is the standard that must be met. But does this standard make sense for climate studies, for example, where there is no alternate earth on which to experiment? These studies involve predictions about how perturbations will affect the climate, and such predictions provide useful checks on climate models. But a simple model for controlled experiments when applied to environmental sciences is neither accurate nor helpful. Also, consider whether the universal standard employed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is really so simple. Even with this standardization of study type, the FDA must still decide whether the study was conducted with an appropriate sample of people, and whether the study ran for long enough, to support the claims made for the drug. And it must decide whether the apparent risks of a new drug are outweighed by their benefits, a judgment made in the context of other medications available. So even with the apparently standardized approach to evidence, judgment in weighing the risks and benefits of error is needed. The question will still remain, is the evidence enough?

No universal answer to this question is available because the contexts in which these judgments must be made vary so widely. Whether the evidence available is sufficient depends in large measure on what the risks are of getting it wrong. These risks arise because of the uncertainty inherent in the enterprise of science, uncertainty that is endemic and unavoidable (although reducible). Even if uncertainty is similar in two cases, the risks of error vary with the claim being examined and the context of the claim. Consider a few everyday examples. Suppose I told you I thought it likely that your gas tank gauge was off, and that you would run out of gas on the way home. The risk of error in rejecting my claim is not terribly huge. It would be inconvenient for you to run out of gas, but probably not life-threatening. You would want to know exactly why I thought this about your as gauge, on the basis of what evidence, and decide whether it really was enough to get you to take the car directly to a mechanic rather than wait and see for yourself. On the other hand, if I told you I thought there was a bomb in your car, the slightest amount of evidence would suffice to get you to think twice about driving it, just as the mere presence of an unattended package at a major airport can cause terminals to be evacuated.

Decisions at the interface of science and policy are no different. If you care deeply about climate stability and not much about the economic health of oil companies, less evidence will be needed to convince you that we have sufficient reason to act to curtail climate change-that the scientific underpinnings are strong enough. If, on the other hand, you care deeply about the health of oil companies and not much about climate stability, far more evidence will be needed to convince you that the we have sufficient evidence to act. Decisions about uncertainties are political (and ethical), and thus the decision that evidence is sufficient is a political decision.

This is not to say that science can't be politicized. It can. One can suppress evidence, by either refusing to record it because one doesn't like it, or by refusing to allow it to be published. One can refuse to allow politically unpopular views to be pursued. One can ignore studies one doesn't like, or fire people who produce the "wrong" results. One can surround oneself with pseudo-experts who only say what one wants to hear. Science can be detrimentally and catastrophically politicized. Yet, there is no standard for how much evidence is enough to settle a scientific dispute. The only standard we have is that we should consider all the available evidence. How much evidence we need before a claim is sufficiently well-supported to be scientific, to enter the canons of science, changes with the context. To appeal to a non-existent universal standard of proof in science is bulls.h.i.+t.

Combatting the Two Kinds of Bulls.h.i.+t With the ever-increasing importance of scientific or technical expertise as a basis for policy-making, it's not surprising that we are increasingly confronted with the problem of how to ensure quality in that advice. How do we make sure we are hearing all the available evidence? How do we ensure that the debates occurring among experts are not being distorted by political pressure to not say some things, or to say others, because it pleases certain powers? How do we know whom to trust?

Isolated-fact bulls.h.i.+t plays upon our inherent intellectual limitations that keep us from being fully informed and up-to-date on all the important issues of our time. As long as political operators want to win debates no matter the cost, this kind of bulls.h.i.+t will occur. Those who refuse to acknowledge fair criticism of their claims, that they are ignoring key work, should be rejected as intellectually dishonest. While we can exclude dishonest operators from the academic forum, the public forum must remain open to all. Fred Singer can continue to write commentaries resting on the isolated fact, and some newspapers will publish them, spreading the bulls.h.i.+t. Only those who follow the particular issue closely are likely to notice the spreading of bulls.h.i.+t in these cases, bulls.h.i.+t that is borne of selective omission and emphasis. Even those who spread such bulls.h.i.+t may not realize the nature of their claims, as the claims often wear an apparent obviousness.

But universal standards bulls.h.i.+t can be permanently undermined once we recognize that there are no such things. We should be asking about the strength of evidence and the risks of error for science-based policy, rather than waiting for something to become "scientific" or text-book science. With a more robust discussion on these terms, perhaps isolated-fact bulls.h.i.+t will lose some of its appeal as well. When we get used to expert disagreement, and understand better its causes, settling a debate on the basis of one expert raising one isolated fact might be recognized for the naive approach it is. We can only hope this would reduce the bulls.h.i.+t in the end.

15.

Rhetoric Is Not Bulls.h.i.+t.

DAVID J. TIETGE.

I begin my discussion of the role of rhetoric in modern society with an aphorism: Rhetoric isn't devious and untrustworthy; those are features reserved for language itself. This is a distinction, however, that is lost on the public at large, whose perception of the word 'rhetoric' renders it synonymous with 'bulls.h.i.+t'.

Several years ago, I conducted an admittedly unscientific, journalistic experiment for a course in rhetorical theory I was teaching at the time. Over the course of three-and-one-half months (the length of a typical university semester), I encountered some 156 occasions via print, radio, and television where the term 'rhetoric' occurred. Of these, only once did the user of the word seem to understand what rhetoric really was. In all other instances, the person employing the word used it only in the most unfavorable sense, for example, "John Kerry is attempting to use rhetoric to disguise his true agenda," or "The rhetoric in the Senate was thick regarding the proposal of the new bill."

The one case in which the user understood the meaning of 'rhetoric' was an interview of the comedian, George Carlin, conducted by Jon Stewart. Stewart had asked Carlin why his comedy routines so often centered on language (a very good interview question, in my opinion), to which Carlin responded that he was, in essence, a rhetorician; it was his job to unpack the meaning behind words, and this process often had comic results. He said he was a performer, and as such, a focus on language was imperative to his success or failure. By reflecting on this practice, he had also demonstrated that he was equally cognizant of the theoretical process that drove his craft.

The decline of rhetoric as a central humanistic discipline in both public and academic circles has been one of the great intellectual tragedies of the last couple of centuries. The common perception of rhetoric as a mode of discourse lacking substance, of being the epitome of empty embellishment, is prevalent in popular and political representations of it, as evidenced in its frequent appearance in phrases like "once one gets past the rhetoric" or "all rhetoric aside."176 In the twentieth century, the privileged status of rhetoric in the Trivium of the Seven Liberal Arts came to be regarded as ancient history, to be supplanted by "purer," more material intellectual pursuits in the sciences. Rhetoric, like its close disciplinary cousin, philosophy, has been relegated in the public mind to the ever-growing realm of "bulls.h.i.+t," reflecting an error in understanding of what scholars do when they practice rhetoric, and even more profoundly, what they do when they use rhetoric as a tool for critically decoding discourse. At the same time, members within academe regularly challenge modern rhetorical studies as too broad and interdisciplinary-lacking the prestige of specialization. Academicians outside of rhetoric usually see rhetoric only as an archaic study of how to persuade through the instructional lenses of Aristotle or Cicero. Taken together, it is surprising that the popular and the academic perceptions of rhetoric have not managed to bury it altogether.

In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Rather than fading quietly into the past as some academic anachronism like philology, rhetoric is fast becoming one of the more popular humanistic studies in many major American universities today. How can it be that, while the public at large claims to distrust rhetoric, and academics outside of fields like English or Communication see it only in reductionistic or archaic terms, rhetoric is thriving as a field of study, especially at the graduate level?177 One answer may be that initiating students into the scholarly and professional activities that rhetoric enhances-just as they are exposed to its breadth of scope-reveals to them how unfair and inaccurate these popular impressions are. Many come to realize that rhetoric enables a command of language, and that if one controls language, one has power-that is, they come to realize that "bulls.h.i.+t" is a marketable talent, and an understanding of rhetoric allows one to more carefully cultivate one's skills in this timeless human ability.

We live, it would appear, in something like a societal paradox. Rhetoric-taken to be expertise in "bulls.h.i.+t"-is ethically suspect, yet we value it in practice. Judging from the salaries and prestige of lawyers, politicians, university presidents, and advertising executives, we value it quite highly. One must wonder, then, why rhetoric has inherited such a poor reputation. I will attempt to sort this out by explaining the value of and use of rhetoric in popular culture and society; and show that our own intellectual history and rhetorical activity supports a place for rhetoric in education, the professional world, and our daily lives. This two-p.r.o.nged approach will help dispel a popular "truth-falsity" dichotomy, according to which we think of statements or beliefs as either true or false, regardless of the complexity and gray areas that rhetoric shows us are always involved.

The Problem (and Politics) of Rhetoric This may seem to fall outside the purview of rhetoric as it is traditionally understood by most academics, what is known as rhetorica utens. But the contemporary study of rhetoric is more than what most academics understand as the Aristotelian "art of persuasion"; it is rhetorica docens, the theoretical treatment of words used to discover how language means among different agents, motives, cultural and social idiosyncrasies, and external events. While some might argue that Aristotle was as philosophically interested in the nature of language as he was in instructing how it could best be used, his most influential work on the subject, On Rhetoric, is ultimately a "how-to" primer on the use of rhetoric as a civic tool. He identifies many principles and constructs many definitions, but there is no real effort to view rhetoric as anything but a practical mechanism for effective speaking. Aristotle himself coined the distinction between utens and docens, but he was far more concerned with the former.

Aristotle's prejudice has survived him. We are mostly ignorant of rhetoric as a tool for communication, and entirely ignorant of it as a set of methods for textual a.n.a.lysis. The most likely explanation for this cites the ma.s.s media and the political pundits who carelessly toss around the word in only its most uncomplimentary form. The pundits who display their contempt for rhetoric may in fact be using the word 'rhetoric' in a rhetorical way. That is, they may well understand that the public's erroneous understanding of the word is occasion to use it to reinforce the a.s.sociations the public already has for it. Rather than correct this error, it is easier to perpetuate it, taking advantage of the fas.h.i.+onable preference for "plain" language. In this regard politicians are among the most adroit insofar as they criticize rhetoric while relying upon it heavily for their own advancement. Everyone else uses "mere rhetoric," the pundit of the moment tells us, as if effective use and understanding of language were something to "get beyond" or "overcome."

For a good example of how one can both disdain rhetoric and utilize it for political gain, consider a statement by George W. Bush regarding Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito: "My hope of course is that the Senate bring dignity to the process and give this man a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor." 178 Bush, long a proponent of what he considers "plain speech," would perhaps not recognize the rhetorical layers of this statement, but they exist. The first is his "hope" that the Senate will "bring dignity to the process," the suggestion being that any attempt to extend debate (by filibuster, for instance) would be undignified. The statement is odd for it implies that democracy itself, which relies on open discussion of important decisions, is undignified. Such an unpatriotic sentiment cannot be what Bush intended his listeners to hear, so we have to consider more layers to figure out what's going on.

Bush also appeals to the notion of a "fair hearing." But this is a subjective term, depending upon individual beliefs and tolerances. Edward Kennedy's and Samuel Alito's definitions of fair, for instance, surely differ considerably depending on who may be getting the criticism at the moment. What about this "up-or-down vote"? It's an interesting requirement and is no doubt related to the issue of "fairness" as well as to the public image that helped bring Bush two presidential elections. Bush is widely seen, that is, as a man of few words-a man of action who does not wish to waste time sallying the pros and cons back and forth all day. Either vote with the confirmation or against it, the statement suggests, but do not, above all, be indecisive or contemplative about it. For careful, thorough debate, after all, would effectively delay and possibly derail his nomination. The real thrust of Bush's statement, then, is something more like the reading of it suggested by the faux newspaper, The Onion, which headlined "Bush Urges Senate to Give Alito Fair, Quick, Unanimous Confirmation," as if any outcome besides the one Bush hoped for would be unfortunate and undignified.179 In this way, rhetorical scrutiny of language allows us to see past the glittering generalities in language and get to an authentic meaning, both in regard to what is being a.n.a.lyzed and to the a.n.a.lyst in question. It should be clear, for example, that I do not like Bush and do not agree with his politics. I a.s.sure you that I deliberately made no attempt to obscure this (much less with "mere rhetoric"), because I want to emphasize that subjectivity need not compromise the integrity of the reading. Subjectivity is part of language, especially language that reflects beliefs and strongly guarded convictions. All language reflects both personal and collective orientations-some are just more obvious than others. In the case of science, the ethos of scientific objectivity can, in fact, aid the rhetor in achieving the necessary persuasion or identification, since people are less likely to question the integrity of a system of knowledge with a reputation for objectivity. Yet even science, like every discursive instrument, relies on words that are imprecise and ambiguous.

The Truth about Postmodernism One issue that helps obscure the universality of rhetoric, and thus promotes the pejorative use of 'rhetoric', is the popular tendency to oversimplify the "truth-lie" dichotomy. In The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood, Jeremy Campbell reminds us that the reductionistic binary that separates truth from falsity is not only in error, but also that the thoroughly unclear and inconsistent distinction between the true and the false has a long, rich cultural history.180 Those doing much of the speaking in our own era, however, a.s.sume that the dividing line between truth and untruth is clear and, more significantly, internalized by the average human. Truth, however, is an elusive concept. While we can cite many examples of truths (that the sky is blue today, that the spoon will fall if dropped, and so forth), these depend on definitions of the words used. The sky is blue because 'blue' is the word we use to describe the hue that we have collectively agreed is bluish. We may, however, disagree about what shade of blue the sky is. Is it powder blue? Blue-green? Royal Blue? Interpretive responses to external realities that rely on definition (and language generally) always complicate the true-false binary, especially when we begin to discuss the nature of abstractions involved in, say, religion or metaphysics. The truth of 'G.o.d is good' depends very heavily upon the speaker's understanding of G.o.d and the nature of goodness, both of which depend upon the speaker's conceptualization, which may be unique to him, his group, or his cultural environment, and thus neither clear nor truthful to other parties.

Is this rampant relativism? Some might think so, but it is perhaps more useful to suggest that the Absolute Truths that we usually embrace are unattainable because of these complexities of language. Some cultures have seen the linguistic limitations of specifying the Truth. Hinduism has long recognized that language is incapable of revealing Truth; to utter the Truth, it holds, is simultaneously to make it no longer the Truth.

Note here the distinction between capital 'T' truth and lower-case 't' truth. Lower-case truths are situational, even personal. They often reflect more the state of mind of the agent making the utterance than the immutable nature of the truth. They are also temporally situated; what may be true now may not be in the future. Truth in this sense is predicated on both perception and stability, and, pragmatically speaking, such truths are tran-sitional and, often, relative. Capital 'T' Truths can be traced back at least as far as Plato, and are immutable, pure, and incorruptible. They do not exist in our worldly realm, at least so far as Plato was concerned. This is why Plato was so scornful of rhetoric: he felt that rhetoricians (in particular, the Sophists) were opportunists who taught people how to disguise the Truth with language and persuasion. Whereas Plato imagined a realm in which the worldly flaws and corruption of a physical existence were supplanted by perfect forms, the corporeal domain of human activity was saturated with language, and therefore, could not be trusted to reveal Truth with any certainty.

Contemporary, postmodern interest in truth and meaning turns the tables on Plato and studies meaning and truth in this s.h.i.+fting, less certain domain of human activity. Campbell cites many thinkers from our philosophical past who helped inaugurate this development, but none is more important than Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, humans have no "organ" for discerning Truth, but we do have a natural instinct for falsehood. "Truth," as an abstraction taken from the subjectivity of normal human activities, was a manufactured fiction that we are not equipped to actually find. On the other hand, a natural apt.i.tude for falsehood is an important survival mechanism for many species. Human beings have simply cultivated it in innovative, sophisticated, ways. As the rhetorician George A. Kennedy has noted, "in daily life, many human speech acts are not consciously intentional; they are automatic reactions to situations, culturally (rather than genetically) imprinted in the brain or rising from the subconscious."181 Our propensity for appropriate (if not truthful) responses to situations is something nourished by an instinct to survive, interact, protect, and socialize. Civilization gives us as many new ways to do this as there are situations that require response.

This is why Nietzsche carefully distinguished Truth from a belief system that only professed to contain the Truth. Ken Gemes notes that Nietzsche co-ordinated the question of Truth around the pragmatics of survival,182 an observation echoed by Kennedy, who provides examples of animals that deceive for self-preservation. Camouflage, for example, can be seen in plants and animals. Many birds imitate the calls of rival species to fool them to distraction and away from their nests or food sources. Deception, it seems, is common in nature. But Nietzsche took doctrinal Truth (note the "T") to be one of the most insidious deceptions to occur in human culture, especially as it is articulated in religions. It is not a basic lie that is being promulgated, but rather a lie masquerading as the Truth and, according to Nietzsche, performing certain functions. Truth, that is, is a ritualized fiction, a condition manufactured for inst.i.tutions and the individuals who control them to maintain their power.

Rhetoric and Bulls.h.i.+t Truth, deception, control over others. This survey of rhetoric thus brings us close to the territory that Harry Frankfurt explores in On Bulls.h.i.+t. For Frankfurt, however, bulls.h.i.+t has little to do with these complexities about truth and Truth that rhetoric helps us identify. Indeed bulls.h.i.+t, for Frankfurt, has little do with truth at all, insofar as it requires an indifference to truth. Does this mean, then, that language that is not bulls.h.i.+t has settled the matter of truth and has access to truth (or Truth)? Does this lead us to a dichotomy between truth and bulls.h.i.+t that is similar to the dichotomy between truth and falsity that postmodernism criticizes? It may seem that postmodernism has little place in Frankfurt's view, insofar as he rejects "various forms of skepticism which deny that we have any reliable access to objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are" (p. 64). Indeed, postmodernism is often vilified as the poster child of relativism and skepticism.

Yet postmodernism is far subtler than a mere denial of "objective reality." Postmodernism claims, rather, that reality is as much a construct of language as it is objective and unchanging. Postmodernism is less about rejecting beliefs about objective reality than about the intersection between material reality and the human interpretations of it that change, mutate, and s.h.i.+ft that reality to our own purposes-the kind of small-t truths that Nietzsche addressed. The common complaint about post-modernism, for example, that it denies "natural laws," forgets that humans noticed and formulated those laws. Postmodernism attempts to supply a vocabulary to describe this kind of process. It is not just "jargon," as is so often charged; it is an effort to construct a metalinguistic lexicon for dealing with some very difficult and important epistemological questions.

And, not surprisingly, so is rhetoric. Constructing language that deals with the nature of language is a unique human problem. It is meta-cognition at its most complicated because it requires us to use the same apparatus to decode human texts that is contained in the texts themselves-that is, using words to talk about words, what Kenneth Burke referred to in The Rhetoric of Religion as "logology."183 In no other area of human thinking is this really the case. Most forms of intellectual exploration involve an extraneous phenomenon, event, agent, or object that requires us to bring language to bear upon it in order to observe, describe, cla.s.sify, and draw conclusions about its nature, its behavior, or its effect. For example, scientific inquiry usually involves an event or a process in the material world that is separate from the instruments we use to describe it. Historical a.n.a.lysis deals with texts as a matter of disciplinary course, yet most historians rarely question the efficacy or the reliability of the language used to convey an event of the remote (or, for that matter, recent) past. Even linguistics, which uses a scientific model to describe language structure, deals little with meaning or textual a.n.a.lysis.

Law is one of the closest cousins of rhetoric. Words are very much a part of the ebb and flow of legal wrangling, and the attention given to meaning and interpretation is central. Yet, even here, there is little theoretical discussion about how words have meaning or how, based on such theory, that meaning can be variously interpreted. Law is more concerned with the fact that words can be interpreted differently and how different agents might interpret language in different ways. This is why legal doc.u.ments are often so unreadable; in an attempt to control ambiguity, more words (and more words with specific, technical meanings) must be used so that multiple interpretations can be avoided. If theoretical discussions about how language generates meaning were entered into the equation, the law would be impossible to apply in any practical way. Yet, to understand legal intricacies, every law student should be exposed to rhetoric-not so they can better learn how to manipulate a jury or falsify an important doc.u.ment, but so they understand how tenuous and limited language actually is for dealing with ordinary situations. Moreover, nearly every disciplinary area of inquiry uses language, but only rhetoric (and its a.s.sociated disciplines, especially philosophy of language and literary /cultural criticism, which have influenced the development of modern rhetoric considerably) a.n.a.lyzes language using a hermeneutical instrument designed to penetrate the words to examine their effects-desired or not-on the people who use them.

What, then, qualifies as "bulls.h.i.+t"? Certainly, as I hope I have shown, rhetoric and bulls.h.i.+t are hardly the same thing. They are not even distant cousins. When a student begins a paper with the sentence, "In today's society, there are many things that people have different and similar opinions about," it's a pretty good guess that there is little of rhetorical value there. About the only conclusion a reader can draw is that the student is neither inspired nor able to hide this fact. This is the extent of the subtext, and it could conceivably qualify as bulls.h.i.+t. In this sense, Frankfurt's characterization of bulls.h.i.+t as "unavoidable whenever circ.u.mstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about" (p. 63) is a useful differentiation.

But aside from these rather artificial instances, if bulls.h.i.+t does occur at the rate Frankfurt suggests, we have an arduous task in separating the bulls.h.i.+t from more interesting and worthy rhetorical situations. We have all met people whom we know, almost from the moment of acquaintance, are full of bulls.h.i.+t. It is the salesman syndrome that some people just (naturally, it seems) possess. In one sense, then, poor rhetoric-a rhetoric of transparency or obviousness-can be construed as bulls.h.i.+t. For the person with salesman syndrome is certainly attempting to achieve identification with his audience; he may even be attempting to persuade others that he is upright or trustworthy. But he fails because his bulls.h.i.+t is apparent. He is a bad rhetorician in the sense that he fails to convince others that he should be taken seriously, that his words are worthy of attention and, possibly, action.

Bulls.h.i.+t is something we can all recognize. Rhetoric is not. My remedy for this situation is simple: learn rhetoric. While students are required to take first-year composition at most colleges and universities, the extent of their training in rhetoric is usually limited to the rhetorical "modes"-yet another curricular misnomer which forces students to write preordained themes that reflect "skills" like definition, comparison and contrast, process a.n.a.lysis, and narrative.184 This is a far cry from teaching the extent of rhetorical a.n.a.lysis. At best, this method creates an artificial environment in which to generate predetermined papers and ideas. At worst, it perpetuates the illusion that this is how real writers really write. A better approach is to offer hypothetical situations that require a rhetorical response (for example, ask students to imagine that they are the princ.i.p.al of a high school with low test scores and are required to explain the problem to the parents). Having students read model essays and deconstruct, edit, critique, or imitate these essays is also good. Yet another approach is to have students watch for occurrences of interesting rhetorical situations-to produce a "commonplace book" of rhetoric. No matter how students learn to think about the language they use and the language that dominates their lives, as long as they are thinking about language, they have a better chance of not falling victim to bulls.h.i.+t. In this age of the Internet, this is an important skill. However, since not everyone is a teacher or a student, the common citizen must be diligent on her own.

If the trend in graduate humanities programs favoring rhetoric is any indication, interest in a theoretical knowledge of language is on the rise. Likewise, since Frankfurt has opened the door for considering an issue that we can only conclude by its sheer popularity has some cultural currency in American society, we can also conclude that people have some genuine interest in the topic of language. His is not the last word on the subject, however. Nor is it the first. Thinkers have been discussing and writing about bulls.h.i.+t for millennia, and the service that Frankfurt has supplied is an opportunity for the general public to think about bulls.h.i.+t on more than just a casual, colloquial level. However, it is equally important to bring rhetoric to the table, if only because there is a remarkably vast gray area between what pa.s.ses for Truth, truth, and what can be dismissed as bulls.h.i.+t, and this is the domain in which rhetoric thrives. Without some ability to navigate this area, without some understanding of how language works, we can only hope to avoid the pitfalls of bulls.h.i.+t by sheer chance.

16.

Just Bulls.h.i.+t.

STEVE FULLER.

On Bulls.h.i.+t is the latest contribution to a long, distinguished, yet deeply problematic line of Western thought that has attempted to redeem the idea of intellectual integrity from the cynic's suspicion that it is nothing but high-minded, self-serving prejudice.185 To their credit, some of history's great bulls.h.i.+t detectors-though not Harry Frankfurt nor his role model Ludwig Wittgenstein-have pled guilty as charged without hesitation. Friedrich Nietzsche and his great American admirer, the journalist H.L. Mencken, who coined the euphemism "bunk," come to mind. It helped that they were also cynics. They never held back from pa.s.sing moral judgment on those they debunked. Moreover, both even tried to explain the adaptive advantage of specific forms of bulls.h.i.+t: Bulls.h.i.+tters may be craven but they are not stupid. Jews, Christians, and Muslims-or, more precisely, their clerics-may lack any definitive proof of a transcendent deity, but the sheer possibility of its existence does wonders to focus the mind and discipline the body in often politically effective ways.

Nietzsche's and Mencken's multifarious p.r.o.nouncements invited others to judge them: Does either the mentally unstable Nietzsche or the hard-drinking Mencken inspire confidence in our ability to live in a bulls.h.i.+t-free world? More generally, does the dogged pursuit of bulls.h.i.+t refine or coa.r.s.en one's sense of humanity or, for that matter, raise or lower one's likelihood of recognizing the truth if confronted with it? For everyone who saw Nietzsche and Mencken as exposing false prophets, there were others who viewed them as the ultimate Doubting Thomases. If bulls.h.i.+t is too easily found, and found to run too deep, the bulls.h.i.+t detector's own judgment is reasonably called into question. Henrik Ibsen's cla.s.sic dramas, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, explored this prospect in terms of the need for a "life lie." For their part, both Nietzsche and Mencken have been dubbed "nihilists" by their detractors, who reverse the harsh light of truth to reveal the bulls.h.i.+t detector as a self-appointed absolutist who happens to take an unhealthy interest in people whose minds he is incapable of either respecting or changing. Scratch a nihilist, and you get a dogmatist in exile.

The bulls.h.i.+t detector aims to convert an epistemic att.i.tude into a moral virtue: Reality can be known only by the right sort of person. This idea, while meeting with widespread approval by philosophers strongly tied to the cla.s.sical tradition of Plato and Aristotle, is not lacking in dissenters. The line of dissent is best seen in the history of "rhetoric," a word Plato coined to demonize Socrates's dialectical opponents, the Sophists. The Sophists were prepared to teach anyone the art of winning arguments, provided you could pay the going rate. As a series of sophistic interlocutors tried to make clear to Socrates, possession of the skills required to secure the belief of your audience is the only knowledge you really need to have. Socrates famously attacked this claim on several fronts, which the subsequent history of philosophy has often conflated. In particular, Socrates's doubts about the reliability of the Sophists' techniques have been run together with a more fundamental criticism: Even granting the Sophists their skills, they are based on a knowledge of human gullibility, not of reality itself.

Bulls.h.i.+t is sophistry under this charitable reading, which acknowledges that the truth may not be strong enough by itself to counteract an artfully presented claim that is not so much outright false as, in the British idiom, "economical with the truth." In stressing the difference between bulls.h.i.+t and lies, Frankfurt clearly has this conception in mind, though he does sophistry a disservice by casting the bulls.h.i.+tter's att.i.tude toward the truth as "indifference." On the contrary, the accomplished bulls.h.i.+tter must be a keen student of what people tend to regard as true, if only to cater to those tendencies so as to serve her own ends. What likely offends Frankfurt and other philosophers here is the idea that the truth is just one more tool to be manipulated for personal advantage. Conceptual frameworks are simply entertained and then discarded as their utility pa.s.ses. The nature of the offense, I suspect, is the divine eye-view implicated in such an att.i.tude-the very idea that one could treat in a detached fas.h.i.+on the terms in which people normally negotiate their relations.h.i.+p to reality. A bulls.h.i.+tter revealed becomes a G.o.d unmade.

The theological overtones are deliberate. In the hierarchy of Christian sins, bulls.h.i.+t's closest kin is hypocrisy, the official target of Nietzsche's and Mencken's ire. However, as Max Weber famously observed with regard to the rise of capitalism, Christians were not uniform in their condemnation of hypocrisy. Some treated it more as an unfortunate by-product in the efficient pursuit of ends. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography developed this position with striking explicitness.186 Indeed, Franklin modeled his understanding of "economical with the truth" on the economy one might exercise in the use of any valuable resource. A lesson he claimed to have learned in life is that one's truthfulness should always be proportional to the demands of the speech situation. It's always possible to say either too much or too little, speaking truthfully in each case, yet end up appearing as incompetent or dishonest. Such verbal misfirings benefit no one, though it may have served to represent some abstract sense of "truth."

Franklin's advice is often read as a counsel of cynicism, but it marked a crucial transition in the conception of the human mind from a pa.s.sive receptacle to a creative agency. Like many of the US founding fathers, Franklin's Christianity veered toward Unitarianism, according to which the person of Jesus signifies that the human and the divine intellects differ in degree not kind. Just as the Biblical G.o.d communicated with humans on a "need-to-know" basis without total revelation, in part to stimulate our own G.o.d-like powers as free agents, so too should be the ethic that governs secular human communication. The result is that we elicit from each other our own creative potential. The success of this injunction can be measured by advertising's colonization of corporate budgets in modern times: What sells is ultimately not intrinsic to the product but one's idea of the product, which advertising invites the consumer to form for herself.

Whatever one makes of Franklin's theology, it's clear that bulls.h.i.+tters qua hypocrites are rough cognitive equals of liars and truth-tellers, not people who lack a specific competence that, were they to possess it, would inhibit their propensity to bulls.h.i.+t. I stress this point because bulls.h.i.+t detectors gain considerable rhetorical mileage by blurring the epistemic and ethical dimensions of the phenomenon they wish to root out. Often this involves postulating a psychologically elusive state of integrity. To be sure, in these democratic times, bulls.h.i.+t detectors are rarely so overt as to declare that bulls.h.i.+tters lack "good character," which might suggest something objectionable, let alone unprovable, about the bulls.h.i.+tters' upbringing or even genetic makeup.187 But the same impression can be conjured by other means. For example, ten years ago, Alan Sokal notoriously argued that French literary philosophers and their American admirers would not have so easily inferred postmodern conclusions from cutting-edge mathematical physics had they been scientifically literate: If you knew more, or were better trained, you would behave better.188 But notice what "behave better" means: It is not that the Francophile philosophers should have derived anti-postmodern conclusions from cutting-edge science. Rather, according to Sokal, they should have refrained from drawing any conclusions whatsoever, since the science does not speak directly to the wider cultural issues that interest the Francophile philosophers. (This position is harder to maintain with a straight face when such great scientists as Bohr and Heisenberg seem to have crossed the line themselves.) Thus, while it is convenient to focus on the lightly veiled incompetence of bulls.h.i.+tters, bulls.h.i.+t detectors are ultimately disturbed by what they take to be the lack of self-discipline revealed by the bulls.h.i.+tter's verbal camouflage. When venturing into terrain yet to be colonized by a recognized expertise, where "true" and "false" are not clearly signposted, bulls.h.i.+tters a.s.sert authoritatively rather than remain silent. What accounts for this difference in att.i.tude? A distinction borrowed from Kant and conventionally used to understand the history of early modern philosophy comes to mind: Bulls.h.i.+tters and bulls.h.i.+t detectors examine the same uncertain knowledge situation from, respectively, a rationalist and an empiricist perspective. Bulls.h.i.+tters see the resolution of uncertainty in terms of selecting one from a number of already imaginable alternatives, whereas bulls.h.i.+t detectors seek some externally caused experience-a.k.a. evidence-to determine where lies the truth. I shall argue that the scientific method is largely a "dialectical synthesis" of these two att.i.tudes, by which I mean that each cancels out the excesses of the other to produce a more powerful form of knowledge than either could provide alone.

Bulls.h.i.+t as a Call to Open-Mindedness Bulls.h.i.+t detectors take comfort in the fact that the time required to master a body of knowledge virtually guarantees the initiate's loyalty to its corresponding practices and central dogmas. Moreover, the overarching discipline may have been crafted over the years to render as difficult as possible the contrary "truth" a bulls.h.i.+tter might wish to advance. In Thomas Kuhn's hands, this tendency was enshrined as "normal science." According to Kuhn, a radical alternative to the scientific orthodoxy must await the self-destruction of the dominant paradigm, which may take a very long time, as ill-defined conceptual objections (a.k.a. bulls.h.i.+t) struggle against the paradigm's made-to-order empirical