Episode 137 - Post-Truth

Transcript

David: 0:18

Hello and welcome to Overthink

Ellie: 0:20

The podcast where two philosophers help you sift the truth from the bullshit.

David: 0:25

I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman

Ellie: 0:26

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. We are living in a post-truth era. Politicians can seemingly say anything and get away with it these days. We have all sorts of misinformation being spouted by randos online. I was just hearing on NPR recently about how much women's health information is being, or women's health misinformation is being spread on TikTok. All kinds of myths about birth control and food. Really scary stuff on social media, right? Like there's a ton of this. YouTube and podcasts our metier are also absolutely not innocent. Podcasting arguably helped inaugurate our current political situation, our current administration, where Post-Truth is, you know, really off to the races and the line between fact and fiction, I would say hasn't so much blurred as been rendered moot, at least according to theorists of the post-truth era.

David: 1:29

I think you're right that it has been rendered moot, and there is no shortage of examples of what post-truth looks like. It goes all the way from truly unhinged conspiracy theories that violate even the most basic laws of common sense all the way to people in positions of power, especially politicians. Pedalling claims that are straight up false and easily falsifiable. Right? So here I'm thinking about all the things that have been in the news cycle in the last few years. Think about Pizzagate, think about birth or conspiracies about Obama. Think about recently the Trump EPA, declaring that greenhouse gases are not in fact bad for human health. So, you know, using politics to overturn scientifically grounded claims about the world.

Ellie: 2:19

Anti-vax rhetoric of RFK Jr. The one that really threw me off was Trump's claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the cats and dogs. I remember hearing that in the 2024

David: 2:30

Oh no, that one was true.

Ellie: 2:32

Well, but that one was alsoreally interesting. I mean, this is, it's not exclusively the case with this example, but Trump had gotten that from a video that he had seen on the news that then was platformed that then he saw and he further platformed it literally on the national debate stage. So there's this also fascinating

David: 2:55

Like has a mirror effect.

Ellie: 2:55

a mirror effect.

David: 2:57

Yeah. In 2011, the economist Paul Krugman made this announcement that we are in the age of truth in the age of truth, in the age of post-truth. So I mean, in 2011, it's before Trump's first term.

Ellie: 3:11

Yeah.

David: 3:12

But Krugman specifically tied the advent of post-truth politics to Mitt Romney specifically though. So that's how he entered into that conversation, focusing on Mitt Romney's false, and again, easily falsifiable claim that Obama was like the second coming of Fidel Castro, who was openly advocating for equal outcomes for everybody in American society despite effort or merit. Oh my God. So that like everybody is gonna be given the exact same portion of social goods, okay, independently of how much they contribute. So very clear red scare tactics. And according to Krugman, that claim by itself is not enough to get us to a post-truth moment. What really marked the beginning of post-truth as he understands it, were the lack of penalties and consequences for Romney, for openly saying something that we knew to be false. So it is falsehood plus impunity.

Ellie: 4:16

I generally tend to wanna resist the frequent impulse to be like things were better. In the old days, I've always been extremely suspicious of that impulse. And I think now as I get older, that impulse presents itself, you know, more frequently. But there is literally no disputing the fact that when we were younger, there were consequences for those kinds of lies. Now there are not. So it's just one of those things that like, it actually was better in the old days. Like there are many metrics by which it wasn't, but this is one of them. There was more journalistic integrity. There were more consequences in the political sphere for falsehoods. And so I think part of what's really scary for people is the fact that we're living in this kind of wild west of misinformation, partly brought by social media, partly brought about by changing political norms. And I find that absolutely terrifying. In fact, I've been excited but also intimidated to do this episode because the problem just feels so overwhelming and intractable.

David: 5:20

Yeah. No, but I like that you describe it as a Wild West because the anarchic lawless character of our political life is eroding our trust in social and political institutions. And I do think that trust was there before in our lifetime. Yeah. I mean, like when I was in college, this would've been unthinkable. And so the fact that democratic institutions have had the rug pulled out from under their feet in such a radical manner points to the danger, the real political danger of living in a world where truth has been rendered moot.

Ellie: 6:00

And also where calls for things like fact checking are becoming more frequent, but also feel like at best, that's just a tiny bandaid on a much bigger problem.

David: 6:11

Today we are talking about Post-Truth.

Ellie: 6:14

In our contemporary political and social landscape has the very idea of truth lost its meaning?

David: 6:21

What political conditions have contributed to the rise of post-truth?

Ellie: 6:25

And will reading postmodern philosophy lead you to post truth?

David: 6:34

The term post-truth was selected in 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary as Word of the Year. It successfully vanquished other competitors like Alt-right, Chatbot, and woke, and it won because it gained a lot of popularity around Brexit and Trump's election around that time. And here is the OED definition of post-truth. Post-truth is an adjective defined as relating to our denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Ellie: 7:13

In terms of timeline, the term post-truth definitely achieved notoriety with the rise of Trump here in the US. And it's no wonder to me that it was the word of the year, the very year that Trump was elected. Also, I guess Brexit, I forgot about that. I was in London right after Brexit and somebody on the street said, you probably voted out you bitch. I was like, I didn't even vote.

David: 7:38

But I would've.

Ellie: 7:39

Alternative facts. No. Okay. Anyway, the term, as we mentioned, goes back farther. You said, you know, there was some use of it in 2011. But it actually dates back, at least in 1992. It was first popularized in the two thousands in Ralph Keyes' book, the Post-Truth era from 2004. And in that 2004 book, Keyes argues that the modern age reveals a decline in honesty and a rise in deception. And he has a whole section on how academic postmodernism, what he calls "pomo profs" have contributed to dishonesty, but he also calls out therapists, Hollywood and lawyers for contributing to post-truth.

David: 8:21

Not Pomo professors like us deliberately encouraging our students to be dishonest.

Ellie: 8:27

Yeah. So we'll come back to the Pomo profs later, but suffice it to say that Keyes thinks the very idea of social construction has been a key factor in the rise of post-truth. So we are the Pomo profs that he has in mind. But one thing that Keys didn't foreground nearly as much as basically all of the conversations on post-truth in our current moment is the rise of post-truth in politics. So in 2004, he probably couldn't have seen coming just how much bold faced lying there would be in American politics in particular, not to mention disinformation.

David: 9:00

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't have foreseen that, but when we think about disinformation. I think it's important to be clear about what we mean by that term, because disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Jayson Harsin, who is a communication study scholar, has really pinned down the difference between them. And he says that misinformation is when you mistakenly or inadvertently share information that is not true. it was not your intent to deceive. Whereas disinformation is a lot more intentional and deliberate. It's an attempt on the part of a speaker to produce false beliefs in other people. He talks about two forms that disinformation can take. There are rumor bombs, which is when there is like a flood of false statements that are kind of vague. And so you don't really know exactly what they're saying. They're kind of rumors. Rumors by definition are vague and whose so is unclear. And so it's a rumor that just like floods a community of speakers.

Ellie: 10:03

Is Obama really a citizen? I heard he's not.

David: 10:05

Yeah exactly. And you know like it's unprovable and it's very difficult to know about the standards of

Ellie: 10:10

That actually is provable, but it's not.

David: 10:12

Yeah no, the statement is unprovable that he's not a citizen because then there is like this account of like, oh well something about his passport.

Ellie: 10:18

Oh, it was forged or whatever. Okay. Okay.

David: 10:20

So it just appeals to really unlikely

Ellie: 10:22

Look at me wanting to hold onto standards of evidence.

David: 10:25

Such pre-truther. But then the other form that disinformation can take is just straight up fake news. And that is when news outlets spread intentionally or promote something known to be a lie.

Ellie: 10:41

Yeah. And I mean there's so many now, AI, deep fakes, right? And like the slop of the internet that is emerging even just in the past few years with the rise of AI. And so there's like these kind of hallucinations or like things that chat GPT will just make up out of nowhere. Not to mention the AI deep fakes. I think that are often, I mean often those are products of disinformation. Sometimes they might just be like misinformation. There might not be some evil person behind chat GPT creating some fake citation where none exists. But certainly like the bought farms, you know, Russia's meddling in our election and all of those things, that is more disinformation than misinformation.

David: 11:21

Yeah, no, that's right. And I think all of these things that we're talking about are expressions of post-truth, like right. They're evidence that we are indeed living in a post-truth era. But a lot also has been written last few years about what cost us to enter this era in the first place. There are a lot of accounts for that, from political theorists, from sociologists, from philosophers. I started thinking about this more seriously, thanks to our mutual friend, Simon Truwant, who is a Belgian philosopher who overlapped with us at Emory for some time. So we went to school together. He recently wrote a book about post truth. It's called The Truth Has Four Faces, and that's a reference to a Dutch saying, which is the truth has many faces to sort of allude to the fact that there are multiple versions of the same story. And so this is a book about how he sees our post-truth condition. Now, unfortunately. He in a brazen Belgian move, wrote this book in Dutch, and I don't speak Dutch. Yeah. So I decided to interview him. I interviewed him for like two hours and I wanna share what he told me he talks about in this

Ellie: 12:35

book. Okay. So English listeners. You're hearing something you wouldn't otherwise have access to, although maybe this is a plea to Simon to translate his book into English. I know you've also interviewed him about his work on Kant and Cassirer for our YouTube channel in English, not in Dutch. They can check that out if they want.

David: 12:49

read it, but I do speak it. Yeah, no, so people can definitely check out that video. But in this book, Simon talks about the causes for our post-truth era that other scholars have already called attention to. And he says that those are all roughly correct as well. So for instance, he talks about information overload. The fact that we are bombarded with information that we don't have the time to assess, to prioritize, and to evaluate. And so what we end up doing is we just accept what is convenient. To accept because it's easy.

Ellie: 13:25

Mm.

David: 13:26

He also talks about news fatigue. The fact that the news cycle is too depressing and overwhelmingly negative, there's always a crisis.

Ellie: 13:35

I have no idea what he's talking about.

David: 13:37

Yeah. So effectively we get depleted by watching the news. He also talks about opinion overload in connection to social media, which is a reference to the fact that in social media spaces, all of us are expected to have an opinion about every subject of controversy, even when we have zero expertise on it. And so when that happens, we start kind of pedaling things that are misinformation or disinformation.'cause we don't know what we're talking about.

Ellie: 14:08

You just share. You're like, I have to share the meme in order to show that I care about this. So let me share it. Like, oh my gosh. Remember that AI image of aid to Gaza that came out a year ago?

David: 14:21

I don't think so.

Ellie: 14:21

Yeah. It was like everybody was sharing this because it was like a palatable way to show that you were like against genocide and, but then it turned out that it was AI. So yeah, you know, the opinion overload, that is like one of my absolute least favorite things about the internet. I think people do not need to have opinions about everything, and they do not need to express their opinions about everything.

David: 14:42

Well, especially about complex political issues. Right. If you have an opinion about like, something minor, who cares? Although maybe that's also a problem.

Ellie: 14:52

And like educate yourself. For sure. It's not, it's not just to be like, I never have an opinion about like I this, it's not to be like I'm not political. It's more just like the idea that to be a good citizen means to reshare something on a corporately owned platform in order to signal that you are on the right side is like one of the most frustrating things to me about social media. Anyway, I've gone on this soapbox before.

David: 15:14

No, I actually agree with you and think learning to bow out from a conversation by saying, this is not my area of specialization. It's a virtue that we need to cultivate. But anyway, so he also talks finally, last variable I'll mention here is the lack of respect that. Cultivates like, you know, Petri dish in online and digital spaces where eventually some political conflict or political debate is going to devolve into name calling into intimidation doxing. And so

Ellie: 15:46

Oh, anonymous comment, culture on things like YouTube, for instance.

David: 15:51

Post and support on our YouTube channel. But anyway, so he agrees with all of this. He says this is roughly true, that all of these contribute to post-truth, but his intervention into the post-truth literature is to add another cause of post-truth that he thinks other people have missed. And this is what he calls truth pluralism.

Ellie: 16:14

Okay. Tell us about truth pluralism.

David: 16:16

When we think about post-truth and you kind of see it with the definition, and also we talked about it as truth being moot earlier. Often we think that nowadays truth doesn't matter, people don't value truth. Simon says that's not right. Even the wildest conspiracy theorist out there, you know, insert whatever name you want here, is committed to truth in their own way. That's why they're spending all this time, you know, looking for clues and trying to like piece things together. Yeah, so it's not that people are beyond truth. What's really happening in our post-truth society is that there are different conceptions of truth that coexist in human life. And when we talk to one another, sometimes we move from one to the other one. But it's important that we are able to flag when we're making those shifts. And we're making one kind of truth claim rather than another. And in the post-truth world, we have all these conceptions of truth, but we are failing to realize that they exist. And so we move between them without realizing, which creates a ton of confusion.

Ellie: 17:22

Okay. So it's not about, rejection of truth altogether. It's rather, unrecognized in commensurability between different kinds of truth and moving between those different kinds of truth again, without recognizing it. So, so that's surprising.'cause I associate post truth with like a disregard for the truth. But this is a different

David: 17:44

Yeah, that's right. So it's a kind of confusion at bottom that leads to a crisis in public discourse. And that public discourse can be everything from politicians talking on television all the way to me talking to my aunt and uncle about a political issue over dinner, right? Like everything that counts as democratic participation through language then gets sort of blurred and muddled by our inability to more clearly delineate what kind of truth claim we're making. Now, the problem for Simon is not that there are multiple concepts of truth. As I just said a minute ago, these are part of what it means to be a human who is a language user. It's that there are these different conceptions of truth. And he talks about four of them that I just wanna list very quickly because they frame his entire argument. The four conceptions of truth that are out there are empirical truth that is about tractable facts that are verifiable or falsifiable about the world.

Ellie: 18:44

Capital of California is the one I always use with my intro to philosophy students.

David: 18:47

Are greenhouse gases bad for human health. So those are empirical truths. Secondarily, there is also an ideological conception of truth, which is not about facts, but about whether your values form a coherent web of belief. So it's about coherence rather than a correspondence theory of truth. Then we also have what Simon calls pragmatic truth, which is the set of assumptions that shape and frame, the way in which you go about having discussions about the world, about politics, whatever. And finally, there is also an existential truth. These are things that we feel deeply, that we are committed to and that need not necessarily be true in an empirical sense, but they are true for us. So it's subjective. It's a kind of subjective lived truth,

Ellie: 19:39

Bold to call that truth in this economy.

David: 19:43

And so to understand how all of these get sort of thrown in and confused in contemporary discourse, he gave me the following example that I'm just gonna share with you. He says, imagine that you are having dinner, let's say with your uncle who has conservative views about whether or not trans women should be in women's sports.

Ellie: 20:04

Okay? Beginning of a horror movie.

David: 20:06

Yeah, it is. And but I mean also our reality, political reality. Yeah. Imagine that you make a claim, right? You begin the dialogue with your uncle by saying, Hey, uncle, you know, people don't need to identify with the sex that they were assigned at birth. For you, that is a truth. And it is according to Simon, an ideological truth because it has to do with values, with beliefs. Right? There is no empirical fact of the matter there. It is about how you see identity. So you make that claim to start the discussion with your uncle, but then your uncle responds to your claim by making an empirical truth claim. Like on average, men are taller than women. Mm-hmm. And so he's now made an empirical response to an ideological claim, and he thinks that he's responded, that he's refuted whatever you said. Yeah. Without realizing that there has been a slippage or a shift from one conception of truth to another. And then to make things even worse, imagine that he follows that up with an existential truth claim. Like, well, Ellie, I'm really afraid of what will happen to our society if trans women are allowed in women's sports. That's an existential truth for him. It's about his fear. It is true that he's afraid. And so again, that slippage has happened again. And by the end of that dialogue, Simon says, no dialogue. I know Simon says. Simon says, ultimately no real dialogue has happened. It's like two ships passing okay, the middle of the day.

Ellie: 21:40

So I can totally relate to this idea that often in these kinds of conversations, we're talking past one another because we are referring to different kinds of evidence and behind that differential use of evidence are different forms of claims. However, I think I'm bumping up against a little bit the distinction between some of these. And so you said that the ideological truth is about the coherence of your beliefs. So I guess like one question that raises for me is can you make an ideological truth claim in isolation the way you can make an empirical truth claim? Or does an ideological truth claim only make sense in tandem with other truths? In which case that seems to be like sort of problematically different. And I also think in the case that you conveyed from Simon, I think like a lot of people would respond like maybe I would respond to my uncle with a factual claim, which is that, okay yes, even though biologically speaking, sexual dimorphism is generally the way our species tends, there is a ton of gray area. I would bring up factual examples of people who are assigned female at birth, who are statistically taller and stuff like that. And so I would say, I think a lot of people who would wanna defend the inclusion of trans women in sports wouldn't just be making ideological claims, they would be responding with factual claims. You know, they might actually be reasonably concerned that the claim that their view is ideological is denigrating it. I wanna just say here, like the way that you presented ideological, it's not ideological in the sense that sometimes critical theorists use it, which is like a Marxist notion of like, you're mystified to the truth of your condition. Ideology is just like this set of beliefs that serves to perpetuate the status quo. He seems to be using it more in terms of like your evaluative? Yeah. But I just guess I wanna express that concern.

David: 23:34

No. So the difference here is not between, oh, certain political positions are purely one kind of truth rather than another. We always, in making arguments appeal to all these kinds of truth, right? Like, sometimes I make a value judgment, sometimes I invoke a scientific finding, sometimes I talk about my feelings. And so there is no division in that sense. And in fact, each of these kinds of truth has its own norms and its own standards of falsehood. For example, if you tell me a belief if I wanna criticize that, I need to show how it is inconsistent with your other beliefs, right? Whereas if you give me an empirical claim, all I have to do is say, well, that actually doesn't reflect the facts by scientific standards or some other standard of empirical truth.

Ellie: 24:20

Okay. How do you refute an existential truth, though? Because I think a lot of people would say existential truths are not truths. You know, this is like the facts don't care about your feelings crowd. Yeah. They would be like, those aren't truths. They're just like your vibe or your feeling. And so those should be cast off from this discussion altogether. Yeah.

David: 24:38

And he says that you need to remind people of the reach and the scope of those claims. So it's not that you refute the experiential fact that your uncle is afraid of what will happen, but rather remind them that their feelings are their feelings and they're not objective.

Ellie: 24:54

Their feelings are valid.

David: 24:56

Yeah. Well, honestly, yeah, their feelings are valid, but I don't feel the same way. I don't share that fear at all, and that fear shouldn't guide political discussions about inclusion/exclusion of citizens, because once you let an existential truth become the basis for policymaking, you really start stepping into the domain of populous messaging. And you know, you also start diminishing the experiential truths of other people.

Ellie: 25:27

So is the conclusion that we should limit our debates to one particular kind of truth at a time.

David: 25:33

No, that's impossible. We always appeal to all these kinds of truths. What he wants is more truth literacy on our part so that we are indeed able to say, well. What I said was an empirical claim. It cannot be rejected by either an existential truth about your feelings or by an ideological belief because then we have to talk about what beliefs make sense and what the assumptions behind them are. And so in some ways I think what he's calling for is a kind of literacy that would allow us to take a meta position relative to the debates that we participate in and that we should expect other people to be able ideally to do the same.

Ellie: 26:16

Sounds like we need more philosophy, education.

David: 26:19

I think that's right. I think because obviously philosophy is the discipline that concerns itself with the study of truth as an object more so than many other disciplines, and so I think he would be very much down with that.

Ellie: 26:51

When we were thinking about doing this episode, you brought up that we should absolutely talk about the very famous Harry Frankfurt essay from 1986, called "On Bullshit", which was then published as a little book in 2005 and became very popular, even like way outside of the confines of his specific, you know, training in analytic philosophy and like where he initially published it became this big deal. And so I was like, this sounds great. We gotta talk about this book. It's perfect for this episode. And then I went on a wild goose chase for about a week trying to find my copy of this book, my annotated copy, which I first read as an undergrad.

David: 27:34

Was it the little book?

Ellie: 27:35

It was the little book. Now the truth is, haha, the post truth is I could not find my book anywhere. And so we're basically having a repeat of what happened when we did our Plato's Pharmacy YouTube video, which may or may not have come out yet, so maybe keep an eye out of it hasn't come out yet where we were reading Derrida's Text, Plato's Pharmacy, and I could not find my annotated copy of it anywhere. And I only realized right before recording. So yeah, as recently as this morning was still hunting for my on bullshit text and I couldn't find it. So you sent me a PDF, but the truth is that I have not reread this in a very long time and so we're gonna discuss it, but I only had a little bit of time to quickly review it. So you're gonna be basically reporting me as if I have not read it.

David: 28:21

No worries.

Ellie: 28:21

Even though I have, and then I'll supplement it with if there is anything that I remember or reread this morning.

David: 28:27

Yeah. Well so the funny thing is that you read it and you just couldn't find it. Remember how I told you that I read it a long time ago and I just needed to like refreshen? Yeah. I went back to it and I was like, I've never read this. So I thought I had read it. But it was so popular when I was an undergrad. I worked in a bookstore before I was a philosophy major and it was like an impulse buy. We would put it next to the register and people would buy it up all the time. Yeah. It was so popular, you would find it at Barnes and Noble at like your random local bookstore. And that's how I first learned about this book. It was not through philosophy. I thought it was just like a cute little book about bullshitting.

Ellie: 29:02

See, I was first assigned it in my undergrad Theories of Truth class, which is the only class I ever got a B+ in in college.

David: 29:08

Oh, what

Ellie: 29:09

I know. So maybe my annotated copy wouldn't have helped much anyway, after all.

David: 29:13

Yeah. So I read the text and I'm happy to report on what's in it, but I really enjoyed it because it targets a phenomenon that we're all familiar with. I mean, he begins by saying there's a lot of bullshit out there, but there is no philosophical treatment of it. What exactly is bullshit as a kind of locutionary act? Like what kind of speech act is it that we are performing when we bullshit other people? And so he gives an analysis of bullshit that is mediated through his reading of another person's analysis of the concept of humbug, which is like a precursor, like an old precursor.

Ellie: 29:55

Yes, philosopher Black.

David: 29:56

Yeah. Max Black, who wrote a text called The Prevalence of Humbug, and there. Black talks about humbug and offers an analysis.

Ellie: 30:06

Sweet Max black prevalence of humbug does not quite have the same ring as On bullshit. Barnes and Noble was not putting it in the front.

David: 30:13

And so yeah, he says somebody else has done an analysis of a board that performs a similar function. Like when you call somebody discourse humbug is very similar to calling it bullshit.

Ellie: 30:25

Is it? I feel like literally, to me, a humbug is just like, just reminds me of bah humbug.

David: 30:30

Oh, well, like it's like from way before.

Ellie: 30:33

Yeah. So I, I thought bah humbug, I thought it was just like an expression of crankiness because it's Scrooge who says it, right?

David: 30:39

According to him. It really means like bullshit or that's crap. Or I don't believe a word of what you're saying.

Ellie: 30:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

David: 30:46

And so let me begin by telling you how Max Blank, who is a Russian

Ellie: 30:51

Max Black

David: 30:51

Max Black,

Ellie: 30:53

alternative facts

David: 30:54

That was misinformation cause it was not intentional. Who is a Russian British analytic philosopher who made a bunch of contributions to metaphysics, but then wrote also about language, how he analyzes humbug. And Black says the characteristics of humbug are three. Number one, deception. There's a kind of telling, a falsehood or a distortion of the truth. Right. That's happening here.

Ellie: 31:21

I'm seeing here too, that, that deception, it's not lying.

David: 31:24

So it's a kind of lying, but, but then he clarifies, he adds this auxiliary claim, which is that in fact it's short of lying. That's the second condition. And so it exists on a spectrum with lying, but it's a spectrum that's really hard for us to know where the one becomes the other.

Ellie: 31:42

Okay.

David: 31:43

And so it's deception that is short of lying. And then finally it is pretentious by word or deed. So there is a pretentiousness to humbug where something is being misrepresented, but the person who is performing humbug is also seeking to convey a certain impression of who they are, and that's the pretentiousness, right? When somebody's a bullshitter it or a humbugger, it tells you something about how they want to be perceived by their interlocutor. Now, to just clarify how Frankfurt positions himself in relation to this other philosopher Black.

Ellie: 32:22

Max Black, otherwise known as blank.

David: 32:24

Yes, exactly. He says, I accept this kind of reading of humbug, but I think Black is wrong in his analysis, and so his analysis won't really help us understand bullshit because he just sees it as a kind of pretentiousness that is short of lying, and that's missing a really important dimension. Of bullshit. And so this is where Frankfurt turns to what he takes to be the characteristics of bullshit he says, yes, it is a kind of lying, but in reality it's closer to bluffing rather than lying. So if you think about bluffing in a poker game, what you're doing is you are adopting a stance of fakeness and phoniness in order to deceive your opponent. And so it, it's a mistake to really reduce bullshitting to just saying things that are not true. Beyond that, he says there's a difference between lying and bullshitting in the following way. A lie is always particular and analytic. So if you think about what I do when I lie as a liar, I look at a field where there are a bunch of truths, and if I want to insert a lie, I have to be methodical and precise in order to locate it very well, and to make sure that it doesn't contradict all the other truths that are around it. Which is why when we lie, we have to cover our tracks. You know, like, who knows what, what did I say before? I need to remember in order to make sure that the lie works. So the lie, I visualize it almost as like playing darts at a bar where you throw it and try to make it land precisely. Whereas bullshit is not precise. It's very general. It's creative, it's panoramic. When you're bullshitting, you're just like throwing caution to the wind. And so I think about it almost not as like, not as throwing a dart, but as grabbing a stinky pile of shit and just like throwing it at the wall to see what sticks. So that, that's an important difference for him.

Ellie: 34:28

Okay. And I'm seeing here too, he says that bullshit might not be false too. So like a lie is by definition false. The bullshitter is faking things, but that doesn't mean he necessarily gets them wrong.

David: 34:43

Yeah, that's right. And so this is where he makes the core claim in this essay, which is that what is ultimately being misrepresented in bullshit is not my beliefs as a bullshitter, and it's not really the state of affairs in the world. What I'm misrepresenting to you is the enterprise of what I am up to. And what am I up to As a bullshitter, I am up to suspending the very game of truth telling that otherwise we would be committed to. And so if you think about a liar, a liar is still committed to the truth and wants to be perceived as telling the truth, which is why they're analytically locating a lie. Whereas the bullshitter is actually playing an entirely different language game that does not abide by the standards of truth. And that's what makes it really difficult to pin down a bullshitter, making him or her an even greater threat to the institution of truth.

Ellie: 35:50

So then how's a bullshitter gonna respond when you call them out for being wrong?

David: 35:54

for Frankfurt, bullshit gives us a framework. Where the bullshitter can say things irresponsibly. So you know, this is the lack of concern. The lack of interest in truth telling that allows them to just like shake it off with indifference. That's how bullshitters respond. Right. They don't feel held accountable because what they're after is not telling the truth. They're after a kind of power game.

Ellie: 36:20

Okay, and so what are we talking about when we're talking about bullshit? Like do we have, I feel like I would expect an essay like this to be like, take X case and then have a really clear example looking through it. I'm not necessarily finding that, but he does say that there's been a rise in bullshit. So what is a,

David: 36:38

an example of bullshit. Oh my God, you're gonna really ask me for an example. He gives actually a weirdly specific historical example. Okay. So there is this woman called Fania Pascal. Okay. Who was she? She was Wittgenstein's tutor in Russian. So she like taught Wittgenstein the Russian language.

Ellie: 36:57

Okay, great. finding Fania Pascal here.

David: 36:59

Well, yeah, one day Wittgenstein was meeting her and she told him, I don't wanna meet you because. I'm sick, and the phrase she used is, I feel like a run over dog. Okay. Like I feel so bad. I feel like I've been run over by a truck or whatever. And iWittgenstein apparently basically called bullshit on her and he said, your statement doesn't make any sense. It's absurd because you can't possibly know what it feels like to be a run over dog.

Ellie: 37:29

It's not precise

David: 37:30

enough. Yeah. It's not, well, it's not precise enough, like a true lie. And it is misrepresenting something, but it's short of lying. And so Frankfurt interprets this as what Wittgenstein would consider bullshit, that he also would consider bullshit. The bullshit quality of that statement about feeling like a run over dog is that it's kind of nonsense and exaggerated.

Ellie: 37:53

He's just like, this metaphor seems exaggerated and so it's bullshit. That's like so strange.

David: 38:00

I know. Yeah. So the lack of examples

Ellie: 38:02

Poor Fania Pascal, the woman's sick. She's like, oh, I feel like, so I wonder what he would think about. I feel like crap. He'd be like, you know what crap like,

David: 38:13

Yeah. And by the way, it took me a long time to figure out who this woman was 'cause she was not a philosopher. So I did a deep dive just to figure out who Fania was. The tutor Russian for Wittgenstein.

Ellie: 38:24

Justice for Fania.

David: 38:26

In the end, Frankfurt brings the essay to a close by talking about the things that lead to bullshit. And he shares your concern about having too many opinions because one of the things that lead to bullshit according to him, is being asked to talk about things that you don't know a lot about. Okay? But then he also gets really close to the no Pomo professor's position, where he says that the rise of anti-realist positions contributes to bullshit. And you know, anti-realism in philosophy can mean postmodernism, but it also can mean certain positions in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of science. So I don't know what he's referring to, but he does blame academic discourses for the rise of bullshit. Whereas I'm like, ah, I don't know about that. The first one. Yes.

Ellie: 39:20

I feel like academia, if anything, has encouraged me to be able to say, I don't know more. You know?'cause I realize it's like the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

David: 39:29

Yeah. Like, I haven't read it, but let's record nonetheless.

Ellie: 39:36

Hey, I literally started the discussion by disclosing that I had not reread it. So it's not a bullshit.

David: 39:44

Yeah. The bullshit would've been if you had hidden that 'cause you would've been misleading us about what you were up to.

Ellie: 39:51

Okay. Let's get into the Pomo profs.

David: 39:56

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Ellie: 40:20

In recent years, no philosophical discourse has been more maligned than that of good old postmodernism. Philosophers such as Michelle Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray have been called every name in the book. Charlatan, obscurantist, pedantic, parasitic, irrational, Anti-Scientific, you name it.

David: 40:45

Not anti-scientific.

Ellie: 40:48

But all of this is independent of whether the people in question actually are or consider themselves to be postmodernist. These philosophers often come up in discussions of post-truth in particular, they are the Pomo profs or they're the teachers of the Pomo profs, because many have blamed postmodernism for the rise of post-truth. It's a very common position, even within academia, but also outside of it. The reason for this is roughly because postmodern theory questions the idea that we can have objective truths, and as a result it's been understood as destabilizing meaning and rejecting the idea of truth altogether.

David: 41:26

Gosh. Yeah. The accusations also, do you remember the infamous Sokal scandal?

Ellie: 41:33

Yeah. I mean, not originally, but I've heard of it. I don't think we were really around during, David: No. This before our time, but this physics professor from NYU Alan Sokal published this bullshit article in a humanities Journal called Social Text. And he was parrodying the style of writing that we find in people like Derrida, Lacan,

David: 41:55

Lacan, Irigaray, et cetera. And he thought that the publication of this article proved that postmodernism as an intellectual enterprise was bankrupt. Because obviously they accepted this bullshit article. And I think about just like echoes of Sokalideology, when I hear of all these accusations against postmodernism from people who don't know about

Ellie: 42:17

Yeah.'cause people are like, oh, this bullshit article made it into this respected journal. But you know, I'm a staunch defender of peer review, even though, there are issues with our system of peer review, one thing that people don't remember about the SoCal affair is that there were no peer reviewers of this piece. So I think it actually speaks to the problem of journal publishing. Like Yeah. Publishing in journals, division of labor, maybe neoliberalism more than it does to the bullshit of postmodern thought. Because I think the system really needs to be reformed. And if there had been peer reviewers, I like to think that they would've caught it.

David: 42:53

Sure.

Ellie: 42:54

The journal really messed up there.

David: 42:55

Well, and it also overlooks the fact that mathematics journals and physics journals have been hoaxed. Also, right? Like people have placed these ill-intentioned pieces for the sake of proving that in fact there is a problem that is pervasive either in publication or in the disciplines. But interestingly, when that happens in physics and in mathematics, it doesn't lead to the conclusion that therefore they're not scientific or rational or legitimate scientist science. Right? Like nobody's making that claim about those disciplines. And I wrote an article a few years ago with Rebekah Spera about hoaxes, about the politics of hoaxing. What kind of philosophical move are we making when we try to hoax a journal or a discipline? And there we focused on a different hoax, which happened more recently. Where somebody also submitted a bullshit article to a journal called Badiou Studies, and when it was accepted, they then released this like reveal piece, this like expose to show that Badiouianism is somehow. Intellectually empty. Like they said it's nonsense.

Ellie: 44:05

Oh, reference to the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou.

David: 44:08

Yeah. As if like Badiou himself was like running this journal. But yeah, like in that article, we do read hoaxes. In the same way actually as Frankfurt reads bullshit, which is not, they're not interested in truth telling or in lying. They're interested in a power move. it actually happens below the space that we typically care for when we're talking about truth telling practices.

Ellie: 44:34

It's funny 'cause Badiou is actually not even a postmodernist, like he's pretty critical of postmodern philosophy. So maybe that's, yeah not quite, the postmodernism is a hoax type of thing.

David: 44:46

Yeah. Talk about accusing other people of being fraudulent. When you don't even get your target.

Ellie: 44:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although to be fair, pretty much no postmodern philosopher associates with postmodernism, it's like existentialism that way. But yeah, I mean, I think all of this taps into a very common idea about so-called postmodernism, which is that it's questioning of objective, neutral truth is a form of relativism that is politically dangerous. So the very famous analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett, for instance, said in 2017, oh, this quote, "I think what the Postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and fact." So Dennet is laying at the feet of the Pomo profs the cynicism about truth and facts that characterizes our political age today. And a version of this argument has been made recently by the philosopher Lee McIntyre in a book called Post-Truth. And there's a chapter in the book suggesting that postmodernism led to post-truth and you know, not exclusively led to it, but that had a substantial role to play in the post-truth era. And McIntyre, who's a philosopher of science, claims that postmodernism is the godfather of post-truth. So his argument basically goes that postmodernists in literary criticism and science studies critiqued the idea of objectivity. And in doing so, they indirectly provided ammo to right-wingers who claimed to de-legitimize science. So left wing postmodernism eventually became right wing postmodernism.

David: 46:30

I feel like we moved really quickly over the language that these critics are making. I mean like Daniel Dennett calling it like evil. Like up there with murder? I guess, like what is your moral compass for these articulations or this other character? What was the name of, is it McIntyre? McIntyre calling Postmodernism The Godfather. Like Godfather is weird. Why not the father or grandfather? Is he emphasizing the Mafioso character?

Ellie: 47:02

You know, Godfather is a strange choice to me.

David: 47:06

It's nothing personal. It's just business quote from Lyotard.

Ellie: 47:11

Yeah. Godfather is weird and, you know, he supports his narrative with a few anecdotal pieces of evidence. So, for instance, he references an influential creationist, Philip Johnson, who had read Derrida and said he was doing deconstruction, but targeting Darwinism. Aside from a few anecdotes of this sort, though the argument is largely based on a kind of postmodern vibe and substantiated through reference to other people making the same claim. So Dennett says this or so-and-so says that postmodernism has led to post-truth. Yeah, which actually there's the rumor. What was it? The disinformation thing?

David: 47:52

The rumor of the bandwagon?

Ellie: 47:53

Yeah. Yeah. Rumor bomb.

David: 47:56

Yeah.

Ellie: 47:57

So there's a rumor bomb that Pomo profs have caused post-truth.

David: 48:00

Well, and also just like the fallacy of the bandwagon, you know, just like jump on board because other people have jumped on board. Yeah. But also the argument or the evidence that he seems to marshal for this claim seems really, really thin to me. First of all, just like giving quotes of other people, this is not my medieval disputation and they're not Aristotle like that does not suffice. But secondarily, they claim that this creationist said that he was deconstructing science by promoting deconstructionism, and therefore that's a condemnation of deconstruction. sounds just as incoherent as saying, I know this guy who believes in God because he thinks God lives in mathematics. Therefore mathematicians are

Ellie: 48:47

supporting

David: 48:47

the Vatican.

Ellie: 48:48

Yeah,

David: 48:48

Like the, the logic there is not great.

Ellie: 48:52

Yeah. It's like, so this guy read Derrida, maybe in college, misunderstood him and then was like, I could do creationism, but with deconstruction. But, so, okay, let me, let me walk you through the idea a bit more because I agree with you. I think this anecdotal evidence is pretty thin, but why is it that so many people, McIntyre Dennett so many others, even like you said, a little bit like Frankfurt's kind of hinting at this, have thought that postmodernism is responsible, at least in part for the post-truth era. So one thing that if we are to group the philosophers, I would say post-structuralist is generally a better term than postmodernist when we're talking philosophy, because postmodernism also includes like literary postmodernism and a lot of things that I think these people aren't referring to, but what's grouped under postmodern philosophy does generally suggest that there is not one meaning to a text. And so Postmodernist thought very influential in literary criticism towards the end of the 20th century, and one of its main interventions would be to say there's not like a single meaning to a text and academics, he thinks, are swept up in this fervor for postmodernism started to apply this idea that there's not a single meaning more broadly than two textual and literary analysis. When they did that, they suggested, according to McIntyre, that there is no one meaning to anything. The very idea of a right or wrong answer to what something means was thrown into question. So maybe if we put this in terms of Simon's research, we would say they then started to apply this idea that there's no one meaning to other forms of truth, beyond like the initial one that they

David: 50:35

had in mind. Or to other forms of text other than literal text.

Ellie: 50:38

Yeah, for postmodernism, McIntyre suggests there is no right answer, only narrative. And so far, that is not a totally unfair characterization. But then he goes on to say that for postmodernism, quote, "any profession of truth is nothing more than a reflection of the political ideology of the person who is making it."

David: 50:59

Okay.

Ellie: 51:01

And he even says that Postmodernists, another quote,"completely reject and disrespect truth and objectivity."

David: 51:08

Oh my God. Another evil act. How do you disrespect objectivity?

Ellie: 51:15

Shame on the Pomo profs disrespecting truth.

David: 51:18

Yeah, man. No, Pomo. I'm curious. I'm First of all, I am interested by this claim that maybe postmodernism was like fine to do its thing when they were only talking about literature. Because a lot of the people who make this criticism already don't respect literature as an enterprise, right. Like so, if they wanna play these games in the domain of art literature and the humanities let them because it's their own little mess. But it does seem like the anxiety kicks in when that is applied outside in relation to quote unquote the real world, whatever that is. again, I think you're right that there is a kind of truth to this. Articulation of postmodernism, the rejection of objective truth. Certainly there in postmodernism the emphasis on the force of narrative and the power of language, but there is no connection that I can make between any postmodernist text and the claim that this is just like the political worldview of the person who says it and nothing else, as if there aren't ways in which texts produce meaning beyond the mental states of the people who articulate them.

Ellie: 52:32

Yeah. Not to mention so postmodernism as a movement is not particularly interested in mental states or in subjectivity. So like that's actually kind of one of the most surprising things about this. They're like, you make everything subjective. Whereas like one of the main claims of postmodernism is that we need to deconstruct subjectivity or

David: 52:49

like the author is dead. The author doesn't have political beliefs.

Ellie: 52:53

Exactly. Exactly. Or that like subjectivity is always already deconstructed. Right. And I also think that from the political side, it's a bit of a strange claim because, with the exception maybe of Foucault, most of the thinkers associated with postmodernism were not particularly political thinkers. And so like most of them were not talking about ideology. So there's also this kind of like weird mashup of ideology critique, which is like a whole different set of thinkers for the most part. Maybe Althusser, kind of like straddles both. But for the most part, like they're not writing about politics. And you know, I do think like McIntyre rightly identifies the 1979 publication of Jean-François Lyotard's, the postmodern Condition as a watershed moment for postmodernism, but Lyotard never says that Postmodernism denies truth. He says that postmodernism is interested in the disruption of meta narratives. Like the systematic philosophy, the kind of philosophy that was popular in the enlightenment period, that thought that it could explain everything systematically, like Hegel, Kant, et cetera. That is what postmodernism is rejecting in favor of petits récits, which are the little narratives. Lyotard says that postmodernism is questioning that idea that there's a view from nowhere, that there are these grand narratives, and so to that extent it's postmodern because modernity is characterized in philosophy by an aim at systematicity. But that does not mean that postmodernism rejects truth altogether. It's just this particular kind of overarching systematic truth that is associated with meta narrative.

David: 54:26

Yeah. Also I would add here that it's been a while since I've read the postmodern condition, but that is not even a normative text about the way things should be. It's a description of our condition. So he's describing what's happening. He's not killing the master narrative. He's saying master narratives have fragmented. Yeah. We live in the ruins of these master narratives, whether those narratives stem from science, from religion, or from metaphysics. And so we do have more of a balkanized experience of truth and narrative where things make sense sort of relative to micro narratives or the petits récits. And I see that lack of specificity and maybe lack of understanding about that distinction really troublesome. And part of what seems odd about McIntyre's claim here is that he's associating Lyotard with a number of other people, right. Like, maybe Barthes, Maybe Paul De Man and Derrida. But they are much more in the like literary side of things. And so there's also a difference there that seems like it's getting alighted in important ways.

Ellie: 55:38

Yeah. And I think your point about Lyotards texts being diagnostic is important as well, because like, I think a lot of these narratives about the Pomo profs make them seem more prescriptive than they are. You know? It's like we should get rid of any objectivity. It's like, no, the insight is rather that what we take to be objectivity is less objective than we believe. That doesn't mean that there is no objectivity, but it does mean that we can't presume and take for granted this idea of a view from nowhere of a neutral outside spectator.

David: 56:11

One thing that I want to point out is that this claim that Pomo professors like you and I, maybe we're not, as, you know, obviously we're not as famous as the people being mentioned here, but we would be

Ellie: 56:22

No, I think it's Pomo profs who are influenced by these famous people. So it would be us.

David: 56:27

Yeah. But I mean like they are the source of the problem. It makes us seem way more influential than we are. You know, post-truth is a widespread political phenomenon that has taken us by storm in education, in politics, in sport, in the news. Do you think that Mitt Romney was reading Lyotard's the postmortem condition when he decided there are no meta narratives, therefore we need to be suspicious about Obama's political project?

Ellie: 56:56

Dude, I know, like even at my kind of like, you know, fancy liberal arts college, the people who now are influential in Washington, were not taking the classes that the Pomo profs were teaching.

David: 57:08

Although I did read that JD Vance was a very close and astute reader of Irigaray.

Ellie: 57:15

But, so here's the thing, McIntyre acknowledges that these people aren't necessarily reading the postmodern,

David: 57:22

it's like a climate

Ellie: 57:23

Yeah. So he says, even if right-wing politicians and other science deniers were not reading Derrida and Foucault, the germ of the idea made its way to them. But then the question, you know, raises itself, which is how did the germ of the idea make its way to them? And McIntyre explicitly ask like, do we have any evidence of this? But the so-called evidence that he provides, I think is very weak. So he mentions a couple of articles that left-wing academics associated with social constructionism, published expressing concern that their ideas could be used for things like climate change, denialism. So kind of reckoning of like, oh my gosh, did we go too far? He doesn't actually provide evidence that the right wing post-truth camp has actually been influenced by postmodernism even indirectly. And that's what we would need in order for this to hold water. So it's really just academics who worry that perhaps they could have been, that their ideas could have been taken up, and that I think be like, maybe we think we're more important than we actually are. So he does actually cite one example, the Trump loving conspiracy theorist, Mike Cernovich said in an interview that he read postmodernist theory in college. But again, it's like, what kind of gotcha is that? But I think also, I would wanna take it out of the Register of Academic Discourse altogether, because our education system in the US is just not good enough for us to blame the Pomo profs on the rise of post-truth. Like we need to think about capitalism, basic greed, the, proliferation of misinformation and disinformation online, and the way that that has benefited the wealthiest people in our society and take the focus off of the Pomo proffs. Like, I just think that that is a real non-starter.

David: 59:07

Yeah. I mean, it seems like that argument is overblown, theatrical and kind of pretentious, which is to say bullshit.

Ellie: 59:19

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David: 59:29

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Ellie: 59:44

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