Bullshit activities

Analytic Philosophy (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Frankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as bullshit or not and show that this account generalizes to many other kinds of act as well. I show that this illuminates some of Graeber's classification of “bullshit jobs,” though it doesn't fully agree with it.

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Kenny Easwaran
University of California, Irvine

Citations of this work

ChatGPT is bullshit.Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater - 2024 - Ethics and Information Technology 26 (2):1-10.

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References found in this work

Meaning.Herbert Paul Grice - 1957 - Philosophical Review 66 (3):377-388.
Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1975 - In Donald Davidson (ed.), The logic of grammar. Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Pub. Co.. pp. 64-75.
Moral Grandstanding.Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke - 2016 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 44 (3):197-217.
On Bullshit.Harry Frankfurt - 1986 - Philosophical Quarterly 56 (223):300-301.

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