Frankfurt: On Bullshit
Summary: A philosophical analysis distinguishing bullshit from lying — the bullshitter is indifferent to truth, not opposed to it, making bullshit a greater threat to truth than lies.
Sources: Raw/Frankfurt-On-Bullshit.pdf
Source pages: Quotes batch 6
Quote pages: Frankfurt — On Bullshit
Last updated: 2026-05-05
The core distinction: bullshit vs. lying
Frankfurt’s central argument is that bullshit and lying are fundamentally different acts, not points on the same spectrum. The liar knows the truth and deliberately contradicts it — they are still in a relationship with truth. The bullshitter has no such relationship:
“His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are… He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
The liar must think he knows the truth in order to invent a falsehood. The bullshitter requires no such conviction. Bullshit need not even be false — it can accidentally be true. What makes it bullshit is not its truth-value but its indifference to truth-value.
“The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”
This leads to Frankfurt’s counterintuitive conclusion: bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are. The liar at least acknowledges truth’s authority by opposing it. The bullshitter ignores it entirely.
The Wittgenstein anecdote
Frankfurt illustrates with an anecdote about Wittgenstein visiting Fania Pascal in hospital. She said “I feel just like a dog that’s been run over.” Wittgenstein was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.”
Frankfurt’s reading: Wittgenstein’s objection was not that Pascal was wrong. It was that she wasn’t trying to be accurate. She concocted the description to appear vivid and sympathetic, without any concern for whether it was correct. Her statement was “unconnected to a concern with the truth.”
This is the Wittgenstein-as-craftsman reading: care and accuracy are the same thing applied to language. A statement not wrought with care is bullshit regardless of whether it happens to be true. The connection to quality is direct — Frankfurt cites the same Longfellow verse Pirsig orbits: “In the elder days of art / Builders wrought with greatest care / Each minute and unseen part, / For the Gods are everywhere.”
Why there is so much bullshit
Two structural causes:
1. Obligation without knowledge. Democratic life requires citizens to have opinions on everything. Public life requires people to speak extensively on topics they don’t fully understand. Whenever the obligation to speak exceeds actual knowledge, bullshit fills the gap. See political-manipulation — Frankfurt anticipates Gurri’s analysis by several decades: the public that is required to have opinions on everything is structurally required to produce bullshit.
2. The sincerity trap. Anti-realist skepticism (the view that there is no objective reality to be accurately described) leads people to abandon truth-seeking in favor of sincerity — being true to oneself rather than to the facts. Frankfurt’s verdict: “And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.” If you replace “is this accurate?” with “is this authentic?”, you have simply relocated the indifference to truth one level up. See narrative-bias.
Bullshit as self-misrepresentation
What the bullshitter necessarily misrepresents is not the facts, but what he is doing. Both the liar and the bullshitter present themselves as trying to communicate truth. The liar hides that he is trying to deceive. The bullshitter hides something different: that truth-values are simply not his concern. He is doing impression management and calling it communication.
The Fourth of July orator going on about “our great and blessed country” is not lying about the Founding Fathers — he does not care enough about the facts to lie. He cares only about what people think of him. This is the paradigm case.
Bullshit as art, lying as craft
Frankfurt draws an aesthetic distinction. Lying requires craftsmanship — you must know the truth to construct a targeted falsehood that fits around it. Bullshitting is more like art: “panoramic rather than particular,” with “more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” Hence the “bullshit artist.” The liar is constrained by reality; the bullshitter is free of it.
Quotes
Critical Thinking & Truth
“The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, with respect to the facts… what he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise.” (p. 54)
Society & Sincerity
“Sincerity is bullshit. It is the attempt to find a substitute for the truth by looking inward rather than outward.” (p. 67)
Related pages
- quality — bullshit as the absence of care; the Wittgenstein/craftsman link
- narrative-bias — the bullshitter constructs impressions, not descriptions; sincerity as relocated indifference to truth
- political-manipulation — democratic obligation to opine beyond knowledge; Gurri’s analysis as a 30-year update
- free-will-and-moral-responsibility — the sincerity critique parallels Sapolsky’s self-knowledge problem
- trust — bullshit as a structural degrader of epistemic trust
- bullshit-foundation — DG’s 2022 Socratic presentation; arrives at the same territory from Pirsig and Watts
- dg-case-method