Day: June 17, 2025

🧠 1. Definition and Theoretical Foundation

• Meibauer expands on Harry Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit” as a form of insincere communication that disregards the truth.
• Bullshitting is not lying: Unlike lying, it does not require the speaker to know the truth; it is characterized by a lack of concern for whether statements are true or false.
• “Bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, is speech with no concern for the truth” (Meibauer, 2016, p. 68).

---

🗣️ 2. Bullshit as a Pragmatic Phenomenon

• Meibauer frames bullshit as a pragmatic category using tools from speech act theory and Gricean implicature.
• He argues that bullshitting typically occurs in the form of assertions, even though the speaker is not committed to the truth.
• “Bullshitting is insincere assertion” (p. 73).
• “Assertions are central to bullshitting, but with a weaker epistemic commitment than is standardly assumed” (p. 74).

---

⚖️ 3. Distinction from Lying

• Lies involve a knowledge of the truth and an intent to deceive.
• Bullshitters may not know or care what is true—they aim to impress or manipulate.
• “The liar hides the truth, the bullshitter hides the fact that he does not care about the truth” (p. 69).

---

📢 4. Excessive Certainty as a Marker

• A novel contribution from Meibauer is the idea that bullshit is marked by exaggerated epistemic certainty.
• This confidence disguises the speaker’s indifference to the truth.
• “One typical feature of bullshitting is the use of excessive certainty markers” (p. 75).

---

🧩 5. Relationship to Other Speech Acts

• Bullshit is closely related to bald-faced lies, irony, and metaphor, but distinct in intent and function.
• Meibauer explores these distinctions to develop a typology of insincere discourse.
• “Bald-faced lies are intended to be false and known to be so by both speaker and hearer… not so with bullshit” (p. 77).

---

🧱 6. Structural Characteristics of Bullshit

• Meibauer outlines key features:
  • Speaker pretends to assert a proposition.
  • Speaker is indifferent to the truth.
  • Speaker aims at persuasion or impression management.
  • Speech often includes pseudo-intellectualism or vagueness.
• “Bullshitting often entails strategic vagueness and the use of stock phrases” (p. 81).

---

🔍 7. Implications for Discourse Analysis

• Bullshit is pervasive in political speech, advertising, and public discourse.
• It challenges conventional models of communication that assume cooperation and sincerity.
• “Bullshit calls into question the Gricean assumption that speakers aim at maximally informative and cooperative discourse” (p. 86).

---

📚 8. Relevance for Broader Linguistic and Literary Analysis

• The paper has significant implications for analyzing:
  • Unreliable narrators
  • Satire and irony
  • Propaganda and rhetorical manipulation
• Meibauer’s framework enables a more precise analytical vocabulary for discussing insincerity and authorial stance in literature.

🎭 Narratology: Unreliable Narration and Speaker Intent

• Meibauer’s concept of insincere assertion is vital for analyzing unreliable narrators, especially those who present themselves as truthful while masking their lack of epistemic commitment.
• His notion that bullshit involves “weak epistemic commitment” (Meibauer, 2016, p. 74) helps decode characters or narrators who perform sincerity without believing their own claims.
• 📖 Application: Analysis of literary voices that manipulate the reader, such as in Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Ford’s The Good Soldier.

---

🌀 Post-Structuralism: Instability of Meaning and Truth

• The text supports post-structuralist concerns about truth being contingent, performative, and manipulable.
• Meibauer observes that bullshit flouts Gricean maxims, destabilizing expected truth norms in discourse (p. 86).
• 📖 Application: Deconstruction of logocentric claims and exploration of ambiguity in authorial voice.

---

🧩 Pragmatics in Literary Discourse Analysis

• By grounding bullshit in speech act theory and implicature, Meibauer offers tools for analyzing how characters use language performatively rather than truthfully.
• “Bullshitting is insincere assertion” (p. 73), particularly useful in identifying manipulative or self-deceptive dialogue in fiction.

---

🎭 Rhetoric and Reader Response Theory

• The function of impression management and strategic vagueness aligns with theories of reader manipulation and rhetorical stance.
• Meibauer writes: “Speaker aims at persuasion or impression management” (p. 81)—a foundation for analyzing how texts guide reader belief or complicity.

---

🌫️ Ideology Critique and Critical Discourse Analysis

• Meibauer’s account of bullshit reveals how truth-indifferent language sustains ideological hegemony, especially in political or propagandistic fiction.
• “Bullshit often entails strategic vagueness and the use of stock phrases” (p. 81)—a critical insight for dissecting ideology in dystopian or authoritarian texts.

---

🧠 Ethics and Intentionality in Literary Ethics Theory

• The concept of ethical commitment to truth in speech is central to evaluating moral dimensions of narration.
• By distinguishing lying from bullshitting, Meibauer clarifies how characters’ epistemic ethics affect narrative trust.
• “The liar hides the truth, the bullshitter hides that he does not care about the truth” (p. 69).

---

📣 Satire and Irony Studies

• Bullshit as a mode of insincere discourse enhances understanding of ironic and satirical narrative tones.
• His reference to “pseudo-assertion” and overconfident speech markers (p. 75) is crucial for analyzing ironic posturing in works by Swift or Vonnegut.

---

📚 Metafiction and Self-Reflexivity

• Theorizing bullshit as discourse unconcerned with truth but obsessed with performance aligns with postmodern metafictional strategies.
• Meibauer’s view of bullshit as discourse that “pretends to assert a proposition” (p. 81) mirrors self-reflexive narration that performs fictionality.

🔍 Overreliance on Speech Act Theory

• Meibauer grounds his theory primarily in assertive speech acts, which may exclude or oversimplify more literary, poetic, or metaphorical uses of bullshit.
• Critics argue that not all bullshit functions through clear illocutionary force—e.g., satire or performance art resists such classification.

---

🎭 Neglect of Performative and Aesthetic Dimensions

• The theory underemphasizes the literary or aesthetic use of bullshit, such as in postmodern fiction, where authors deliberately play with sincerity and insincerity.
• Literary scholars may argue that bullshit can function as artistic ambiguity, not always as a rhetorical or moral failure.

---

🧠 Assumes a Binary Between Truth and Bullshit

• While Meibauer refines Frankfurt’s model, he still operates within a binary of truth vs. insincerity, leaving little room for complex epistemic gray zones like irony, parody, or speculative writing.
• Real-life discourse often blends knowledge, belief, and persuasion—bullshit may not be as categorically distinct as suggested.

---

🗣️ Narrow Focus on Assertion

• The model prioritizes assertions as the main carrier of bullshit, possibly ignoring other speech acts like questions, commands, or emotional appeals, which can also function insincerely.

---

🌍 Lacks Socio-Cultural Contextualization

• Meibauer’s approach is largely individualistic and formal, focusing on the speaker’s intent rather than institutional or ideological structures that enable bullshit (e.g., political media, nationalism).
• Critical theorists might call for a broader, discourse-historical analysis.

---

🌀 Insufficient Engagement with Visual/Multimodal Bullshit

• In the age of digital misinformation, bullshit often occurs in images, memes, or tone, not just verbal assertions—Meibauer’s framework doesn’t address this.

---

🧩 Unclear Operational Criteria

• The line between exaggeration, lying, and bullshitting remains theoretically murky, especially when certainty and sincerity are difficult to measure.
• Critics argue the framework lacks clear diagnostic tools for identifying bullshit in natural language.

🔹 Redefining “Bullshit” Beyond Frankfurt

• The authors critique Harry Frankfurt’s rigid, checklist-style definition of “bullshit” and argue for a more flexible, graded-category approach.
  • Frankfurt defines bullshit as “a misrepresentation of the self—one’s feelings, thoughts, or attitudes” (p. 17).
  • However, the authors propose that bullshit is not an either/or concept but a spectrum: “Like game, bullshit groups together acts that can be quite varied” (p. 32).
  • They draw on Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” to suggest bullshit should be treated as a graded category rather than an essentialist one (p. 32).

---

🔹 Bullshit as a Rhetorical Phenomenon

• Bullshit in academic writing is often not about deception, but rhetorical ethos-building.
  • “Prototypical bullshit has to do with a purposeful misrepresentation of self, has the quality of gamesmanship…” (p. 379).
  • The authors stress that academic bullshit is part of a “ludic” rhetorical tradition—one that values play, performance, and reputation (p. 132).
  • Referencing Walter Ong, they argue that such rhetorical behavior is gendered, typically associated with masculine competitiveness (p. 124–125).

---

🔹 Prototypical vs. Non-Prototypical Bullshit

• A key conceptual distinction is drawn between different types of bullshit:
  • Prototypical bullshit: exaggerated, insincere, self-promoting discourse that misrepresents reality for rhetorical gain.
    • Example: “Your call is important to us” – “It grates… nobody believes it” (p. 380).
  • Non-prototypical bullshit: stylistic convention, unintentional obfuscation, or identity performance that may still serve valid academic purposes.
    • “Academic writing… may be bullshit, but it is not prototypical bullshit” (p. 384).

---

🔹 The Bullshit Paradox in Academic Writing

• Academics are in a contradictory position: they produce writing often accused of being bullshit, yet they value clarity, truth, and rigor.
  • “The academic writer must… prove [claims] according to the conventions of the discipline” (p. 383).
  • Yet these conventions themselves can produce writing that “enhances the ethos” more than it clarifies (p. 383).
  • The article suggests that “academic gamesmanship is liable to the charge of bullshit insofar as the persona… may be completely different from the ‘actual’ disposition of the writer” (p. 384).

---

🔹 Bullshit in Student Writing

• Student writing also reflects bullshit in both cynical and developmental forms.
  • William Perry’s “bullster” writes without reading—offering “relevancies, however relevant, without data” (p. 65).
  • More troubling is the “competent but insincere cooperation” seen in Jasper Neel’s “anti-writing,” where students follow form but show “disregard for the truth” (p. 85).
  • This type of bullshit “aims to get by with something worse than a lie: disengagement” (p. 386).

---

🔹 Bullshit as Pedagogical Reality and Opportunity

• The authors conclude that benign bullshit is part of academic development and genre acquisition.
  • “Productive sort of bullshit… ultimately produces better thought and better selves” (p. 387).
  • They caution, however, against the “gravitational pull” of prototypical bullshit (p. 384).
  • Teachers must remain vigilant, guiding students away from cynical manipulation and toward sincere engagement: “To do that, we need… a more precise understanding of how what bullshit is varies” (p. 386).

---

🔹 Bullshit as a Structural and Institutional Issue

• The article shows how academia’s incentive systems (tenure, publishing, specialization) structurally encourage bullshit.
  • “Professional rewards come from academic reputation, and academic reputation comes from publication” (p. 383).
  • Even earnest academic writing “may be a variant sort of bullshit—bullshit on the edge of the category” (p. 384).

---

🔹 Bullshit and Intra-Academic Policing

• Bullshit is also a rhetorical weapon used within academic turf wars.
  • “Theoretical frameworks probably provoke more cries of ‘Bullshit!’ than any other academic praxis” (p. 385).
  • Accusing another scholar of bullshit can be “an argumentum ad hominem that aims to excommunicate” (p. 385).

🧠 1. Poststructuralism & Constructivist Theories of the Self

• Contribution: The article supports a view of identity as constructed rather than essential, aligning with poststructuralist ideas of subjectivity.
  • “Some contemporary scholars might deny… that there is a pre-existing self to which the bullshitter is not true. They might say that the self is bullshit. It is constructed out of bullshit” (p. 377).
• Implication: The notion of rhetorical identity aligns with thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, challenging stable notions of authorial sincerity and authenticity.

---

🧬 2. Rhetorical Theory and Ethos

• Contribution: Eubanks and Schaeffer expand classical rhetorical theory—particularly the Aristotelian concept of ethos—by showing how academic ethos can be performative, strategic, and even deceptive.
  • “The bullshitter attempts to misrepresent himself or herself, that is, to create an ethos that implies a character that the speaker does not possess” (p. 377).
• Implication: In literary theory, this supports an analysis of texts and authorship as performative acts, not transparent self-expressions.

---

🌀 3. Prototype Theory and Linguistic Semantics

• Contribution: The article introduces prototype semantics (from cognitive linguistics) into literary and rhetorical theory, enriching how categories like “bullshit” or “literature” are evaluated.
  • “Bullshit is a graded category… one task is not to say what is bullshit and what is not but to distinguish what is prototypical bullshit from what is not” (p. 376).
• Implication: Literary theorists can apply graded categories to analyze genres, textual ambiguity, and hybrid forms without strict binaries.

---

🎭 4. Performance Theory

• Contribution: Bullshit is reframed as gamesmanship or rhetorical performance, linking to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theories and Judith Butler’s performativity.
  • “Bullshit may be essential to the kind of rhetorical situation that Walter Ong calls ‘ludic’… these situations could be called ‘games’ and the behavior appropriate to them called ‘gamesmanship’” (p. 378).
• Implication: Academic and literary discourse are viewed as stage-managed performances, challenging assumptions of sincerity or objectivity in interpretation and criticism.

---

⚔️ 5. Feminist Literary Criticism

• Contribution: The article acknowledges that the masculine, ludic nature of rhetorical games (including bullshitting) is embedded in academic discourse and writing norms.
  • “Bullshit… is almost exclusively a male game” (p. 379); “It is surely no accident that so many influential critiques of academic argument have come from a feminist perspective” (p. 379).
• Implication: Reinforces feminist critiques of academic discourse as gendered and exclusionary, validating the push toward more inclusive and ethical writing practices.

---

🧾 6. Genre Theory

• Contribution: It reframes academic writing as a genre bound by institutional conventions that may foster bullshit—not as deviance but as structural necessity.
  • “Even good academic writing… may be bullshit” (p. 384); “Academic publication… aims to create an ethos that will result in tangible rewards” (p. 383).
• Implication: Enhances literary theory’s understanding of how genre functions rhetorically, especially in institutional and professional contexts.

---

📚 7. Institutional Critique & Critical Theory

• Contribution: The article critiques the academic institution itself for structurally incentivizing bullshit through systems of tenure, peer review, and scholarly competition.
  • “Professional rewards come from academic reputation, and academic reputation comes from publication… a particularly rich field for bullshit” (p. 383).
• Implication: Supports the critical theory tradition (e.g., Habermas, Bourdieu) in exposing the ideological and material functions behind academic discourse.

---

🤹 8. Reader-Response and Audience Theory

• Contribution: The essay emphasizes that judgments about “bullshit” are audience-dependent and context-specific.
  • “What they really mean is that the writing does not appropriately address them” (p. 382); “It matters who is making the judgment” (p. 382).
• Implication: Underscores the active role of the reader in assigning value and meaning—core to reader-response theory.

---

💬 9. Metacriticism

• Contribution: The article itself is a metacritique of academic discourse, exposing its self-contradictions, performativity, and institutional constraints.
  • “If academic writing is bullshit, then bullshit is what we teach” (p. 374).
• Implication: Challenges literary theorists to critically reflect on their own practices and disciplinary assumptions.

❗ Over-Normalization of Bullshit

• Criticism: The authors risk normalizing bullshit by suggesting it is often benign or inevitable in academic writing.
• Concern: This may blur the ethical distinction between strategic rhetoric and intellectual dishonesty.
• E.g., the argument that “benign bullshit… produces better selves” (p. 387) could be misused to excuse poor scholarship.

---

🔍 Lack of Clear Boundaries

• Criticism: The concept of bullshit as a graded category makes it difficult to apply in real academic assessment.
• Concern: By avoiding a firm line, the authors complicate the task of evaluating when rhetoric crosses into problematic territory.
• Frankfurt’s call for “decisiveness” is rejected, but critics might argue this renders the concept too vague to regulate.

---

👓 Masculine Bias in Rhetorical Framing

• Criticism: Although the essay acknowledges Ong’s insight that bullshit is a “masculine game,” it arguably does not go far enough in critiquing this gender bias.
• Concern: The piece risks reinforcing a gendered view of rhetoric without fully interrogating its implications for feminist or inclusive pedagogies.

---

🧩 Insufficient Engagement with Power Structures

• Criticism: The essay critiques individual performances and stylistic conventions more than systemic academic inequalities.
• Concern: It underplays how institutional bullshit is tied to publishing metrics, elitism, and exclusionary discourse norms.

---

📉 Neglect of Student Impact

• Criticism: The discussion of student “bullshit” risks condescension or underestimation of the pressures students face.
• Concern: Descriptions of “bullsters” and “anti-writing” may frame students too harshly, ignoring the structural constraints on their agency.

---

📚 Limited Theoretical Dialogue

• Criticism: The article focuses heavily on Frankfurt and cognitive semantics, with limited engagement with broader critical theory.
• Concern: The discussion could be enriched by deeper references to discourse theory, Bourdieu, or postcolonial critiques of academic language.

---

🔄 Circularity in Definition

• Criticism: The authors reject checklist definitions but still rely on a prototype that often loops back to the same traits—misrepresentation, ethos inflation, gamesmanship.
• Concern: Critics may argue this makes the article circular in logic, using bullshit to define bullshit.