Introduction: “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
“Aspects of a Theory of Bullshit” by Jörg Meibauer first appeared in 2016 in the journal Pragmatics & Cognition (Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 68–91) and marks a significant contribution to the linguistic and philosophical theorization of deception and insincerity in language. Building upon Harry Frankfurt’s foundational essay On Bullshit, Meibauer deepens the theoretical landscape by proposing that “bullshit” should be understood as a distinct pragmatic category, grounded in speech act theory and implicature analysis. Central to his model is the notion that bullshitting involves insincere assertion, characterized by a loose concern for truth, a misrepresentational intent, and crucially, excessive certainty. This last component—arguably Meibauer’s most original addition—suggests that the bullshitter’s rhetoric is marked by undue epistemic confidence despite lacking adequate concern for factual accuracy. The paper also addresses challenges to Frankfurt’s theory, such as evasive, bald-faced, and bullshit lies, and defends a refined account capable of capturing these nuances through a pragmatic lens. Meibauer’s work is important in literary theory and broader linguistic pragmatics for offering a rigorous typology of deceptive discourse acts, enabling a more precise analysis of communication in political rhetoric, advertising, and even literary texts. By situating “bullshit” alongside categories like irony, metaphor, and hyperbole, the paper broadens the scope of how insincerity and truth-related attitudes shape discourse and reader reception. It also lays foundational groundwork for distinguishing performative and strategic uses of language, making it a valuable resource in the study of narrative voice, authorial stance, and reader manipulation in literature.
Summary of “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
🧠 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.
Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
| Theoretical Term/Concept | Explanation | Reference / Quotation |
| 🧠 Bullshit (Frankfurtian sense) | A form of speech where the speaker shows no concern for truth, unlike lying which involves deliberate falsehood. | “Bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, is speech with no concern for the truth.” (p. 68) |
| 🗣️ Insincere Assertion | A statement presented as sincere but lacking genuine epistemic commitment—a defining structure of bullshitting. | “Bullshitting is insincere assertion.” (p. 73) |
| ⚠️ Excessive Certainty | A rhetorical strategy where speakers express strong confidence despite having no regard for truth—key to identifying bullshit. | “One typical feature of bullshitting is the use of excessive certainty markers.” (p. 75) |
| 📚 Speech Act Theory | The theoretical lens used to analyze bullshit as a kind of assertive act, despite the speaker’s lack of truth-commitment. | “Assertions are central to bullshitting…” (p. 74) |
| 🧩 Gricean Implicature | Bullshit disrupts cooperative conversation by violating Grice’s maxims, especially the Maxim of Quality (truthfulness). | “Bullshit calls into question the Gricean assumption…” (p. 86) |
| 🙊 Bald-faced Lie | A lie that is clearly false and known to be false by all parties, yet socially tolerated—contrasted with bullshit’s indifference to truth. | “Bald-faced lies are intended to be false and known to be so…” (p. 77) |
| 🌀 Pseudo-assertion | A statement that mimics an assertion but lacks actual belief or knowledge—frequently found in bullshit. | “Bullshitting often entails strategic vagueness…” (p. 81) |
| 🎯 Epistemic Commitment | The speaker’s degree of commitment to the truth of their statement; in bullshitting, this is weakened or absent. | “Assertions… with a weaker epistemic commitment…” (p. 74) |
| 🎭 Persuasion / Impression Management | A core function of bullshit: to influence others or craft a certain image of the speaker, regardless of truth. |
Contribution of “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer to Literary Theory/Theories
🎭 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.
Examples of Critiques Through “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
| Fiction Title & Author | Bullshit Element Identified | Application of Meibauer’s Concepts | Critique Using In-text Reference |
| 🪖 The Blind Man’s Garden – Nadeem Aslam (Pakistani-British, Indian conflict theme) | Ideological Bullshit and Certainty in Faith Discourse | The characters’ rhetoric—especially Islamist and militarist speech—reflects “excessive certainty markers” and disregard for factual complexity (Meibauer, 2016, p. 75). | Religious and military figures often “pretend to assert a proposition” to sustain ideological belief (p. 81). |
| 🪙 The Scent of God – Saikat Majumdar | Insincere Assertion in Institutional Militarized Religion | The protagonist’s elite monastic school experience showcases truth-ambivalent narratives from spiritual authorities—a form of institutional bullshit. | Characters flout sincerity and commitment in sacred speech acts, engaging in what Meibauer calls “insincere assertion” (p. 73). |
| 🎖️ Kargil: From Surprise to Victory – General V.P. Malik (semi-fictional narrative framing) | Overconfident War Rhetoric | Uses strategic over-certainty in framing India’s military victory—rhetoric aligns with Meibauer’s critique of epistemic overstatement (p. 75). | The narrative uses “excessive certainty markers” to construct nationalistic truth, glossing over ambiguity (p. 75). |
| 🔫 The Valley of Masks – Tarun Tejpal | Ideological Indoctrination and Pseudo-assertion | The protagonist’s role in a violent, cult-like movement reveals systematic use of pseudo-assertions and strategic vagueness (p. 81). | Language used by the cult “pretends to assert propositions” rooted in moral certainty, echoing Meibauer’s structure of bullshit (p. 81). |
Criticism Against “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
🔍 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.
Representative Quotations from “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer with Explanation
| # | Quotation | Explanation |
| 1️⃣ | “Bullshitting is insincere assertion: the speaker pretends to assert a proposition while not being committed to the truth of what he says.” (p. 73) | Meibauer’s core definition. Bullshit mimics genuine assertions but lacks the speaker’s epistemic commitment, which is a foundational breach of sincerity in communication. |
| 2️⃣ | “One typical feature of bullshitting is the use of excessive certainty markers: the speaker expresses strong commitment to a proposition while actually not caring whether it is true.” (p. 75) | Introduces excessive certainty as a key linguistic marker of bullshit—where a speaker uses overconfidence to mask indifference to truth. |
| 3️⃣ | “The liar hides the truth; the bullshitter hides the fact that he does not care about the truth.” (p. 69) | Meibauer paraphrases Frankfurt to distinguish bullshit from lying: liars are oriented toward truth (to negate it), whereas bullshitters are epistemically indifferent. |
| 4️⃣ | “Assertions are central to bullshitting, but with a weaker epistemic commitment than is standardly assumed in speech act theory.” (p. 74) | Meibauer adapts speech act theory, arguing that the form of assertion is preserved in bullshit, but the internal sincerity condition is missing. |
| 5️⃣ | “Bullshitting often entails strategic vagueness and the use of stock phrases that appear informative but avoid any clear propositional commitment.” (p. 81) | This identifies the rhetorical style of bullshit: vague, clichéd, and deliberately evasive, often used to create the illusion of knowledge. |
Suggested Readings: “Aspects Of A Theory Of Bullshit”by Jörg Meibauer
- Wakeham, Joshua. “Bullshit as a Problem of Social Epistemology.” Sociological Theory, vol. 35, no. 1, 2017, pp. 15–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26382904. Accessed 16 June 2025.
- Frankfurt, Harry G. “ON BULLSHIT.” On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 1–68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7t4wr.2. Accessed 16 June 2025.
- Pilgrim, David. “BPS Bullshit.” British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction, edited by David Pilgrim, Karnac Books, 2023, pp. 127–44. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.23338242.11. Accessed 16 June 2025.
- Brahms, Yael. Philosophy of Post-Truth. Institute for National Security Studies, 2020. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep23537. Accessed 16 June 2025.