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Rethinking Bullshit Receptivity

Today's blogpost is from Jonathan Wilson, a Philosophy PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center, on his recent paper Rethinking Bullshit Receptivity (Review of Philosophy and Psychology).

Jonathan Wilson

Over the past decade, research on bullshit has become widespread thanks in large part to the development of the Bullshit Receptivity Scale. Here's how the scale works. Subjects read a series of syntactically correct, randomly generated statements with a new-agey ring (e.g., “The future will be an astral unveiling of inseparability”). Then subjects rate how profound they think the statements are on a scale from 1 (not at all profound) to 5 (very profound). Deployment of the scale has yielded some interesting results. People who rate bullshit as profound tend to be less reflective and lower in verbal intelligence. They are also more susceptible to fake news, more prone to conspiratorial ideation, and higher in religious and paranormal belief. 

But what is bullshit anyway? I don’t have a definition or theory on offer. Instead, my goal is to clarify the conceptual foundations of the Bullshit Receptivity Scale and to argue for a conception of bullshit that’s appropriate, given the aims of research on bullshit receptivity.

The Bullshit Receptivity Scale is typically construed as an operationalization of Harry Frankfurt's influential analysis of bullshit. Frankfurt’s analysis focuses on the intentions of the bullshitter—bullshit is speech or writing produced without regard for the truth. Researchers often emphasize that since statements in the Bullshit Receptivity Scale are randomly generated, they qualify as Frankfurtian bullshit. 

That’s true. But I argue that the fact that the statements were randomly generated is irrelevant to understanding why subjects respond to bullshit statements in the way they do. We’re better off looking for a notion of bullshit that focuses on what’s distinctive about the statements themselves, not the intentions behind the statements.

Along these lines, I propose that we reframe the Bullshit Receptivity Scale in terms of G.A. Cohen’s notion of unclarifiable bullshit—roughly, speech or writing that cannot be made clear. Viewed in this light, the central question probed by the Bullshit Receptivity Scale is not: “Do people regard statements produced without regard for the truth as profound?”; it’s “Do people regard unclarifiable statements as profound?”

In the later sections of the paper, I highlight some payoffs of this reframing. I argue that this helps generate plausible hypotheses about the mental processes implicated in bullshit receptivity and detection. In particular, I argue that we can draw from work on the Illusion of Explanatory Depth to throw some light on the psychology of bullshit receptivity and detection. I also emphasize that focusing on unclarifiable bullshit draws our attention to forms of bullshit that go beyond the pseudo-profound statements in the Bullshit Receptivity Scale.
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