I loved Harry Frankfurt's excellent essay "On Bullshit." But the article described here, which purports to build on Frankfurt's work, is nothing more than an elaboration of the authors' prejudices. I wondered for a moment if the abstract wasn't a joke -– an amusing demonstration of what it pretends to deplore. Unfortunately, no: the authors are apparently serious and actually carried out the "research" needed to arrive at their perfectly pseudo-scientific results.
Given that they are studying reactions to what they describe as "pseudo-profound bullshit," one would expect the authors to define what they mean by that term with some degree of care and rigor. They don't. Instead, in their brief discussion, they provide something akin to Justice Stewart's famous non-definition definition of obscenity: I know it when I see it.
The problem of course is that when it comes to bullshit, things aren't that simple. How exactly does one distinguish the pseudo-profound from the genuinely profound? The explanation that pseudo-profound bullshit consists of "seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous" sounds good (as bullshit often does) but is logically circular: a statement is empty because it is vacuous.
Their one real-life example of the pseudo-profound is this tweet from Deepak Chopra: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” Easy enough to believe that this statement is indeed pseudo-profound bullshit. But the authors don't even bother to demonstrate as much: the mere fact that Deepak Chopra said it and that its meaning is not immediately apparent suffices for them.
I have no idea what if anything Chopra meant by his tweet, but philosophy is full of highly compressed, gnomic statements whose full meaning can be revealed only by studying the work in which they appear (and sometimes many other works as well). Here's one from J.L. Austin: "Sentences are not as such either true or false" Does that sentence contain a useful insight or is it merely pseudo-profound bullshit? If Austin's meaning isn't immediately apparent to you, the only way to make that judgment is to read further.
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