Assurance and Warrant

We’re now ready for the revision. Though he’s right that there’s an important difference between bullshitting and lying, Frankfurt is wrong about the nature of bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t, or at least needn’t, manifest a failure to care about the truth. Bullshit instead manifests a failure to care appropriately about the context-sensitive epistemic needs of your interlocutor. You can fail to care appropriately about the context-sensitive epistemic needs of your interlocutor while being very much — even overridingly — concerned with the truth, as the following example illustrates. Say Sieglinde tells Aidan that his wife is having an affair, and Aidan replies ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ What is Aidan likely to have in mind? He may not in the least suspect Sieglinde of lying, and the charge in any case falls far short of lying. ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ lacks the key implication of ‘Don’t lie to me!’ — namely that the speaker is, or at least may well be, in the business of outright deception. Thus far, Frankfurt’s analysis is correct. His analysis goes wrong only when it implies that Aidan must be thinking of Sieglinde as unconcerned, or as not concerned in the right way, with the truth. Aidan needn’t be thinking of Sieglinde in those terms at all. He may be perfectly aware that she believes that his wife is having an affair. He may conceptualize her intervention as an attempt to get him to open his eyes to the truth in what she says. He may think of her, in sum, as acting from a passionate devotion to the truth. But he’s still worried about what she’s up to, and ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ perfectly expresses this worry. What worries him, as we might naturally construe the case, is that Sieglinde believes that his wife is having an affair on the basis of evidence that would not count as conclusive in his doxastic context – a context very different from her own. Elaborating the worry, perhaps he regards her as unempathetic or unimaginative about others’ lives. Or perhaps he fears that a false intimacy motivates her to make him feel that they operate in a single doxastic context. ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ here means ‘Don’t disregard my epistemic needs!’ He might have put his claim of need in terms of respect: ‘Given that you’re addressing me, treat me with the respect appropriate to this illocution!’ The example makes clear that, in the illocutionary dimension that defines the act, a teller respects her addressee by aiming to be appropriately responsive to his epistemic needs. To put the difference in terms that will be useful later, failure to care about the truth is a monadic wrong, but failure to care about your addressee’s epistemic needs, or at least to act as if you cared, is fully bipolar. If you address A in the way characteristic of testimony without being thus appropriately responsive to A’s context-sensitive epistemic needs, you aren’t merely in the wrong, you’re wronging A.