 I don't know about you, but when someone tells me that they're really into bullfighting, for me that's kind of a red flag. As anyone who knows me will tell you, especially anyone who knew me in college, I'm sometimes prone to just running my mouth, saying things that might be true or not. Either way, the point isn't really to communicate information, it's to have something to say. This heedless attitude towards the truth or falsity of my words is the hallmark of what philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit, a sort of speech that isn't intended to inform or even mislead, speech that really isn't even invested in the question of accuracy at all. It's just kind of throwing words at the wall and seeing what sticks. And, speaking of walls, Frankfurt's criterion has been invoked by many authors over the years of the Trump presidency, and it's not hard to see why. The former president's disregard for self-consistency or facts pervades his speech in a way that departs from the usual strains of bullshit you find in politics. News media reporting on him have had to invent all sorts of new apparatus to responsibly inform viewers of the many things he says or implies that are simply, straightforwardly, unambiguously wrong. The communication that's happening when Trump speaks to an audience has very little to do with the literal meaning of what he says, and everything to do with the vibe or attitude he's trying to cultivate. In response to some of the fallout from the mob's assault on the Capitol Building this past week, former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told reporters, people took him literally. I never thought I'd see that. Yep, it's also a strategy that seems to have spread. There is no earnest evaluation of the stop the steal mob that would lead a reasonable person to the conclusion that it was anything but what it was. But numerous baseless and banal conspiracy theories have sprung up in its wake, repeated by both professional media bullshitters and, more distressingly, members of Congress. Again, these statements aren't intended to either inform or mislead. Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks doesn't expect anyone to believe his bullshit. He certainly wouldn't be surprised if someone ID'd every member of the mob and confirmed that they were, in fact, Trump supporters attempting to interrupt the certification of the electoral vote. He's not actually invested in the truth or falsehood of the statement. He's kind of just saying stuff. A clear contemptuous indifference towards reality, even against the backdrop of the normal, weasel-y half truths that we expect from politics, is shocking, sometimes frightening. A liar can at least be challenged or backed into a corner with evidence or careful reasoning. They might dance around a straight answer or deliberately mislead you, but with enough facts, even the best lies can be chased down and extinguished. An unapologetic bullshitter, on the other hand, is immune to all the inconveniences of reality. They can happily deny the existence of the cliff until the moment they hit the ground, with all of the consequences that imply for the rest of us. Still, if you're a curious sort of person, you might wonder what exactly is so drastically different between a Donald Trump whopper, like we won in a landslide, and Bill Clinton's It Depends on what the meaning of the word is, is, or George W. Bush's Mission Accomplished. Sure, maybe Trump's bullshit is more egregious, more blatantly and transparently false, but true is true and false is false, right? I mean, technically speaking, a little white lie and a massive unbelievable fiction have the same truth value. They're both false. There are an infinite number of fictional claims, and only one actual truth at the matter. What is it exactly that we're so worried about going from little liars to big ones? Why does it matter if Trump's bullshit is an order of magnitude more outrageous than the fibs that politicians usually tell? Well, just hang on to that question for a moment. We're going to take a little detour, and hopefully we'll pick up some insight along the way. So, during the 20th century, scientists rapidly overturned many established truths about the universe, and it became increasingly apparent that even the best, most well-established, fundamental scientific theories could be called into question or straight disproven. Newtonian physics? Wrong. Local realism? Wrong. Conservation of mass? Wrong, wrong, wrong. With so many critical paradigms overturned, the rosy notion that eventually science would deliver a complete theory of everything on a silver platter with a 100% money-back guarantee that it was the whole truth and nobody would ever find anything wrong with it in the future, kind of fell by the wayside. Instead, many philosophers of science began to embrace a more humble mentality made popular by Karl Popper and others thinking along the same lines, called fallibilism. The idea that knowledge is always a tricky, uncertain thing, that even the best and most robustly verified theories may someday reveal themselves to be incomplete or wrong in some way. That's kind of a bummer, really. It implies that we're never going to have certain knowledge of anything. But Popper became famous for rescuing some sort of silver lining in the midst of fallibilism, saying, science isn't really about proving that certain notions are true, but instead disproving ones that are false, crossing out hypotheses that don't work from our list of possible answers. That's great, because it means that even if we always have to worry about suddenly finding out that all of our scientific theories are wrong, at least we can move on confident that we're not making the same mistakes twice. And that's a sort of knowledge. But it does leave us with the Trump bullshit problem. Or something sort of like it. Newtonian physics is, technically speaking, false. It is logically just as false as a theory that puts the Earth at the center of the universe instead of orbiting the sun, or a theory that the Earth sits on the back of a giant turtle. All of these theories have the same logical truth value. They're all false. Worse yet, it's infinitely unlikely that we just sort of happen to pick the singular correct theory, called relativity, out of an infinitely large hat of possibilities. Going by sheer probability, the odds are zero that we got it right. How can it be that science is making progress towards understanding the universe if we're just using it to switch between an infinite number of false theories? The answer that Popper and other philosophers came up with is something that's somewhat intuitive in common sense reasoning, but very difficult to define. Truth-likeness, or versimilitude, a sort of relative distance from, or resemblance to, truth that's a little more fine-grained than simply, is it true? Yes, no. In many ways, truth-likeness is a much more precious thing than exact truth or falsehood, a better indicator of the value of a theory or statement or idea for understanding the whole picture. Take this statement. There's a non-zero amount of water in this glass. Well, that's definitely true. As true as anything can be, and not really helpful. I mean, well done, Josh. You said a true fact about the universe, but it's not much more informative than saying, this glass is a glass, or the glass is made of matter. Logical truths, at least the ones that can be known beyond any doubt, are almost always useless for knowing what's actually going on. However, take this statement. There's 250 grams of water in this glass. Now that's demonstrably untrue. If we measure it carefully, we find out that it's actually 246 grams. Even that's technically untrue. There's really 246.30859 and so on grams of water, and that number is constantly fluctuating as water evaporates. However, even though the 250 and 246 gram answers are both literally false, they supply a more complete and nuanced and useful picture of the situation than the literal, indisputable 100% truth of, there's more than zero water in the glass. Philosophers have been trying for decades to pin down exactly what makes for more truth-like answers, examining possibilities like whether they encompass more logical truths, or imply more true consequences, or maybe there's more similarity between the worlds described by truth-like answers and the real world. Each of these criteria has been shown to have strengths and weaknesses, but as of yet, nobody's really managed to nail down what makes an answer truth-like or closer to the truth than another answer, even if it's not logically true. This gives us a sort of insight into what it is that makes Trump's unapologetic pants-on-fire falsehoods different and scarier than the relatively normal bullshit that we expect from career politicians. A journalist might be extraordinarily careful in how they choose their words to report a situation exactly as it occurred, both true and truth-like speech. A lawyer might use very specific language that's technically accurate but misleading, true but not truth-like. A Frankfurt-esque bullshitter might not care about the literal truth or falsehood of their claims, but may still be invested in conveying something truth-like, or at least maintaining respectful distance from truth-like claims. An amusing story with random details thrown in for comedic effect, complimenting someone under performance when you actually have no idea if it was good or bad. These may be bullshit, but they're still conveying earnest truth-like messages. This was a funny event. I'm glad I was here to support your work. The Trump-style of wild grandiose, wholly unfounded bullshit, however, shows no regard for either truth or truth-likeness. A statement like, we're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it clearly isn't made with any attention paid to the literal truth of the words being said, but it's also distinctly unhinged from any concern for realistic representation of the world. As with normal bullshit, it's more about shaping the emotions and attitudes of the audience than communicating facts, but it's only about that. The fiction invented for a joke or a baseless compliment are still in some sense intended to reflect some part of reality truthfully. They rhyme with what's actually going on, but in statements like these, the only aspect of the world that's given any serious consideration is, what words can I string together to get you to support me? Normally, when it's fairly obvious that someone's bullshitting me, I sort of just nod along and let them get it out of their system, because, hey, we've all done there. Bullshit isn't always malicious, and it's not always feasible to care strongly about speaking factually all the time, but people who turn their back on both literal truth and truth-like speech have essentially rejected all pretense to using language for any purpose but cultivating a desired reaction from their audience. Rather than taking the time to carefully assemble facts that they won't care about, I think that you're probably justified in simply just calling them under bullshit. What do you think of this sort of an account of heedlessness towards both literal truth and truth-likeness? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blow up a subscribe law share, and don't stop thunking.