Lying and Bullshitting

Dr Andreas Stokke (Uppsala University)

Abstract: Most of the time, people take care to make sure that the things they say are things they believe to be true. If we couldn’t trust people to, in most cases, tell the truth, we wouldn't be able to rely on information acquired from others to the extent that we need to. But sometimes people speak while being indifferent toward what they say. We will look at some of these ways in this talk. In particular, we will try to arrive at an understanding of what Harry Frankfurt called ‘bullshitting’ as a mode of speech marked by indifference toward truth. And we will try to understand how this kind of talk differs from lying, that is, saying something one believes to be false.