Thursday, September 10, 2020

The philosophy of bullsh*t and how to avoid stepping in it

The philosophy of bullsh*t and how to avoid stepping in it



The essay "Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy" considers much of the nonsense we encounter and offers a definition that allows us to move forward in dealing with it.
Dr. Moberger argues that what makes something bullshit is a "lack of epistemic conscientiousness," meaning that the person arguing for it takes no care to assure the truth of their statements. This typically manifests in systemic errors in reasoning and the frequent use of logical fallacies such as ad hominem, red herring, false dilemma, and cherry pickingamong others.
This makes bullsh*t different from lying, which involves caring what the truth is and purposely moving away from it, or mere indifference to truth, as it is quite possible for people pushing nonsense to care about their nonsense being true. It also makes it different from making the occasional mistake with reasoning, occasional errors differ from a systemic reliance on them.
Importantly, nonsense is also dependent on the epistemic unconscientiousness of the person pushing it rather than its content alone. This means some of it may end up being true (consider cases where a person's personality does match up with their star sign), but they end up being true for reasons unrelated to the bad reasoning used by its advocates.
Lots of things can, justly, be deemed "bullshit" under this understanding; such as astrologyhomeopathy, climate change denialism, flat-Earthismcreationism, and the anti-vaccine movement.

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