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This 3 page paper discusses Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit," explaining how Frankfurt defines it and giving two examples of BS, one from the media and one from politics. Bibliography lists
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3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVOnBS.rtf
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Frankfurts essay On Bullshit, explaining how Frankfurt sees it and giving two examples of BS, one from the media and one from politics. Discussion One of the things a critic
noted about bullshit is that it is both a noun and a verb (Noah, 2005): We can say "Thats a lot of bullshit" or we can say "Youre bullshitting me!"
and clearly understand the difference between the two. This is an important point, because we can also say the same thing about a lie: "Thats a lie" or "Youre lying
to me!" Frankfurt argues that despite this commonality in usage, there is a difference between lying and bullshitting, and that lying almost always provokes an angry response in the person
lied to, while the person on the receiving end of a well-constructed piece of bullshit is more forgiving. What then is the difference between outright lying and bullshitting? "Frankfurts
conclusion ... is that bullshit is defined not so much by the end product as by the process by which it is created" (Noah, 2005). Because this is so, bullshit
becomes special; its "possible to bullshit somebody, but it is not possible to poppycock, or to twaddle, or to horseshit anyone" (Noah, 2005). Further, talking about bullshit means that we
also have to talk about "the action that brought the bullshit into being: Somebody bullshitted" (Noah, 2005). In this context, "bullshit" is identical to "lie," because when we talk about
a lie, we also implicitly talk about the action "that brought the lie into being: Somebody lied" (Noah, 2005). But "bullshit" is not a synonym for "lie," although the difference
is difficult to explain clearly. Frankfurt does so by considering a situation in which the philosopher Wittgenstein (who does a lot of work with semantics and word meanings as philosophical
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