Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [31]
So is Sam-I-Am’s friend trying to deceive Sam-I-Am? We should note that actually deceiving someone is an insufficient and unnecessary condition of intending to deceive someone. I can try to deceive and fail, and I could accidentally deceive someone without meaning to do so. In order to claim lying in this case, Sam-I-Am’s friend would need to know, or at least believe, that he in fact does like green eggs and ham, as he repeatedly insists that he does not. But we know that he learns something new when he finally tries the dish, i.e., that he would eat it and would even do so with a fox, unless he is just pretending to love green eggs and ham at the end of the book to get Sam-I-Am off his back! In that case, he is outright lying, but we don’t have much of a reason to think this was Seuss’s intention.
So Sam-I-Am’s friend is probably not lying. Considering that he freely admits that he does not like “that Sam-I-Am” at the start, it is more likely that he is bullshitting. The bullshitter uses propositions, or claims, without regard for their status as true or false and is not directly concerned with the recipient’s belief of those propositions. A bullshitter is using those propositions simply to promote her agenda, without a care of whether they are true or false. Sam-I-Am’s friend just wants to be left alone and so is making a claim about not liking green eggs simply to shut Sam-I-Am up. Indeed, Sam-I-Am’s persistence, acting like the Socratic gadfly, brings this driving desire to the forefront since the friend is finally willing to try the eggs just to be finished with the nagging. Similarly, my daughter wasn’t concerned much with the truth status of her claim; she just didn’t want to stick those green eggs in her mouth.
If bullshitting is understood as using claims for some purpose other than representing or misrepresenting the truth, of conveying information or misinformation, we can fairly quickly recognize that we are often engaged in bullshit as both generators and recipients. This occurs any time we have desires that drive us to use propositions without a concern for their veracity. As such, engaging in bullshit is a constant threat to our intellectual integrity, which we can see by considering its effect on the five aspects I listed previously. First, it can reinforce already accepted ideas without warrant, undermining aspect (1). Second, bullshitting skews considerations of the genuine support for those ideas being true, undermining aspect (2), and clutters our minds and conversations with too many conflicting ideas, making it more difficult to attend to aspect (3). Most importantly, it devalues the honesty required within intellectual integrity, highlighted in aspect (4). Completely refraining from bullshit may be practically impossible, but complacency with regard to it completely deteriorates our sense of intellectual integrity. Philosophy provides the tools of rigorous critical thinking and the concern for the truth to purify our minds of such fecal matter.
Delusion Ain’t Just a Sport in D’Olympics
Just as we can lie to ourselves as we lie to others, we can also fall victim to our own lines of bullshit. Sometimes we say things without caring about its truth because we are really just managing other people’s reactions;