I call bullshit on On Bullshit

After quite a hiatus from my 30-at-a-time library book borrowing habit, I have 4 tasty selections, and more on my wait list.

• On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt
• Godel, Escher and Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• In Search of the Mind, by Eric R. Kandel
• A Culinary Traveler in Tuscany, by Beth Elon

I’ve avoided any online talk of On Bullshit so don’t know what the general consensus is, but I think Frankfurt has written a pretty fantastic joke. On page one, he claims “most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it.” I think this is the point of the book — to fool the very intellectual folk who would be so confident. Frankfurt has written a very real book with a very real discussion of the explicit and implicit characteristics of bullshit. Yet, just as he considers it not quite lying, more of a bluff, I believe he wrote the entire piece as a bluff. We are not meant to take it seriously.

I am both annoyed and impressed — much as I would be, I suppose, by any other very good bullshit.