ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘bullshit’ as a philosophical and pragmatic concept was first made popular by Frankfurt (2005) in the 1980s and has since been taken up by philosophers (e.g. Cohen 2002, Evans 2006, Wreen 2013, Fallis 2015, Stokke and Fallis 2017) and pragmatists (e.g. Meibauer 2016). In this chapter I take a discourse analytical approach, which means that I am not so concerned with the abstract philosophical or pragmatic concept in itself but in how it manifests in spoken or written discourse. Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit involves the speaker intentionally saying something for rhetorical effect while being indifferent as to whether or not they believe it. However, as first noted by Cohen (2002), bullshit can be not only the conscious movement of the bull but also the excrementitious product on the discursive ground. Cohen saw this ‘shit’ as being produced by any state of mind. Here, though, I argue that this type of bullshit is primarily produced through a dogmatic frame of mind. In discourse analytical terms, rather than being an intentionally insincere discourse strategy like Frankfurtian bullshitting, dogmatic bullshit can be seen as a ‘discourse pathology’, something that goes discursively wrong when the speaker, under the influence of a dogmatic attitude, is not being epistemically conscientious (Montmarquet, 1993). While dogmatic bullshit is epistemically irresponsible and can result in epistemic blame, the chapter also introduces a dimension of moral blame through the notion of ‘epistemic negligence’.
