Reflections Essay
A rough account of what bullshit is:
In involves a kind of bluff. Lying and bluffing misrepresentation or deception. The liar is someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing is conveying something false.
What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.
Bullshitting is not being concerned for the truth but need not be false.
Telling a lie is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs
The liar is incapably concerned with truth-values.
A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through focuses on the panoramic rather than the particular and is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point.
The Bullshitter's only distinction is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. The truth-values of his statements are of no interest to him. His actions are a greater enemy of the truth than that of a liar.
Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.
Reflections on Bullshit essay by Harry Frankfurt chairman of the department of philosophy at Yale.