Bullshit and Philosophy Part 10

29.

Cohen's is "Deeper into Bulls.h.i.t," Chapter 8 in this volume.

30.

"Not by Chance," National Post of Canada (1st December, 2005).

31.

Lesson plans for teaching "Critical a.n.a.lysis of Evolution" in high schools can be found at the creationist Discovery Inst.i.tute's website, discovery.org.

32.

Special thanks to Gary Hardcastle for reading several drafts of this essay and never bulls.h.i.tting me about the problems he found.

33.

I use the term 'bulls.h.i.t' for a broader range of phenomena than Harry Frankfurt does. My focus here is less on one-on-one bulls.h.i.t, and more on what we might call official, inst.i.tutional bulls.h.i.t.

34.

There is by now a vast and varied literature, written from a variety of scientific or political perspectives, on techniques of ma.s.s persuasion and propaganda and on how and why it works on the human mind. For a few recent and cla.s.sical examples see Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Freeman, 1992); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Ma.s.s Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig, 2004 [1928]), and Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

35.

The psychological literature on confirmation bias is vast. For early studies doc.u.menting this phenomenon, see P.C. Wason, "On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task," Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (1960); P.C. Wason, "Reasoning," in B.M. Foss, ed., New Horizons in Psychology I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Among more recent studies see R.S. Nickerson, "Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises," Review of General Psychology 2 (1998).

36.

Explaining why exactly we should be liable to confirmation bias at all is, of course, an entirely different matter. I will not try to give an answer here.

37.

This example is adapted from a discussion in D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "Prospect Theory: An a.n.a.lysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica (1979). Reprinted in Kahneman and Tversky, Choices, Values, and Frames (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

38.

George Lakoff has recently diagnosed American political discourse as a war over frames. See his Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

39.

See L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) for an example of this approach.

40.

I do not mean to suggest that impairment of social cognition is unique to personality disorders-impaired social cognition of various sorts is characteristic of autism, schizophrenia, and psychopathy, among others. But a personality disorder is, in the first instance, a certain kind of difficulty with navigating the social world.

41.

See M.S. Gazzaniga, The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); and "The Split Brain in Man" Scientific American 217 (1967), pp. 2429.

42.

More specifically, the picture is flashed for an interval of less than one-quarter of a second. This ensures that there is no time to saccade, so we can be sure that the picture is shown to just one hemisphere.

43.

V.S. See Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Morrow, 1998).

44.

Frankfurt notes in pa.s.sing that humbug, as glossed by Max Black-a precursor to his own notion of bulls.h.i.t-"may be accomplished by words or by deeds" (pp. 1011). But it is not clear that this is meant to be a feature of bulls.h.i.t as he construes it.

45.

You could start out with a clear awareness of p, but still succeed in distracting yourself from that painful truth, without actually unseating your belief; or you could in implicating the contrary of p get yourself to question your previous confidence in p.

46.

R. La.r.s.en and D. Buss, Personality Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), p. 608. American Psychiatric a.s.sociation, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, 1994.

47.

Thanks to Tom Oltmanns for pointing this out to me.

48.

See Personality Psychology and also Theodore Millon, Seth Grossman, Carrie Millon, Sarah Meagher, and Rowena Ramnath, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, Second Edition (Hoboken: Wiley, 2004).