Humbug & Bullshit

“HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.”

The Prevalence of Humbug

I haven’t been writing much recently as I haven’t been exploring any “fun” or topics that I can write about while staying legible (“Hegel”)1. That is until I stumbled on this particulra topic.

The two essays are of very similar in topic and relatively short reads, so I will link both of them: here and here. Humbug and BS. An essay on those topics interested me as that’s all I see nowadays on the internet. It’s also interesting in relation to literary works; considering the difference between fact and fiction nowadays; a reflection on truth is in order.

Truth

I’m sure I’ve written somewhere about what truth is as a “linguistic” and social properties of the things we say or more exactly our “utterances”. And in a piece about “correct” design I covered the difference between a “realist” and “anti-realist” in approaching design work. And lastly about the definition of words i.e. “extensional” and “intensional” in relation to math and language.

So where does that leave Humbug and BS? In a good place. What Frankurt or Black adds to the discussion here is pointing out the functional distinction between lying and humbugging. Lying is an activity done with the truth in mind. A person still needs to take a specific are for the truth in order to lie effectively. On the otherhand, when people take up BS’ing someone, the two authors would say that person has no actual care for the truth. That a person is talking “hot air”.

Subjecthood

~~Now the definition of humbug is good and all, but I’m left wondering about subjecthood matter for Truth? And controversially, how much does subjecthood matter for empirical truths and what does that have to say for capital T Truth?

~~It’s not controversial to point at something in the natural world and make certain claims like “there is a tree in front of me”. It’s not controversial either to say that we can aggregate personal preferences to decide on some things like what a good slice of pizza is.

~~What is usually controversial is the statement that there are some sense in which statements about the natural world can change depending on perspective. Adding on to that, it is usually controversial to say that everysone “should” only eat the best kind of pizza or have the same conception of the “Good”.

~~So it’s not that people don’t understand that there is a subjective and empirical sense of truth, rather how they relate to Truth as a general concept. particularly in moral and political discourse. Is something good or bad? Is something a riot or a protest?

I realized after writing this that my post on design isn’t that great as realist vs anti-realist positions mainly are about the ontological status of truths. The up-shot being how a person orient themselves towards truth and in my interests design. The linguistic references in the “Truth” section is not really a discussion of truth, but serves to highlight the nature of the subject and our relation to the truth.

The only theory of truth then that takes into account the subject—without falling into a relativism—in a satisfying way has been Hegel’s historical account2. The notion that locally in time we are wrong, but eventually we achieve Truth just seems to be the case. Just as coherence theory may seem to be the case to some people. As even the concept of “Truth” itself is something we are in movement towards3.

I mainly aim to affirm a position where it allows people to be wrong and the realness of truth. I don’t see naive realist or wholesale relativism to fulfill that, so that leaves me with idealism or constructive empiricism.


  1. The main confusion for Hegel is a lot of what he writes about is 2nd order to actual claims about the world and it’s structure i.e. different logical systems. Anything meta tends to carry on a property of being confusing. It’s interesting how far “subjecthood” goes back though, probably even further back than Hegel. ↩

  2. This or maybe correspondence pluralism. ↩

  3. It’s taking the account of relativism that there are different perspectiveswhile giving an account for how those different perspectives are related to Truth. ↩