Frankfurt's Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosopher, published 'On Bullshit' in 1986 and expanded it into a bestselling book in 2005. The essay drew a taxonomic distinction that had been conceptually implicit in ordinary usage but never formalized. A liar, Frankfurt argued, knows the truth and deliberately contradicts it; lying is parasitic on the truth it denies, because the liar must know what is true in order to say its opposite. A bullshitter, by contrast, is indifferent to truth. The bullshitter's goal is not to describe the world accurately but to produce an effect on the audience — to persuade, to impress, to sound authoritative — without regard for whether the statements producing the effect happen to be true. Forty years later, Flyvbjerg and Cambridge's Alan Blackwell applied the framework to large language models with diagnostic precision.