On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2025 (anniversary edition),  84 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 978-0691276786.

Campaigning in the December 2019 British general election, Boris Johnson informed voters that ‘We have a deal with the EU that is ready to go, it is oven ready … you just put it in the microwave and there it is.’ In the event, Britain didn’t formally leave the EU until the end of January 2021. Far from being oven ready, the Brexit deal took a full year to be finalised. Was Johnson’s ‘oven ready’ claim simply a lie?

Many believe it was, but there is another possibility: he was not lying but bullshitting. Lying means asserting what one believes to be false. According to Harry Frankfurt, ‘the bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be’. Indeed, what the bullshitter asserts might even be true. The essence of bullshit is ‘indifference to how things really are’. The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true nor, like a liar, on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, and it is this truth about himself that he hides.

Frankfurt, who died in 2023, regarded President Trump as a bullshitter in his sense. In 2016, the New York Times ran a profile of Anthony Senecal, Trump’s longtime butler at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump told guests that the tiles in one of the bedrooms were made by Walt Disney, his retainer rolled his eyes and protested that this wasn’t true. Trump laughed and responded, ‘Who cares?’ Even if it turned out that Disney did make the tiles, Trump’s indifference to the truth or falsity of his assertion about their manufacture was a sure sign that he was bullshitting.

A version of Frankfurt’s essay was first published in 1986, when Watergate was still fresh in people’s minds and politicians like Richard Nixon were seen as liars. As Frankfurt points out, it is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. The liar is at least responding to the truth and is to this extent respectful of it. The bullshitter ‘does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.’ As a result, ‘bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are’.

This seems doubtful. What could be more dangerous than an inveterate liar who, like Hitler and Goebbels, uses deliberate, colossal falsehoods (the ‘big lie’) to promote genocidal policies that result in the deaths of millions? Compared to this type of liar, and perhaps liars generally, bullshitters look relatively harmless. The bullshitter is someone one can afford not to take seriously, but not the liar. Morally and in other ways, lying seems a greater sin than bullshitting.

In a postscript to this 2025 anniversary edition, Frankfurt insists that bullshit is far from innocuous. Indifference to the truth is ‘extremely dangerous’ since ‘the conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false’. This might all be so but someone who thinks that lies are a greater enemy of the truth than bullshit needn’t suppose that bullshit is innocuous.

This presupposes that there is a clear distinction between lying and bullshitting but it is often uncertain whether someone’s false assertion is a lie or just bullshit. For Frankfurt, the mental state of the person responsible for a statement is a crucial factor in determining whether the statement is bullshit. However, he also notes in the concluding paragraph of his essay that facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid or always easy to know. This has implications for our ability to know whether we are bullshitting.

Consider Johnson’s state of mind when he made his claim about an oven-ready Brexit. Did he fully believe what he was saying? If not, did he at least half-believe it? Did he care at all whether what he was accurately describing reality or was he totally indifferent? Perhaps not even Johnson could have been absolutely certain what he was up to because he couldn’t be absolutely certain about his own state of mind. How much someone cares about the facts isn’t always transparent, either to them or to others. Self-deception is always on the cards. 

Frankfurt came to recognise that matters are often much less clear-cut than his account implies. Writing in Time in 2016, he reiterated that the bullshitter is indifferent to the truth or falsity of his assertions and that his goal is not to report the facts but to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way. He conceded that it is often uncertain whether a person actually cares about the truth of what he says and therefore also uncertain whether he is lying or bullshitting.

Suppose it turns out that Johnson genuinely believed his assertion about an oven-ready Brexit deal. In that case, he wasn’t lying or bullshitting, even if what he said was false. The charge of bullshitting would instead have to rely on the observation that Johnson made an assertion for which he lacked adequate evidence and was not deterred by his recognition of this fact from making the assertion anyway. It was this lack of care that made Johnson a bullshitter – if that is what he was.

On this account, the mental state of the bullshitter is not so much indifference to the facts but indifference to one of the norms of assertion: don’t make claims for which you know you have insufficient evidence. The problem with this analysis, though, is that it threatens to classify a great deal of ordinary discourse as bullshit, depending on how well-grounded our assertions are meant to be. Which of us isn’t guilty of making claims for which we know we lack good evidence?

A way to avoid such difficulties is to get away from the idea that whether something is bullshit depends on the mental state of the bullshitter. As an alternative, the philosopher GA Cohen suggested that bullshit is a type of unclarifiable unclarity or nonsense. Whether an assertion is nonsense depends not on the mental state of the assertor but on whether it actually makes sense. For Cohen, the works of certain philosophers – he mentioned Hegel and Heidegger – are bullshit not because they didn’t care about the truth but because of the unclarifiable unclarity of their assertions.

Frankfurt responds to Cohen in the postscript, which originally appeared in 2002. Although he doesn’t deny the existence of bullshit in Cohen’s sense, he regards it as much less important and dangerous than bullshit in the mental state sense. What goes on in the academic world might not have much influence elsewhere and genuinely unintelligible texts are unlikely to be widely read. When it comes to the bullshit of politicians, the problem is not that what they say is literally nonsensical.

Although many analyses of bullshit focus on political bullshit, it was certainly not Frankfurt’s view that bullshit in his sense is confined to politics. He described advertising and public relations as realms that are replete with bullshit and observed that ‘one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit’. If this was true in 1986, it was even more true in 2005, when Frankfurt’s essay was first published in book form.

It might be tempting to blame social media for the prevalence of bullshit but there were no social media in 1986. According to Frankfurt, ‘bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about’. In these cases, instead of confessing our ignorance, we try to bluff. The bullshitter is, in this sense, a phony, like the undergraduate who hasn’t done the reading and tries to bluff their way through a tutorial by pretending to know what they know they don’t know.

Yet this analysis doesn’t fit advertising or public relations bullshit, which Frankfurt describes as ‘the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept’. The problem with the advertiser who fails to mention a product’s poor safety record is not that they don’t know what they are talking about but that they deliberately conceal pertinent facts from the consumer without actually lying. Far from being indifferent to the facts, the advertiser cares about them enough to want to conceal them without saying anything that is strictly false.

Ever since the shock of Brexit and the first Trump election in 2016, progressives have been on the lookout for new ideas and concepts to explain political developments they still find unfathomable. Post-2016, it became something of a cliché to see the major political events of that year as evidence of the power of bullshit or the rise of ‘post-truth’. Some uses of these concepts have been frivolous, but they have also been employed seriously or semi-seriously as tools of political analysis. One idea that was doing the rounds in the year after the Brexit vote was that the success of the Brexit campaign was due to the routine use of bullshit.

Yet such claims are deeply suspect. Part of the problem is that they underestimate the strategic dimension of successful political campaigns. By dismissing figures like Trump and Johnson as mere bullshitters, progressives excused themselves from offering a serious explanation of their electoral success and their ability to craft a message that appealed to large numbers of voters. A famous example was the slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week – let’s fund our NHS instead.’ Was this, in the words of one critic, the ultimate bullshit political claim? Far from it, if bullshit is understood as something produced self-indulgently or carelessly.

The £350 million figure was misleading in so far as it was a gross rather than a net figure, that being closer to £175 million. According to Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of the successful campaign for Brexit, the point of using the gross figure in the slogan was to focus attention on the issue and provoke an argument in the expectation that even the net figure would be seen by most voters as too high. The carefully crafted slogan was part of a highly effective campaign whose success had less to do with the power of bullshit than the ability to deliver a message that would resonate with the electorate. If the Brexit slogan was bullshit it was strategic rather than careless bullshit, but it is questionable whether strategic bullshit is really bullshit.

Frankfurt wrestles with the tension between viewing a statement as bullshit and recognising it as carefully crafted. He notes that the notion of ‘carefully wrought bullshit’ involves ‘a certain inner strain’ but insists that it is not out of the question. Effective political operatives are like advertisers who, with the help of opinion polls, market research and psychological testing, ‘dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right’. But this is difficult to reconcile with the laxity and slovenliness that is normally associated with the ordinary idea of bullshit. Trump’s claim about the tiles at Mar-a-Lago was bullshit precisely because it was not the result of tireless dedication to achieving a certain result.

To be bullshitting in Frankfurt’s sense it must at least look as if one is trying to describe reality, but not all bullshit is descriptive bullshit. In a phone call in November, President Trump presented Nicolás Maduro with an ultimatum: go into exile or face the consequences. Maduro’s nonchalant response and refusal to comply are easy to understand if he thought that Trump was bullshitting. Within weeks, as he was being taken into custody by US forces, he discovered that Trump was deadly serious. Danes and Greenlanders would be well advised to keep in mind that yesterday’s supposed bullshit can become today’s reality.  

A bullshit ultimatum is one that isn’t meant seriously but an ultimatum isn’t a description of reality, of what is actually the case. It is an attempt to shape reality by threatening someone else with dire consequences for failing to comply. A bullshit ultimatum is a bluff, and the person delivering it doesn’t care enough about non-compliance to follow through with the threatened consequences of inaction. Just as it can be hard to tell whether a purported description of reality is bullshit, so, as Maduro discovered, it can be hard to tell whether an ultimatum is bullshit.    

Despite the ingenuity of Frankfurt’s theory, it raises more questions than it answers. It offers an analysis of a concept of bullshit, but it is debatable whether bullshit as Frankfurt understands it is the garden variety bullshit whose prevalence is one of the salient features of our culture. It is comforting to assert that one’s political enemies are bullshitters but one can’t help wondering whether this assertion is itself a piece of bullshit.