Bullshit activities

Abstract

AbstractFrankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as bullshit or not and show that this account generalizes to many other kinds of act as well. I show that this illuminates some of Graeber's classification of “bullshit jobs,” though it doesn't fully agree with it.