Analyzing Frank Ambler's Essay 'On Bullshit'
With the upcoming presidential elections, citizens of the Unites States will soon be asked to vote. It can be quite challenging to be completely educated on all subject matter that the candidates use to promote their campaigns. So when your distant family member asks for opinion about a subject at the dinner table and you don’t really know anything about that particular subject, what do you say? You could say you don’t know anything and look uneducated in front of the rest of your family. Or you could bullshit it, just like you did in your English class for the essays, and seem like you know what you’re talking about in front of the rest of the family. But what really is bullshit and is it a good thing to use? In the short essay On Bullshit, written by Harry Frankfurt a Princeton University professor, we follow the process that is used to create a “rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not”(1) to create a working thesis for “bullshit”, which is presented in the latter stages of the essay. Frankfurt takes a broad view on items to be applied to bullshit and then shifts his gaze to more specific details of bullshit. The first broad item is the title essay The Prevalence of Humbug in which the parts of the definition of “humbug” are heavily analyzed. The second broad view he takes is a look into the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein to discuss his view on how a woman portrays her feelings. After this Frankfurt takes a specific look into items, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, a novel Dirty Story, and St. Agustine. These all have the common theme of discussing lying and how it relates to bullshit. By this point Frankfurt has a working concept of what “bullshit” is, that being it is a form of miscommunication, like lying, in which the perpetrator is indifferent to the truth. Now with a thesis Frankfurt ends his essay by relating this thesis to real world and the implications that come with it. However, Frankfurt does successfully define