什麼時候胡說八道才是真正的胡說八道？
哲學家哈里·法蘭克福認為，胡說八道的本質不在於欺騙的意圖，而在於「對事物真實面貌的漠視」。但這是否意味著胡說八道比謊言更糟？我們不都時常說胡話嗎？
在2019年12月的英國大選中，鮑里斯·約翰遜在競選期間告訴選民：「我們與歐盟達成的協議已經準備就緒，就像烤箱裡準備好了一樣……你只要把它放進微波爐裡加熱一下就行了。」然而，英國直到2021年1月底才正式脫離歐盟。脫歐協議遠非“烤箱裡準備好了”，而是耗時整整一年才最終敲定。約翰遜所謂的「烤箱裡準備好了」的說法難道只是個謊言嗎？
許多人認為他是在說謊，但還有另一種可能：他不是在說謊，而是在胡說八道。說謊意味著斷言自己認為錯誤的事情。哈里·法蘭克福認為，「胡說八道者可能並非有意欺騙我們，無論是在事實層面還是在他自己認為的事實層面」。事實上，胡說八道者斷言的內容甚至可能是真的。胡說八道的本質是「對事物真實面貌漠不關心」。胡說八道者既不站在真理的一邊，也不像說謊者那樣站在謬誤的一邊。他根本不在乎事實，而他所隱藏的正是關於他自身的這種真相。
弗蘭克福特於2023年去世，他認為川普總統是個愛吹牛的人。 2016年，《紐約時報》刊登了一篇關於安東尼·塞內卡爾的報道，他是川普在海湖莊園的長期管家。當川普告訴客人其中一間臥室的瓷磚是華特迪士尼製作的時，他的管家翻了個白眼，抗議說這不是真的。川普笑著回應：「誰在乎？」 即便後來證實瓷磚確實是迪士尼製作的，川普對瓷磚來源真假漠不關心的態度，也足以證明他是在吹牛。
法蘭克福的論文《論胡說八道》最早發表於1986年，當時水門事件的餘波尚未平息，像理查德·尼克森這樣的政客被視為說謊者。正如法蘭克福所指出的，除非一個人認為自己掌握了真相，否則他不可能說謊。說謊者至少對真相有所回應，並在某種程度上尊重真相。而胡說八道者「不像說謊者那樣否定真相的權威，也不與真相對抗。他根本不把真相放在眼裡。」 因此，「胡說八道比謊言更能危害真相」。
這似乎值得懷疑。還有什麼比一個像希特勒和戈培爾那樣，用蓄意捏造的彌天大謊（“彌天大謊”）來推行種族滅絕政策，導致數百萬人喪生的慣於撒謊的騙子更危險的呢？與這類騙子，或許與所有說謊的人相比，胡說八道的人似乎相對無害。人們可以不把胡說八道的人當一回事，但不能把說謊的人當一回事。從道德和其他方面來看，說謊似乎比胡說八道罪過更大。
在《論胡說八道》 2025年紀念版的後記中，法蘭克福堅持胡說八道遠非無害。對真相的漠視“極其危險”，因為“文明生活的開展以及對其不可或缺的製度的活力，從根本上依賴於對真假區別的尊重”。這一切或許不無道理，但認為謊言比胡說八道更能危害真相的人，就沒必要認為胡說八道是無害的。
這預設了說謊和胡說八道之間存在明確的區別，但通常很難確定某人的錯誤斷言究竟是謊言還是胡說八道。對法蘭克福而言，發表言論者的心理狀態是判斷該言論是否胡說八道的關鍵因素。然而，他在文章的結尾段落中也指出，關於我們自身的事實並非總是那麼確鑿無疑，也並非總是容易知曉。這會對我們判斷自己是否在胡說八道的能力產生影響。
想想約翰遜聲稱脫歐已準備就緒時的心境。他是否完全相信自己所說的話？如果不是，他至少半信半疑嗎？他是否在意自己描述的是否屬實，還是完全漠不關心？或許連約翰遜自己都無法完全確定自己究竟在做什麼，因為他連自己的心境都無法完全確定。一個人對事實的重視程度，無論對他自己或對別人來說，都並非總是顯而易見的。自欺欺人總是可能發生的。
法蘭克福後來意識到，事情往往遠沒有他所描述的那麼簡單明了。他在2016年為《時代》雜誌撰文重申，胡說八道者並不關心自己言論的真假，他們的目的並非陳述事實，而是以某種方式塑造聽眾的信念和態度。他承認，一個人是否真的在乎自己所說的話的真假，往往難以確定，因此也難以判斷他是在說謊還是在胡說八道。
假設事實證明，約翰遜確實相信他關於脫歐協議已萬事俱備的說法。在這種情況下，即使他說的是假話，他也並非說謊或胡說八道。要指控他胡說八道，就必須基於這樣一個事實：約翰遜在缺乏充分證據的情況下做出了斷言，並且明知這一點卻依然堅持己見。正是這種漠不關心的態度，才使約翰遜成為一個胡說八道者——如果他真是個胡說八道者的話。
由此看來，胡說八道者的心態與其說是對事實漠不關心，不如說是對一條斷言準則的漠視：不要在明知證據不足的情況下妄下斷言。然而，這種分析的問題在於，它有可能將大量的日常言論都歸類為胡說八道，而這取決於我們斷言的依據是否充分。我們當中又有誰沒有犯過在明知缺乏可靠證據的情況下妄下斷言的錯誤呢？
避免此類困境的方法之一是摒棄「某事是否荒謬取決於胡說八道者的精神狀態」這種觀念。哲學家G.A. Cohen提出另一種觀點，認為荒謬是一種無法澄清的模糊不清或無稽之談。一個斷言是否荒謬，並非取決於斷言者的精神狀態，而是取決於它本身是否有意義。 Cohen認為，某些哲學家——他提到了黑格爾和海德格爾——的著作之所以荒謬，並非因為他們漠視真理，而是因為他們的斷言本身就存在無法澄清的模糊不清。
法蘭克福在2002年發表的後記中回應了科恩的觀點。雖然他不否認科恩意義上的「胡說八道」的存在，但他認為這種胡說八道遠不如精神狀態意義上的「胡說八道」重要和危險。學術界的言論可能對其他地方影響不大，真正晦澀難懂的文本也不太可能被廣泛閱讀。至於政客的胡說八道，問題不在於他們所說的話本身是否荒謬。
儘管許多關於“胡說八道”的分析都聚焦於政治上的“胡說八道”，但弗蘭克福特顯然不認為他所定義的“胡說八道”僅限於政治領域。他將廣告和公共關係描述為充斥著「胡說八道」的領域，並指出「我們文化最顯著的特徵之一就是充斥著大量的『胡說八道』」。如果說這在1986年是真理，那麼在2005年弗蘭克福特的這篇文章首次以書籍形式出版時，就更加印證了這一點。
人們或許會忍不住將胡說八道的盛行歸咎於社群媒體，但1986年可沒有社群媒體。法蘭克福指出，「當某種情況迫使人們在不了解自己所談論內容的情況下發言時，胡說八道就不可避免」。在這種情況下，我們不但不承認自己的無知，反而試圖裝腔作勢。從這個意義上講，胡說八道者就像一個騙子，就像那些沒做功課的大學生，試圖透過假裝自己懂一些自己明知不懂的東西來蒙混過關。
然而，這種分析並不適用於廣告或公關宣傳中的種種謬論，法蘭克福將其描述為「該概念最無可爭議、最經典的範例」。廣告商之所以不提及產品糟糕的安全記錄，問題不在於他們不了解情況，而在於他們故意向消費者隱瞞相關事實，但又沒有說謊。廣告商並非對事實漠不關心，而是非常在意，所以才想辦法隱瞞，但又不能完全說謊。
自2016年英國脫歐和川普首次當選總統的衝擊以來，進步人士一直在尋找新的理念和概念來解釋他們至今仍難以理解的政治發展。 2016年之後，將當年的重大政治事件視為「胡說八道」的力量或「後真相」興起的證據，幾乎成了一種老生常談。這些概念的運用有時顯得輕浮，但也有人認真或半認真地將其作為政治分析的工具。在英國脫歐公投後的那一年裡，一種廣為流傳的觀點認為，脫歐運動的成功歸功於對「胡說八道」的慣用。
然而，這種說法令人深感懷疑。部分原因在於，它們低估了成功政治競選的策略層面。進步人士將川普和約翰遜之流斥為只會吹牛的傢伙，以此為藉口，逃避了對他們選舉成功及其打造吸引大量選民的信息的能力做出嚴肅解釋。一個著名的例子是「我們每周向歐盟支付3.5億英鎊——不如把這筆錢用來資助我們的國民醫療服務體系（NHS）」。正如一位批評者所說，這是否是政治宣傳中最荒謬的言論？如果將「荒謬」理解為出於自我放縱或草率炮製的言論，那麼答案遠非如此。
3.5億英鎊這個數字具有誤導性，因為它指的是總額而非淨額，而淨額更接近1.75億英鎊。據脫歐運動成功策劃者之一多米尼克·卡明斯稱，在口號中使用總額的目的是為了集中公眾注意力，引發爭論，因為他預期即使是淨額也會被大多數選民認為過高。精心炮製的口號是高效競選活動的一部分，其成功與其說是靠胡說八道，不如說是靠傳遞能夠引起選民共鳴的訊息。如果脫歐口號是胡說八道，那也是策略性的胡說八道，而非漫不經心的胡說八道，但策略性的胡說八道是否真的算胡說八道，這一點值得商榷。
法蘭克福特糾結於如何看待一種說法：既可以將其視為胡說八道，又可以將其視為精心炮製。他指出，「精心炮製的胡說八道」這一概念本身就包含著“某種內在的矛盾”，但他堅持認為這種可能性並非完全不存在。高效率的政治操盤手就像廣告商一樣，借助民意調查、市場研究和心理測試，「孜孜不倦地致力於確保他們製作的每一個字、每一幅圖像都精準無誤」。但這與通常與「胡說八道」這一概念聯繫在一起的鬆懈和馬虎，很難調和。川普關於海湖莊園瓷磚的說法之所以是胡說八道，正是因為它並非出於對達成特定結果的不懈努力。
根據法蘭克福學派的定義，胡說八道至少要看起來像是描述現實，但並非所有胡說八道都是描述性的胡說八道。去年11月，川普總統在一次電話中向尼古拉斯馬杜羅發出最後通牒：要嘛流亡，要嘛承擔後果。如果馬杜羅認為川普在胡說八道，那麼他漫不經心的回應和拒絕服從就很容易理解了。幾週後，當他被美軍拘留時，他才發現川普是認真的。丹麥人和格陵蘭人最好記住，昨天的胡說八道可能變成今天的現實。
虛假的最後通牒並非出於真心，而是指發出最後通牒的人並非在描述現實或事實真相，而是試圖透過威脅他人若不服從將面臨嚴重後果來左右現實。虛假的最後通牒是一種虛張聲勢，發出者根本不在乎對方是否會服從，因此不會兌現威脅。正如我們很難判斷現實的描述是否虛假一樣，馬杜羅也發現，我們很難判斷最後通牒是否虛假。
儘管法蘭克福的理論頗具匠心，但它提出的問題遠多於解答的問題。它分析了「胡說八道」的概念，但法蘭克福所理解的「胡說八道」是否就是我們文化中普遍存在的那些常見胡說八道，這一點值得商榷。斷言自己的政治對手都是胡說八道者固然令人感到安慰，但人們不禁會想，這種斷言本身是否也是一種胡說八道。
出版日期：2026年5月26日
英文原版
首次發表於《都柏林書評》，2026年4月1日
本文由《都柏林書評》提供 © Quassim Cassam / 《都柏林書評》
PDF/列印For the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the essence of bullshit was not the intention to deceive but ‘indifference to how things really are’. But does that make bullshit worse than lies? Are we not all, sometimes, bullshitters?
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 ‘On Bullshit’ 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 the 2025 anniversary edition of ‘On Bullshit’, 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.
Published 26 May 2026
Original in English
First published by Dublin Review of Books 1 April 2026
Contributed by Dublin Review of Books © Quassim Cassam / Dublin Review of Books
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