Letter to a friend (philosophical pastiche)

Le Regard Libre N° 46 - Thierry Fivaz

It's an embarrassing situation we're all familiar with. Any socially balanced person must have been confronted with it at least once in their life. That strange uneasiness that arises when a dear friend says something stupid. My friend doesn't say a lot of stupid things. By bullshit, I don't mean the little jokes and puns we tell each other between friends. No, by bullshit I mean a proposition asserted with sincerity, in public what's more, by a person who believes it to be true - it may even happen that this person is justified in believing it to be true.

This kind or type of proposition, which we will henceforth refer to as C, can be likened to error—in an Aristotelian sense, at any rate. Aristotle, in fact, considers error to be nothing other than «saying of what is not that it is, or of what is that it is not.» In this sense, stupidity can be viewed as a kind of an error, since it, too, does not tell the truth. But is nonsense reducible to error? Or does it belong to an ontological category? sui generis?

Let me explain. Sometimes—and for some people, even often—we say things that aren’t true. In that sense, we let's commit errors. To be clear, these are to commit an error in the linguistic sense of the term, not in the sense of to do something by mistake such as doing x by mistake. Let’s understand that the mistake we’re interested in here is what philosophers generally call a speech act. That said, it’s quite common for us to say things that aren’t true or to hear something that isn’t true. A prime example: weather forecasts. It’s common for meteorologists—and especially TV weather presenters—to say things that aren’t true. A presenter might very well announce, «It will rain tomorrow,» when, on the day in question, it turns out that no rain fell at all. So, did the presenter say something stupid, or did he simply make a mistake in his forecast and clerk A mistake?

The weather report does not provide a satisfactory answer to the question. The difficulty stems from its temporal dimension: when the presenter says, «It will rain tomorrow,» we do not know whether he is telling the truth or is mistaken and saying something false. Consequently, it’s hard to exclaim in front of the TV, «That news anchor is talking nonsense!» because only the facts will determine whether that statement is true.

An example that might be more compelling and useful for our investigation could be that of a journalist. It does indeed happen that a journalist gets the facts wrong and, as a result, makes erroneous and therefore false statements. In such a situation, the journalist is sometimes encouraged to acknowledge the error so that the truth can be restored. However, wouldn’t it be harsh—and somewhat unfair to the profession—to argue that a journalist who has made a mistake is, in fact, spouting nonsense? Here, too, answering this question is not as easy as it seems. To claim that a journalist could never spout nonsense seems far too restrictive, because it does happen sometimes—and no one can deny this—that a journalist does, in fact, spout nonsense.

From what has just been said, the following lessons can be drawn: there are mistakes that aren’t bullshit (the journalist’s mistake) and there are mistakes that are bullshit (the journalist’s bullshit). Let’s set aside the question of whether there is nonsense that isn’t a mistake and focus our attention on what causes a mistake to become nonsense.

One possible way to distinguish between stupidity and a mistake would be to view stupidity as something intentional (in the sense of doing something intentionally x). Bullshit, then, would be the act of intentionally stating something false, whereas a mistake occurs when one states something false unintentionally. However, this distinction is difficult to maintain, given that we have previously stated that a person who tells a lie believes what they are saying to be true. Yet it seems implausible to believe that what one says is true and to say it, while at the same time intentionally wanting what one says to be false. Intentionality is therefore a characteristic incapable of correctly distinguishing nonsense from error.

A second idea—and perhaps a more promising one—would be to focus on the subject of the error. An error always has an object or a subject matter. In the sense that an error is always about something or concerns something. It is, in fact, impossible for an error to be about nothing. When our boss, a dear friend, or our grandfather tells us, «You have clerk »a mistake,« we would inevitably ask him with a concerned look, »What did I say? What is my mistake?«—to which we would be very surprised if he replied, »Your mistake isn't about anything." A mistake, therefore, always pertains to something, and what the mistake pertains to is the subject of the error.

However, it turns out that the subject matter of an error is uniquely always false. All errors do, in fact, have in common that their subject matter is never true. A journalist’s error has as its object something that is not true, such as claiming on the radio that «Lance Armstrong is the first man to have walked on the moon.» Yet it is here that we can consider the distinction between an error and nonsense. For while both nonsense and error have a false proposition as their object, nonsense is distinguished by the fact that the false proposition is held to be highly true by the person asserting it, even though its falsity seems obvious to everyone else. While this still needs to be verified, it also seems that nonsense, unlike error, has a public dimension. Indeed, uttering nonsense is a futile attempt to describe the world; yet we describe the world for others. Another important criterion seems to be the number of people who know that what is being said is not true. Indeed, it sometimes happens that nonsense goes unrecognized by people who are inattentive or not particularly scrupulous about identifying falsehood in certain statements.

So saying something stupid means making a public statement that you believe to be true, but which is in fact false, and which a number of m No one knows that it isn't true. The larger the audience, the more likely the nonsense is to be exposed, and the further what is considered true strays from the truth, the greater the nonsense.

That's bullshit C occurs when S believes that P is the case and that S asserts P in front of n people, whereas P is false. The degree of stupidity (dc) is proportional to the evident truth of non-P; more n The bigger it is, the more likely the nonsense is to be identified, if and only if, m people on n know that P is false. If m=0, so the nonsense cannot be identified. The necessary condition for nonsense to be identified is that m≥1; let's add that if m=n So S ends up humiliated like never before.

All this to say, my dear friend, that the other day you made a statement in public P that you believed to be true, but which was false, and that no one else but me knew was false. And just as what you believed to be true (P) was wrong—and by a long shot. Not only did no one else besides me point out the nonsense you said, but I have a duty as a friend to tell you that it was really, and I mean really, a load of nonsense. What was that nonsense about again? Oh, that—I don’t remember anymore.

Write to the author: thierry.fivaz@leregardlibre.com