The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
Tags: truth honesty reality philosophy bullshit sincerity
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.
Harry CrewsTags: truth bullshit sports absolutes
I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.
Mel BrooksTags: humor profanity bullshit vulgarity shit
My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.
Charlaine HarrisI once got lost in a dark woods with no supplies.
Struggling to deal with nature, beasts and storms,
that was time when I lost my arrogance as human.
Tags: human arrogance bullshit
Don't trust everything you read,
everything is gonna be just fine.
Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not [...]. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.
Sarah PalinTags: energy united-states bullshit oil incoherence united-states-congress palinisms coal exports
If you say bullshit on things come in handy,
better revise it before others say otherwise.
Tags: bullshit come-in-handy otherwise think-before-speak
When heard someone's boasting,
I could smell shit of bull from afar.
Tags: bullshit boasting from-afar smell-stink
She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.
Laura LippmanTags: bullshit strength-through-adversity
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