Truth-tellers, liars and B-worders

Everyone knows what truth is because, really, it’s so straightforward. It’s fidelity to a fact. A lie on the other hand is slightly trickier because there are various subtypes such as white lies, half truths and the lying truth (where for example when you don’t want to lend a book, you lie and say your wife has already lent it to someone else without knowing that, in reality, she’s done just that.) But the intent always remains the same: to deceive. Yet, there’s one important thing that a person telling the truth and a lying person have in common: they both have to know and care about what they believe is the truth. Which is why it’s impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.

There is, however, one exception as pointed out by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and that’s bullshitting. In an essay called — What else? — On Bullshit which became a nonfiction blockbuster, spending 27 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list in 1986, Frankfurt explains how. Both lies and bullshit, he writes, can either be true or false but since bullshitters aim primarily to impress their audiences, they are, in general, unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of their statements. And it’s this lack of connection to a concern with truth that he regards as the essence of bullshit. Or as he puts it: “... bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Not because it’s false but that it’s phoney.

By extension now, take believers in God. At a stretch they could be deluded in their conviction by not having what is usually considered watertight empirical evidence to back their faith and it’s possible they could at some future date even be proved wrong. But whatever the case may be, they do not pretend to believe in what they believe. They actually do; they aren’t bullshitters. Similarly, atheists. The worst that can be said about them by believers is that they know the truth and are deliberately misrepresenting it like liars do. Yet, atheists can never be accused of pretending to be unbelievers. Because, again, they aren’t bullshitters.

That leaves agnostics. It’s said their aim is to (mis)represent themselves as knowing what they don’t know or more than they actually do. Either way, there isn’t much concern or caring about the truth — whatever the truth may be — but, instead about making a certain impression. If so, that would make them the ultimate phoneys.