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What Does Bullshit Mean and Is Indifference to Truth the Definition

“bullshit”
Indifference to truth
Confidence: High Checked on July 15, 2026

Summary

Bullshit is speech intended to persuade or serve a purpose while the speaker is indifferent to whether the statements are true or false. It differs from lying in that the bullshitter does not aim to deceive with falsehoods but rather disregards truth altogether, often using bluffing or misrepresentation. This definition is supported by philosophical analyses and contemporary discussions of the term.

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Sources 60 searched

www2.csudh.edu
cis.ua.edu
quod.lib.umich.edu
  • Bullshitting, Lying, and Indifference toward Truth

    As a general term, we use contributing that p to mean either asserting that p or conversationally implicating that p, and we use contribution accordingly to mean either an assertion or a conversational implicature. We propose to use this way of looking at discourse structure to account for the phenomenon of bullshitting, that is, the ways in which we sometimes talk while being indifferent toward truth and falsity, and its relation to lying.

press.princeton.edu
  • On Bullshit | Princeton University Press

    With his characteristic combination ... Frankfurt argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true....

en.wikipedia.org
  • Bullshit - Wikipedia

    To do so, they explored associations ... Frequency Scale and performance on measures of receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit, pseudoscientific bullshit, and fake news. They found that higher scores of "persuasive bullshitting" positively predicted scores for all three types of "bullshit receptivity". In other words, those who ...

  • Fake news - Wikipedia

    Overlapping terms are bullshit, hoax news, pseudo-news, alternative facts, false news and junk news. The National Endowment for Democracy defines fake news as "[M]isleading content found on the internet, especially on social media [...] Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites ...

  • On Bullshit - Wikipedia

    On Bullshit is a 1986 essay and 2005 book by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt which presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication. Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade ...

dictionary.cambridge.org

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