Humbug

Toronto Society for Masonic Research (TSMR) -- Audi Vide Dice

"Our basic principles — brotherly love, relief and truth — must guide all our deliberations. Without them, we have nothing." -- C.E. Drew 1988.07.20

Max Black: The Prevalence of Humbug 1983

Excerpts:

HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.

We can usefully distinguish between the speaker's message, as I shall call it, and his or her stance. By the message I mean whatever is explicitly or implicitly said about the topic in question; while I reserve the term "stance" for the speaker's beliefs, attitudes, and evaluations, insofar as they are relevant to the verbal episode in question. ...

What then is the prima facie charge against a speaker accused of humbug? Well, some of the words that immediately suggest themselves are pretense, pretentiousness, affectation, insincerity, and deception. Often there is also a detectable whiff of self-satisfaction and self-complacency: humbug goes well with a smirk. A common symptom is clever-me-ism, as in Jack Horner's case. In this respect, it resembles cant, which Dr. Johnson memorably defined as "a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms." ...

"It would be more illuminating to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing." -- Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962

Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bull5hit 2005

In his short treatise On Bull5hit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bull5hit. We normally think of bull5hit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bull5hit has nothing to do with truth.

Rather, bull5hit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bull5hitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. -- Wikipedia

Bull5hitting, as he notes, is not exactly lying, and bull5hit remains bull5hit whether it's true or false. The difference lies in the bull5hitter's complete disregard for whether what he's saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he "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. By virtue of this, bull5hit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." -- Amazon

On Bull5hit offers a tightly focused, telling critique of a political and cultural climate that seems positively humid with mendacity, obfuscation, evasion and illusion. -- Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle

Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy professor, presents a scholarly and formal essay on inflated truth, purposeful obfuscation, and pretentious duplicity. -- Richard Pachter, The Boston Globe

Professor Frankfurt concludes that bull5hit is a process rather than an end product. . . . If you are fed up with hype, spin and bull5hit this book will provide insight - and therapy. -- Australian Doctor

Excerpts:

Whenever a person deliberately misrepresents anything, he must inevitably be misrepresenting his own state of mind. 12

Harry G. Frankfurt: On Truth 2006

Now, the pejorative implication of a charge of humbug is commonly leveled against the content of a message (a remark or a text) rather than at what I have called the speaker's stance: then it usually has the force of "Stuff and nonsense," denigrating the message without necessarily imputing falseness or insincerity. ...

Frankfurt's strategy is to show that the truth, whether an individual is to be truthful or not, is integral to nearly every endeavor, the final point of his argument being that it is a requirement for self-knowledge and therefore all distinctions between ourselves and the world. Frankfurt concludes that the importance of truth, and thus the need to care about it, is incorrigible thereby. -- Wikipedia

Having outlined a theory of bull5hit and falsehood, Harry G. Frankfurt turns to what lies beyond them: the truth, a concept not as obvious as some might expect.

Our culture's devotion to bull5hit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people (professional thinkers) won't even acknowledge "true" and "false" as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it "all good"? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway? -- Amazon

Excerpts:

(to come)

In "On Truth", Frankfurt develops the argument that individuals should care about the truth, regardless of whether they intend to be truthful. While Frankfurt explicitly avoids a definition of "truth" beyond the idea of the commonsense concept of truth people commonly hold, i.e., that which corresponds to reality.