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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 5 - 19 Apr 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
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| | | This is one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I had to write something about Arctic Barbies, and I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is how I came to produce pure bullshit. | |
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< | What is bullshit? | >
> | What is Bullshit? | | | One way to define bullshit is in terms of what it is not - truth. I like what Eben had to say about Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (an essay I have not yet read), so I will borrow those ideas. Bullshit is not the opposite of truth. Bullshitters don't care about the truth; they care about selling a certain image of themselves. Liars have to know what the truth is in order to lie about it. Bullshitters don't have to know what the truth is to bullshit.
Bullshit in the law is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense" – concepts based on logic and nothing else. Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. | |
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< | Thinking Over the Bullshit | >
> | What is Not Bullshit? | | | Holmes argued that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true?
If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago. Bednarik, Robert G., A Figurine from the African Acheulian, Current Anthropology, 2003, at 412. Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to "evolve away" the primary mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains.
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< | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is also a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. | >
> | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. | | | The Lawyer Who Bullshits |
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