“The essence of bullshit,” argued philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his 2005 book On Bullshit, “is not that it is false but that it is phony”. Both a liar and an honest person are interested in the truth – they’re playing on opposite sides in the same game. A bullshitter, however, has no such constraint.
Imagine a politician who claims to have witnessed something that did not, in fact, happen: thousands of people in areas of New Jersey with a heavy Arab population cheering as the Wor...
