Part 4 (1/2)

Following Peirce, I define genuine inquiry as any inquiry that is fueled by the desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking, or involved (perhaps indirectly) in asking. Peirce defined science that way.70 To define science in terms of the scientific method, as was done traditionally, was for Peirce to put the cart before the horse. If inquiry is conducted with the right att.i.tude, methods that further that inquiry will evolve naturally in the course of that inquiry. The use of scientific method by itself doesn't guarantee that inquiry is conducted with the right att.i.tude, as the pseudo-inquirers may be more successful in reaching their goals when they use methods developed by scientists. In short, what makes something scientific is not the correctness of the conclusions, nor the methods employed, but the att.i.tude with which it is conducted. The resulting conception of science is a very broad one. It includes any inquiry that is engaged with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions one is asking. Thus conceived, it encompa.s.ses the work of homicide detectives who want to find the murderer, philologists who seek to recover the meaning of an ancient text, politicians who want to know which health plan best serves the public, and car mechanics who are looking for the cause of a suspicious rattle.

What characterizes genuine inquiry is neither its methods, nor its results, but the att.i.tude with which it is conducted. Inquiry should be engaged in with a genuine desire to find true answers to the questions that are being asked. Taking this posi-tion does not commit us, however, to the view that we can solve all the questions we can possibly ask. It doesn't even commit us to say that any particular question we ask must be solvable merely because we were able to formulate the question. All it commits us to is that when we try to answer a particular question we proceed from the notion-or the postulate, if you will-that that question can be answered, and hence that we direct our inquiry in such a way as to find that answer. One possible outcome of that inquiry might be that the question was ill-posed, which may lead to its abandonment or point to a new question that seems to have better prospects. Formulating better questions is one way of advancing our knowledge.

To truly counter the bulls.h.i.+tter, however, we must show that genuine inquiry is not a pipedream, but something attainable. One thing that keeps genuine inquiry within our reach is that its aim is not something grand and abstract, like ”discovering the whole truth,” but, modestly, finding answers to the questions that are actually being asked. This raises the question of what it is to answer a question. Staying close to the intentionalist stance, we can say that a question is answered (or resolved) when the doubts that initiated the question have been satisfied. This may raise an eyebrow or two, since at least on the face of it the correctness of an answer seems independent of what the inquirer believes it to be, something that is borne out by the fact that occasionally (if not to say often) people are quite satisfied with a wrong answer.

Several things can be said about this. Whether the answer he comes up with is mistaken or not, once the inquirer has satisfied himself that he has found the answer, he will stop inquiring. Put differently, the satisfaction of the inquirer brings the inquiry to conclusion. Subsequent doubts about this answer can cause the same inquirer, or others, to reopen the investigation until everyone is again convinced that the right answer has been reached, and then inquiry once again comes to a close. Such new doubt can emerge when new facts come to light, or when the question is looked at with fresh eyes. For many of our questions this is a long and torturous process, sometimes involving generations of inquirers.

This account of inquiry also points at something else: inquiry is a deeply social enterprise. Given our a.s.sumption that the inquirer is really interested in uncovering the right answer, reasonable doubt expressed by others, especially when they are peers, is powerful fuel for rekindling doubt. In fact, interaction with others is often the only way that personal biases, quirks, lacunae, etc., can be ironed out.

The above claim that the answer to the question must be independent of what the inquirer thinks it to be is misleading. What is really meant is that the answer is not determined by what the inquirer believes it to be. However, we can maintain the opposite: the answer that solves the puzzle will determine, or at least influence, what the inquirer is going to conclude if he is interested in finding that answer and if he is given enough time to complete the inquiry. Put differently, whereas the doubt that generates the question can be seen as the efficient cause of inquiry, the answer can be considered its final cause; it is that toward which genuine inquiry directs itself. Pragmatists even go a step further. Rejecting any view as meaningless on which truth is made into something that is in principle unattainable, they argue that the answer that would be agreed upon in the long run by the community of all inquirers is the truth with respect to that question.71 There is no more to truth than that. It is called the final opinion, in that neither new facts nor fresh eyes can elicit any doubt that the answer that has been reached is indeed the right one. We do not need to go that far for our purpose-which is merely to show that wherever the outcome matters genuine inquiry is superior to bulls.h.i.+tting-but it does show that a robust theory on which genuine inquiry is truth-indicative is possible.

Remaining with the pragmatists a little, we can say that although for countless questions the moment a final opinion could be reached lies infinitely far in the future, there are also countless questions for which we have already reached such an opinion or for which such a final opinion is in our reach. However, at the same time, since we are human and hence fallible, there is no guarantee that in any actual case the answer we have reached, and have come to agree upon, is correct. Hence, though we can say that many of our answers must be true (how else could we survive?), we cannot point at any single one of them and say with certainty that the answer to that particular question is true. Consequently dogmatism, which maintains that there are certainties we can identify and build upon, goes out the window.

This, however, by no means forces us into skepticism, as is often a.s.sumed. The skeptic concludes from the fact that we can doubt any of our answers that we can doubt all our answers. But that simply doesn't follow. From the fact that a pa.s.senger can occupy any vacant seat in the train it does not follow that she can occupy them all. The viable third option that presents itself here is that of the fallibilist, who argues that though we can trust many of our beliefs to be true, we cannot single out any particular belief as true. The fallibilist is like someone who is building a house in a swamp. Though none of the foundation poles. .h.i.t solid ground, all of them combined keep the house firmly in place. Hence, whereas skepticism undermines the very possibility of knowledge, fallibilism does not.

The above, very brief discussion of inquiry allows us to recast the scientific att.i.tude in terms of a general epistemic imperative: When engaging in inquiry we should always proceed upon the hope that there is a true answer to the questions we ask and act from a desire to find that answer.

The Problem with Bulls.h.i.+tting.

Where there's an imperative there are ways it can be violated. Bulls.h.i.+tting is one such violation, but there are others. Let us look at a few. Peirce, who inspired the imperative, directed most of his own criticism against what he called ”sham reasoning.” In sham reasoning, the intent is not to find true answers to the questions asked, but to find facts that will support a conclusion that is already believed. Creationism, which uses science specifically to support the preconceived notion that the universe is created literally as explained in the Old Testament, is a paradigm case of sham reasoning. The creationist already knows the answer. His attention is focused on finding the facts that support it and refuting the arguments that deny it. The creationist, however, genuinely believes that the theory of evolution is wrong. It has to be wrong because its conclusions are wrong. Hence, the creationist isn't bulls.h.i.+tting. In contrast to the bulls.h.i.+tter, the creationist cares about how things really are. However, he is not a genuine inquirer either, because the conclusion is set beforehand and isn't negotiable.

A different type of violation-one that Susan Haack has dubbed ”fake reasoning”-occurs when the inquirer is not concerned with finding the right answer, but with some ulterior goal, one that is related to the inquiry but is in essence extraneous to the question that is being inquired into.72 An inquirer who receives funding from a large corporation has a strong incentive to produce work that gives the results her sponsors want hear. Someone who is working toward a conclusion, not because he thinks it is the right answer, but because it will give him fame, save his career, bring in research money, land him votes, etc., is a fake reasoner. A marketing campaign that tailors claims about the benefits of a product to scenarios that maximize the company's profit is engaged in fake reasoning as well. A special kind of fake reasoning is that which is designed to absolve the reasoner of responsibility. We can find this with cold-blooded murderers who plea temporary insanity, corporations that seek to avoid damage claims, and politicians that smooth over the gap between what they promised and what they actually did.

Note that the fake reasoner need not actively doctor the results. The influence of ulterior goals can take place at a subconscious or even at an unconscious level. The fake reasoner is also not a bulls.h.i.+tter. The issue is not that he doesn't care about the truth, as with the bulls.h.i.+tter, but that there are certain other goals that he cares about more. He is not a genuine inquirer either, as finding the right answers is not his highest priority. Sure, his reasoning may be shaky, he may twist language, ma.s.sage his statistics, or embrace logical fallacies with vigor, but all that does not make him a bulls.h.i.+tter, at least not in the intentionalist school. The fake reasoner per se still believes in genuine inquiry and departs from it only because of other reasons more pressing in his eyes-the inquiry being only one of several b.a.l.l.s that are being juggled.

A third violation is that of prematurely dismissing the inquiry as going nowhere, so that the answer to the question we are asking is a defeatist ”we'll never know.” This is the approach of the skeptic. But there is a difference between being convinced that there is no truth and not caring whether what one says is true. Consequently, the skeptic too is no bulls.h.i.+tter.

So, what then is bulls.h.i.+tting? What makes someone a bulls.h.i.+tter-at least in the intentionalist school of Frankfurt and others-is that he doesn't care about the truth or the correctness of his statements, either because of a total indifference to how things really are, or because of the belief that whatever he says makes no difference at all, his voice being only one in a sea of others, many of which more powerful, and all clamoring for attention.73 The sales clerk who doesn't care about the company she works for, and who tells her customer that the shoes she is trying really look great on her without paying any attention to whether they do or not, is bulls.h.i.+tting. There is no motivation to get things right, nor to deceive; there isn't even any ulterior motive. In bulls.h.i.+tting claims are made, judgments cast, arguments presented, all with the unbearable lightness of those who are free of any responsibility or commitment, even if it is a freedom that is rooted in a profound sense of impotence or insecurity.

A lack of faith in genuine inquiry, intellectual laziness, being forced to speak on issues one knows too little about, all contribute to a culture of bulls.h.i.+tting. And it is a culture that can very well feed on itself. Bulls.h.i.+tting invariably invites more of it. It would be a mistake, however, to limit one's search for bulls.h.i.+tting only to spent scientists, oily politicians, or slick marketers. When philosophy itself is boldly identified, per Richard Rorty, with ”carrying on the conversation” and truth is defined as ”what your peers will let you get away with,” even the perennial search for wisdom is being reduced to mere bulls.h.i.+tting. What this means is not just that what some philosophers say is jargonistic, obscure, or meaningless, but that even philosophers are not immune to losing the desire to really search for answers to the questions they are raising. The temptation to just blurt out what sounds good and the power of whatever sounds good to find willful ears (generally including one's own) is just too great.

Not all violations of the epistemic imperative are so simple and straightforward. They can be blended, and even combined, with genuine inquiry. The fake reasoner who doesn't care what people think, or who has lost all respect for his audience, may resort to bulls.h.i.+tting when trying to bridge the gap between the results he needs and the results inquiry would bring him. He makes factual claims and explanations without caring whether they are true or false, whether they make sense or not, or whether they are even convincing. The same can be said for the sham reasoner who seeks to defend his holy truths in a political arena where he is faced with an audience that steadfastly refuses to see things as he sees them. Also the genuine inquirer may engage in bulls.h.i.+tting when playing the game of keeping corporate sponsors, university administrators, or grant agencies happy, furnis.h.i.+ng them with facts, findings, and arguments he doesn't himself believe. One can even bulls.h.i.+t about bulls.h.i.+tting. 74 It's important, however, to keep such second-order bulls.h.i.+tting separate from first-order bulls.h.i.+tting. Otherwise one runs the risk of losing the child with the bathwater, as when one would dismiss excellent research because of the bulls.h.i.+tting with which its findings were made public.

In light of the above, one might still argue that there are some situations where bulls.h.i.+tting is productive, and that even within genuine inquiry there is a proper place and time for it. Frankfurt's discussion of the bull session points in this direction (pp. 3437). Bulls.h.i.+tting could be interpreted as creating the right atmosphere for inquirers to vent new hypotheses they feel unsure about or draw wild a.n.a.logies that contain a potential key for further progress. However, there remains an important difference between brainstorming, however creative, and bulls.h.i.+tting. Returning once more to the central premise that drives the intentionalist school-that what makes something bulls.h.i.+t is the intention with which it is generated-we can say that what distinguishes a brainstorm session from an evening of bulls.h.i.+tting is that the partic.i.p.ants in the former are interested in discovering something, a desire that is altogether absent among bulls.h.i.+tters. Bulls.h.i.+tting lacks the openness of mind and the ability to adapt in face of new insights that are essential for anything to be taken seriously or as worth pursuing. True, what bulls.h.i.+tters excrete may on occasion prove useful to others, but that's an accidental and unintended consequence. Taken in that way, listening to someone bulls.h.i.+t is no more part of inquiry than serendipitously hitting upon some insight while browsing tabloids or while mindlessly driving through town.

So Why Bulls.h.i.+t?

Having distinguished bulls.h.i.+tting from genuine inquiry as well as from sham and fake reasoning, and having said something about why people engage in those activities, the question remains: Why do people bulls.h.i.+t? Why do people make epistemic claims without caring whether they are true? Leaving pure epistemic sloth aside and with no pretense of being exhaustive, I will say a little about two (mutually reinforcing) reasons why people bulls.h.i.+t: the social pressure to speak on any issue (often combined with the notion that whatever one says makes no difference), and a lack of faith in the possibility-or the usefulness-of genuine inquiry. Because I have separated bulls.h.i.+tting from sham and fake reasoning, some motives often attributed to the bulls.h.i.+tter properly belong to the sham or the fake reasoner.

Within a liberal democratic society, as Frankfurt notes, every individual is expected to be a responsible citizen who is able to instantly voice an opinion on countless pertinent and not so pertinent issues (p. 63). This expectation goes back to the Cartesian rejection of authority and the Enlightenment's appeal that everyone should think for himself. However, when the situation is such that one is forced, or conditioned, to speak with conviction on many issues one knows little about, one will be unable to always speak from a genuine desire to find true answers. For one thing, there simply isn't the time. Moreover, in cases where one is not directly affected there is little motivation to do so. Being relatively detached from the issues one is voicing opinions about, and finding that one's voice is just one among many, has the liberating effect that what opinion is being voiced does not make any difference. Hence, there's no real need to be concerned about the truth of what one is saying.

In addition to the feeling that one does not need to engage oneself in genuine inquiry for many of the issues one is asked or feels compelled to voice an opinion about, there is the belief that genuine inquiry is far too romantic an ideal to be worthy of actual pursuit. Generally, such a prophylactic pessimism follows the disillusion caused by a failed search for certainty. I hope that the above account of genuine inquiry, which makes no reference to something like ”Truth with a capital T,” and with its fal-libilistic stance, makes a sufficient case to counter this type of bulls.h.i.+tter.

When addressing the issue of the prevalence of bulls.h.i.+t it may be fair to say that the Enlightenment's narrow focus on individuals has made bulls.h.i.+t its natural outcome, as it leaves every individual to fend for himself in an overwhelming epistemic landscape. Put differently, one way of looking at the prevalence of bulls.h.i.+t is that it is the price we are paying for the Cartesian-style epistemic emanc.i.p.ation that developed into a linchpin of the ideology of modernity, an ideology that situates knowledge within the individual and makes any appeal to authority suspect.

Hence, the best way to counter bulls.h.i.+tting is to restore confidence in genuine inquiry and insist that people be in earnest when they make epistemic claims. Confidence in genuine inquiry also alleviates the need to be able to speak on any and every issue, as it allows one to rely on the work of others. Scientists work like this. Unless there is good reason to doubt the work of their colleagues in other fields of research, they take the results they obtained at face value, a.s.suming that they are the product of genuine inquiry.

Now one might object that by focusing on inquiry I did not cast my net wide enough, because there is more to life than inquiring into things, even if we include sales clerks helping customers find the right shoes. May there then not be some other function of bulls.h.i.+tting that is not a violation of the epistemic imperative? Take, for instance, the formulaic ”It's nice to see you!,” which is not intended to reveal or conceal the speaker's real feelings, nor to convince the addressee about the true nature of those feelings, but rather to make the addressee feel at ease. It could be argued that the claim's truth value doesn't matter for that, so there's is no need for any of those involved to concern themselves with the claim's truth value, thereby making bulls.h.i.+tting permissible.

In response to this, it might be suggested that this is not a case of pure bulls.h.i.+tting but that it is bulls.h.i.+tting for a cause, and that the claim ”It's nice to see you!” is in effect a purported product of inquiry, even if this inquiry amounts to little more than a reflection upon one's feelings. With the formulaic ”It's nice to see you!” this inquiry is simply not engaged in because no matter what the inquiry would reveal about our feelings toward that person, the best strategy remains to say ”It's nice to see you!” That is what best serves the purpose that is deemed more important, which is to ease our interaction with that person-making it technically a case of fake reasoning. What this comes down to is the belief that it is not always best to be earnest. Just as there may be situations where it is better to lie, there may be situations where it is better to bulls.h.i.+t.

Alternatively, take the case of a few friends that are just having a good time by horsing around a bit for fun. Their bulls.h.i.+tting serves no other purpose than that they enjoy doing it; it plays a role not unlike that of playing Scrabble or some other game. However, since we are still dealing with a situation that involves pa.s.sing off claims as knowledge, however casually, it satisfies the broad definition of inquiry given before, on which inquiry encompa.s.ses any activity that leads to knowledge claims that are in some aspect new to those partic.i.p.ating in the activity. Such cases of horsing around can be defended, though, by arguing that in situations where the conclusions reached do not matter, the enjoyment of the activity can overrule the epistemic imperative. Yes, bulls.h.i.+tting too has its aesthetic appeal.

The fact that these two cases can be interpreted in terms of inquiry doesn't prove that all cases of bulls.h.i.+tting can be satisfactorily interpreted that way. Personally, I doubt that this can be done. What it does show, however, is that looking at bulls.h.i.+tting from the perspective of inquiry gives us a viable framework through which to interpret and evaluate bulls.h.i.+tting. A better understanding of bulls.h.i.+tting may be a first step, not only towards detecting and identifying bulls.h.i.+t, but also towards countering or preventing it when it is inappropriate.

II.

The Bull by the Horns.

Defining Bulls.h.i.+t.

8.

Deeper into Bulls.h.i.+t.

bulls.h.i.+t n. & v. coa.r.s.e sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing. - v. intr. (-s.h.i.+tted, - s.h.i.+tting ) talk nonsense; bluff. bulls.h.i.+tter n.

-Oxford English Dictionary.

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth-this indifference to how things really are-that I regard as the essence of bulls.h.i.+t.

-Harry Frankfurt, On Bulls.h.i.+t, pp. 3334.

1 Without the s.h.i.+t of the Bull.

Harry Frankfurt's essay ”On Bulls.h.i.+t” is a pioneering and brilliant discussion of a widespread but largely unexamined cultural phenomenon. Upon being honored by an invitation to contribute to a volume that celebrated his work,75 I decided to focus on Frankfurt's work on bulls.h.i.+t, partly because it is so original and so interesting, and partly because bulls.h.i.+t, and the struggle against it, have played a large role in my own intellectual life. They have played that role because of my interest in Marxism, which caused me to read, when I was in my twenties, a great deal of the French Marxism of the 1960s, princ.i.p.ally deriving from the Althusserian school.

I found that material hard to understand, and, because I was naive enough to believe that writings that were attracting a great deal of respectful, and even reverent, attention could not be loaded with bulls.h.i.+t, I was inclined to put the blame for finding the Althusserians hard entirely on myself. And when I managed to extract what seemed like a reasonable idea from one of their texts, I attributed to it more interest or more importance (so I later came to see) than it had, partly, no doubt, because I did not want to think that I had been wasting my time. (That psychological mechanism, a blend, perhaps, of ”cognitive dissonance reduction” and ”adaptive preference formation,” is, I believe, at work quite widely. Someone struggles for ages with some rebarbative text, manages to find some sense in it, and then reports that sense with enthusiasm, even though it is a ba.n.a.lity that could have been expressed in a couple of sentences instead of across the course of the dozens of paragraphs to which the said someone has subjected herself).76 Yet, although I was for a time attracted to Althusserianism, I did not end by succ.u.mbing to its intoxication, because I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigor was not matched by conceptual rigor in its intellectual practices. The ideas that the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false. (Failure to distinguish those opposed interpretations produces an illusory impression of interesting truth).

No doubt at least partly because of my misguided Althusserian dalliance, I became, as far as bulls.h.i.+t is concerned, among the least tolerant people that I know. And when a set of Marxists or semi-Marxists, who, like me, had come to abhor what we considered to be the obscurity that had come to infest Marxism-when we formed, at the end of the 1970s, a Marxist discussion group which meets annually, and to which I am pleased to belong, I was glad that my colleagues were willing to call it the Non-Bulls.h.i.+t Marxism Group: hence the emblem at the head of this article, which says, in Latin, ”Marxism without the s.h.i.+t of the bull.” (The group is also called, less polemically, and as you can see, the September Group, since we meet each September, for three days.) 2 Two Species of Bulls.h.i.+t.

I should like to explain how this chapter reached its present state. I read Frankfurt's article in 1986, when it first appeared. I loved it, but I didn't think critically about it.

Having been asked to contribute to the present volume, I reread the article, in order to write about it. I came to realize that its proposal about the ”essence” of bulls.h.i.+t worked quite badly for the bulls.h.i.+t (see Section 1 above) that has occupied me. So I wrote a first draft which trained counter-examples drawn from the domain of the bulls.h.i.+t that interests me against Frankfurt's account. But I then realized that it was inappropriate to train those examples against Frankfurt, that he and I are, in fact, interested in different bulls.h.i.+ts, and, therefore, in different explicanda. Frankfurt is interested in a bulls.h.i.+t of ordinary life,77 whereas I am interested in a bulls.h.i.+t that appears in academic works, and, so I have discovered, the word ”bulls.h.i.+t” characteristically denotes structurally different things that correspond to those different interests. Finally, and, belatedly, I considered, with some care, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) account of ”bulls.h.i.+t”, and, to my surprise, I discovered (and this was, of course, rea.s.suring) that something like the distinct explicanda that I had come to distinguish are listed there under two distinct entries.78 So, instead of citing cases of the bulls.h.i.+t that interests me in disconfirmation of Frankfurt's account, I now regard it as bulls.h.i.+t of a different kind.79 Which is not to say that I have no criticism of Frankfurt's treatment of the kind of bulls.h.i.+t that interests him.

Frankfurt is partly responsible for my original, misdirected, approach. For he speaks, after all-see the second epigraph at the beginning of this article-of the ”essence” of bulls.h.i.+t, and he does not acknowledge that the explicandum that attracted his interest is just one flower in the lush garden of bulls.h.i.+t. He begins by saying that the term 'bulls.h.i.+t' is very hard to handle, a.n.a.lytically, but, as we shall see, he rather abandons caution when he comes to offer his own account of it.

Consider, then, the OED reading of 'bulls.h.i.+t': bulls.h.i.+t n. & v. coa.r.s.e sl. - n. 1 (Often as int.) nonsense, rubbish. 2 trivial or insincere talk or writing.80 - v. intr. (-s.h.i.+tted, -s.h.i.+tting) talk nonsense; bluff. bulls.h.i.+tter n.

The bulls.h.i.+t that interests me falls under definition 1 of the noun, but the bulls.h.i.+t that interests Frankfurt is closer to what's defined by definition 2 of the noun. And that is because of the appearance of the word 'insincere' in that second definition of 'bulls.h.i.+t'. In definition 2 of the noun 'bulls.h.i.+t', bulls.h.i.+t is const.i.tuted as such through being the product of discourse governed by a certain state of mind. In this activity-centered definition of bulls.h.i.+t, the bull, conceptually speaking, wears the trousers: bulls.h.i.+t is bulls.h.i.+t because it was produced by a bulls.h.i.+tter, or, at any rate, by someone who was bulls.h.i.+tting at the time. Bulls.h.i.+t is, by nature, the product of bulls.h.i.+tting, and bulls.h.i.+tting, by nature, produces bulls.h.i.+t, and that biconditional, so understood that 'bulls.h.i.+tting' enjoys semantic primacy, is true of Frankfurt's view of the matter.81 Definition 1, by contrast, defines 'bulls.h.i.+t' without reference to the bulls.h.i.+t-producer's state of mind. The defect of this bulls.h.i.+t does not derive from its provenance: almost any state of mind can emit nonsense or rubbish, with any old mix of sincerity and its lack. Here the s.h.i.+t wears the trousers, and if there are indeed ”bulls.h.i.+tters,” and ”bulls.h.i.+ttings,” that correspond to the bulls.h.i.+t of definition 1, then they are defined by reference to bulls.h.i.+t: but it may be the case, as I meant to imply by that 'if', that the words 'bulls.h.i.+tting' and 'bulls.h.i.+tter' don't have a stable place on this side of the explicandum divide.82 However that may be, definition 1 supplies an output-centered definition of the noun: the character of the process that produces bulls.h.i.+t is immaterial here.