What I say

"What she said" in the vernacular is a way of expressing or agreeing with what the speaker just said. We can extend this useful idea in all kinds of ways. E.g.

(1) we can apply a negation operator. Thus 'not what she said'.

(2) we can apply it recursively. Thus

A: Snow is white
B:what A said
C:what B said

and so on. Note that all three are statements, each of them says something. Thus to say something is either (i) to say something without reference to another statement. This is the boundary condition. (ii) to reference some other statement which also says something. This is the recursive case.

(3) We can use other pronouns than the third person. E.g. to saying to C, 'not what you said', thus disagreeing with C, and thus disagreeing that snow is white. In the first person 'what I said', emphasising again what you said before, 'not what I said', changing your mind, as we do. And finally 'not what I am saying'. Does this say anything? No. It is a recursive case that has no boundary condition.

(4) Finally, we can ask a question. Thus 'what C says?', to which the answer could be 'what C says', or just 'Snow is white', or 'not what C says', thus 'Snow is not white'. As for 'not what I am saying?', there is no appropriate answer, given that 'not what I am saying' has no boundary condition, as in case (3) above.

Lunatic, Liar or Lord?

I have now scanned in Question 2 of the Prologue to Scotus' Ordinatio. There is much of interest here.  There is the well-known allusion to the defeat of the Egyptians at the battle of Hims (also known as the battle of Wadi al-Khazandar)  in 1299. The battle was on 22-23 December 1299, but the news did not reach Oxford until the summer of 1300, which is taken as evidence that Scotus began the revision of the Ordinatio then. He writes that, with the co-operation of God, Islam will soon be ended "for it is greatly weakened in the year of Christ 1300, and many of its devotees are dead and some have fled".  This was gravely lacking in foresight.

There is also a reference to Josephus' history of the Jews, which for a long time was used as evidence for the "historical Jesus".  Josephus questions whether Jesus was really a man, says he was the worker of miracles, and was the Messiah.  We are not now certain whether this passage is authentic, or a Christian interpolation.

And there is an argument that must be a very early version of the one now known as Lunatic, Liar or Lord?, popularised by C.S. Lewis and many other Christian apologists.

The argument as we now have it is that Christ (or in other versions, the Christians who wrote the gospels) either deceived by conscious fraud, and so was a liar, or was himself deluded, and so a lunatic, or was telling the truth, and so was the Lord. This is the 'trilemma'. The argument (1) that Jesus (or the Christians who wrote the gospels) could not have been lying, because Christianity forbids lying, (2) that he could not have been deluded, because of the evidence of his rationality (or the rationality of the Christians who wrote or preached the gospels).

Scotus argument is essentially the same, although a little more complex. I will discuss it later.

Is bullshitting the same as lying?

Failing to tell the truth is not necessarily lying.  We can sincerely believe what we are saying, as Augustine says, and thus not intend to deceive, even though what we say happens to be false.  Or we can say what we know to be false, without deceiving, as when our audience knows that it is false, and we know that they know. "Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth".  Conversely, we can tell a big lie by telling the truth, but not the whole truth, and thus deceive in effective ways.

What about bullshitting (the coarse phrase is an American one, which has the same meaning as the now almost archaic defunct British English 'flannel' - to talk evasively)?  Is it lying? I haven't looked at Harry Frankfurt's excellent 'On Bullshit' for some time, but I know he develops a 'theory of bullshit' in a very philosophical way -giving necessary and sufficient conditions of bullshit, and so on.

Looking at it again, it is wonderfully funny.  "Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth." (my emphasis).

Now, Frankfurt claims that the essence of bullshit is a lack of connection to a concern with truth, and  indifference to how things really are.

This is the crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is  anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

And he says that "it is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth".

Is that right?  I don't think so.  The essence of bullshit is the project of conveying a falsehood without articulating it.  Proof:  when you spot the falsehood that the bullshitter is attempting to convey, and try and force him (or her, usually him) to articulate it, the bullshitter will immediately move on from that place, to avoid it becoming occupied by the truth.  He, or she, will use various methods and means - sometimes accusations of bad faith, sometimes professing ignorance or misunderstand, and very often a move to a higher level of generality ("let's step back for a minute").  Bullshitters of the unsubtle and unskilled and ephemeral variety frequently descend into complete nonsense.

Therefore, their evident consciousness of the place to avoid - such a consciousness, in fact, that the place becomes clear and obvious, by dint of the trampled ground around it, is proof that they are not unconcerned with the truth, and that they do have an interest in it.

Further proof: nearly all people hate a barefaced lie. This may be because their parents told them it was wrong, perhaps it is part of our genetic code.  It may be simply the fear of being found out.  One liar who lied to me quite recently said to me "I do not think I ever lied to you".  He could not bring himself to say 'I lied'.  Nearly all ordinary liars are bullshitters, on this understanding.

I assume Harry Frankfurt has spent a great deal of his time in an academic department, indeed, a department of philosophy.  Such people have a deep concern for the truth, and generally little reason to lie.  Moreover, their whole training is intended to eliminate the vagueness and unclarity of ordinary discourse.  This may be the cause of his mistake.