August 20, 2005
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Truth vs. BullshitBackground:
For an essay on the above topicfrom this week’s New Yorker,
click on the box below.Representing truth:
Rebecca Goldstein
Representing bullshit:
Apostolos Doxiadis
Goldstein’s truth: Gödel was a Platonist who believed in objective truth.
See Rothstein’s review of Goldstein’s new book Incompleteness.
Doxiadis’s bullshit: Gödel, along with Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and Heisenberg, destroyed
a tradition of certainty that began with Plato and Euclid.“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov
Comments (1)
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn’t be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.”
As I’m fond of saying, “If it’s a paradox, it’s probably true.”
Just more bullshit.
It just goes around and around . . .