Bullshit, Social Integration, and Political Legitimation: Habermasian Refl ections

摘要

This paper proposes a Habermasian analysis of bullshit which divergesnfrom the well-known account offered by Harry Frankfurt. It aims to show that Habermas’sntheory of communicative action provides superior conceptual tools for such annanalysis, but also that the phenomenon of bullshit ought to be deeply troubling tonHabermasians. Bullshit frustrates the transition to discourse, interrupts the bindingnforce of communicative action (the basis of Habermas’s account of social integration)nand, if suffi ciently widespread as to alter fundamental attitudes toward public speech,nbullshit challenges the status of Habermas’s theory of communicative action as a reconstructionnof the intuitive knowledge of competent speakers, which status is intended tonjustify its claim to provide the normative foundations for a critical theory of society innthe Frankfurt School sense of an immanent critique.