Truth vs. Bullshit
Background:
For an essay on the above topic
from this week’s New Yorker,
For an essay on the above topic
from 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
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 . . .
Comment by BlueCollarGoddess — Sunday, August 21, 2005 @ 3:06 am