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We put bullshit, and truth as well, down to the transpositions of interest in a dialectic where, between representation and communication, meanings can never be completely shared. Bullshit is when the not-sharing involves bad faith. Less than outright lies, it may be (mere) exaggeration, affectation, pretense, deliberate elision, feigned sincerity, or faked knowing. This is just the beginning of a potentially endless catalogue of intentional or unintentional failures to communicate interest. In each case, the untruth is the rhetorical truth. The comedian Stephen Colbert has a nice word for this, “truthiness.” Bullshit is never only that.

Rhetoric may result in more or less congruent meaning, but meanings always will remain incongruent to some degree. Communication can never complete representation because the representable truth is inexhaustible. In solidary interests the not-sharing is benign. In antagonistic interests, the lies and the bullshit are in the gap between sharing and not-sharing. Rhetorics are always ready to descend into bullshit. But some things are more bullshit than others, and our parsing may unmask this.

Reification often works to the same effect, where immediate objectifications obscure underlying patterns of agency and interest. Localized truth may serve as a cover for generalized lies.

As for the project of parsing the truth, we like the distinction Husserl makes between lifeworld and science.^§AS2.5b The lifeworld sustains vernacular truths as well as everyday bullshit. Science is a kind of parsing that tries to cut through the bullshit and get closer to the truth. Sometimes, however, the bullshit masquerades as science, and when it does, this too demands our parsing.

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⁴³⁰ Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005, On Bullshit, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 3.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 316–318. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

To Parse §AS2.5.1