Expert Bullshitting: Understanding Epistemic Trespassing through the Lens of Bullshit
Fundamentally, a trespasser is an overconfident and ignorant expert who believes they have the authority to encroach on another domain. They could end up being right, but as Ballantyne acknowledges, “that’s thanks to a stroke of good luck” and not the strategies they employed while trespassing. 7 This reveals the main goal of the trespasser: to be right in an attempt to justify their overconfidence. They don’t seem to be concerned about the betterment of a domain or humanity; they are mainly concerned with themselves. Even the proposed justifications of trespassing are focused on what makes the trespasser right, and not how their potentially correct claims may positively affect others. I don’t want to deny the fact that trespassing could make meaningful contributions to a field, but as Levy and Varley (2024) point out, trespassing of this sort is “vanishingly rare” and still “epistemically suspect.” 8 This isn’t to say all trespassers are conscious of their actions, but regardless of this the essence of the trespasser doesn’t change—they are ignoring outside evidence to act like an expert in a field they’re not. Trespassing as Bullshit By identifying what a trespasser’s core goals are, we can say that the only outcome they are concerned with is the possibility of increasing their epistemic status through misrepresentation. I believe this reduction of epistemic trespassing is completely justifiable, as it tracks almost perfectly with the concept of ‘bullshit’ that Frankfurt presents. According to Frankfurt, “The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to
7 Ballantyne, 370. 8 N eil Levy and Russell Varley, “Mind the Guardrails: Epistemic Trespassing and Apt Deference,” Social Epistemology , 2024, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2024.2400560.
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