Expert Bullshitting: Understanding Epistemic Trespassing through the Lens of Bullshit
their ventures (in the same way grant agencies sponsor interdisciplinary research) as
they’re unable to find an electrician. After numerous rounds of trial and error, they’re
finally able to identify the issue. They then send a photo to their friend who’s a
trained electrician and explain how they figured out the issue. Their friend tells them
they wasted their time and could have run one simple test to identify the issue, saving
days of labor.
What this demonstrates is that the intent and outcome don’t matter when it
comes to trespassing. The plumber just happened to stumble upon a method that
worked after numerous hours of bullshitting. If he was an epistemically responsible
agent, he would’ve never accepted the job, or when he did, he would’ve taken the
necessary time to acquire the expertise and skills needed to complete it. A bullshitter
doesn’t have to be conscious of their bullshit, so maybe a trespasser is better
identified as an unconscious bullshitter . For the sake of this paper, though,
identifying a conscious vs. unconscious bullshitter is unimportant, as it seems
trespassers can be either one.
Why this Sameness is Important Now that I’ve established that bullshitting can be used to describe epistemic trespassing, you may be questioning the usefulness of this reduction. To explain, I turn to Olsson, who proposed bullshitters will still be indirectly exposed to the truth through “information exchange processes” and a “social pressure to average among
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