How Obscurantism Differs from Bullshit: A Proposal

Abstract

This paper holds the view that although bullshit and obscurantism are obviously related phenomena, they should be kept distinct for conceptual reasons. It shows that whereas phenomena of bullshit tend to concentrate on speech acts and a violation of the expectations of relevance therein, obscurantism betrays an indirect move to confound while promising deep content. After an overview of studies on bullshit and a look at the different characteristics and types of obscurantism, this paper investigates why readers retain interest in reading obscure texts. Interpretive charity, which is one of the reasons for this sustained interest, is found to be unsuccessful in making sense of obscurantism. Obscurantism is thus seen to be a vice more cryptic and systematic than bullshit.

Bullshit, Pragmatic Deception, and Natural Language Processing

“…the other hand, obscurantism may be interpreted as "betray[ing] an indirect move to confound while promising deep content" (Bien, 2021(Bien, , p. 1498. Following this view, obscurantism would be more closely related to so-called argumentative bullshit (Gascón, 2021).…”