Bullshit, Social Integration, and Political Legitimation: Habermasian Reflections
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a Habermasian analysis of bullshit which diverges from the well-known account offered by Harry Frankfurt. It aims to show that Habermas’s theory of communicative action provides superior conceptual tools for such an analysis, but also that the phenomenon of bullshit ought to be deeply troubling to Habermasians. Bullshit frustrates the transition to discourse, interrupts the binding force of communicative action (the basis of Habermas’s account of social integration) and, if sufficiently widespread as to alter fundamental attitudes toward public speech, bullshit challenges the status of Habermas’s theory of communicative action as a reconstruction of the intuitive knowledge of competent speakers, which status is intended to justify its claim to provide the normative foundations for a critical theory of society in the Frankfurt School sense of an immanent critique.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it