Bullshit, Social Integration, and Political Legitimation: Habermasian Reflections
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".