About academic bullshit in nursing

Many of the texts that proved to be seminal or structuring in a given scientific field rely on specialized vocabulary and high-level abstraction that limits their accessibility to lay readers. And although I believe that any writing should at least aim for clarity and simplicity—something not everyone agrees with (Aoki, 2000)—I accept the fact some ideas and concepts are intrinsically hard to express using simple everyday language. However, I am of the opinion that academic writing also includes a significant amount of discourses that cross the line from the complex to the meaningless. Relying principally on the work of Frankfurt (2005) and Spicer (2017), I argue not only that academic bullshit exists but that academic nursing has been a significant producer of it. And yes, the choice of the term is deliberately catchy and offensive, and I will get back later to the justification of this choice. The first characteristic of bullshit is that contrarily to other forms of language, it has no obvious connections with empirical reality. The object of bullshit is not to describe reality nor to communicate about it. Bullshit is thus highly abstract. Neither the speaker nor the listener would be able to translate the bullshit into a set of simple, practical sentences related to mundane daily experiences of the world (Frankfurt, 2005). When we say: “Every word in language signifies something” we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. (It might be, of course, that we wanted to distinguish the words of language (8) from words ‘without meaning’ such as occur in Lewis Carroll's poems, or words like “Lilliburlero” in songs.) (Wittgenstein, 1998, para. 13). Bullshit is, in the same way, an atypical use of language in the sense that it is not meant to convey a specific meaning. To take an analogy, bullshit is to meaningful language what cubism is to realistic visual representation. Saying this does not imply that cubism, as a visual expression, is meaningless. On the contrary, the painter's ambition is definitely to convey something. But that something is, for one part, in the realm of subjective feelings and, for another part, a dialogical episode in the evolution of visual arts. In the same way, bullshit is language carefully crafted to evade any specific and precise meaning while also being effective in ongoing social games (Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2015). The second characteristic of bullshit is that it has no practical conceptual value. Academic language is full of complex and sophisticated concepts summarized as one simple word (power, culture, democracy, etc.). To make sense of specialized academic discourses, one thus needs to gain a sufficient mastery of those underlying concepts (which is a huge endeavour). But, as those concepts are often captured by words also used in daily lay language, the actual sophistication of specialized academic discourses might not be obvious at first sight. Therefore, such discourses outside of one's field of expertise can read like a meaningless string of semi-random words and illogical articulations. Because of the external similitude between conceptual sophistication and academic bullshit, some academics have shown an unhealthy enthusiasm for exploring the boundaries between the two. One of the clearest demonstrations of the prevalence of bullshit in academia was provided by Alan Sokal who deliberately wrote a full paper of total bullshit and got it peer-reviewed and published (Sokal, 1996; Sokal & Bricmont, 1997). Unfortunately, similar experiments have been reproduced several times since (Sokal, 2018). I also want to emphasize the obvious. I strongly believe that specialized academic discourse is usually not bullshit. But making the distinction between a conceptually sound but complex academic concept (Bourdieu's habitus would be one I like and use [Bourdieu, 1980]) and academic bullshit requires specialized expertise. Actually, making the distinction between sophisticated ideas and academic bullshit requires both expertise and self-confidence. There are many good reasons one can be reluctant to call bullshit on a colleague (seniority, politeness, diplomacy, etc.), but there is also a whole lot of pluralistic ignorance going on. When a speaker utters bullshit, listeners are often left silently pondering if they are the only ones perplexed. What if what sounded like a meaningless garble to you was in fact a robust scientific debate that everyone else understood? So, not only can bullshit be hard to distinguish from legitimate complex academic discourse, but raising the question can be intimidating. Nevertheless, we stick to our second characteristic of bullshit as deliberately hard to grasp discourses that have no conceptual value—actually impossible to grasp discourses, as they have no meaning. The purpose herein is to introduce an emerging metaparadigm that links self to system, interweaving and integrating the teachings of caring science and conscious dying through the use of reflective inventories for both the individual nurse and collective of nursing (Rosa, Estes, & Watson, 2017, p. 58). The social world includes social-economic-political, transcultural knowledge development, and evaluation and implementation of rules of law and systems to cocreate the meaning of critical human caring ethical action (Ray & Turkel, 2014, p. 132). On an epistemological level, qualitative research espouses to accessing knowledge embedded ontologically in life experiences by using methods that most appropriately link the area of interest to the theoretical constructs (Walter, Glass, & Davis, 2001, p. 267). Nursing has three traits of a vulnerable field for academic bullshit. First, as a university-based autonomous discipline, nursing's existence rests on its capacity to distance itself from a purely technical field of practice. Going for a high level of abstraction is an obvious way to achieve this (Abbott, 1988). And bullshit—being disconnected from any reality—can be seen as the absolute level in abstraction. Second, as a newer discipline, nursing is—very legitimately—borrowing heavily from other fields. And this creates an opportunity to, sometimes, take too much liberty in interpretation and adaptation, thus trespassing from the complex to the meaningless. Finally, nursing theoretical scholarship is deeply influenced by postmodern and subjectivist conceptualizations that, in my opinion, weaken the potential for productive intra-disciplinary debates. And by saying this, I am in no way suggesting that all academic nursing is bullshit nor that nursing should be limited to practical dimensions and shy away from philosophical or ethical questions. I am merely saying that academic bullshit exists within nursing and that there are reasons to believe that this discipline might be more vulnerable to it than others. I also believe readers should not find solace in the thought that bullshit is limited to some sect-like sub-fields of nursing with their own journals and societies. Obviously, some sub-fields and journals proved highly propitious for bullshit growth, but my opinion is that the discipline itself is vulnerable, as are other disciplines with similar characteristics. Academic bullshit also creates the conditions for its own reproduction. Once trainees and students enter in a field where bullshit is either left unchallenged or even accepted as a valid intellectual currency, then social reproduction processes will facilitate its growth. Mastering nursing bullshit takes time and, as such, is an investment. As with any investment, those who capitalize on it will want it to be fruitful, which somehow intersects to some extent with David Graeber's thesis about the economic importance of bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2018). The only way to reap the benefits from one's investment in mastering a strand of academic bullshit is to foster its use in academia. In practice, this will take the form of a systematic effort to push any debate or academic discussion towards the realm of bullshit-based discourses. When successful, this grants the speaker a distinct advantage in controlling the discussion, even if this is done at the expense of deeply damaging the field itself. Unfortunately, examples of nursing bullshit such as the ones quoted earlier are easy to source. And although academic bullshit is not specific to nursing, there is bullshit in academic nursing. This is not desirable for, at least, three reasons. First, it is useless to the scientific or scholarly endeavour. Having no connection to reality nor conceptual value, bullshit is the exact opposite of what the language of science should be. Not only is it useless, but it impedes the understanding of the world. As bullshit becomes a commonplace occurrence in a field, it will prompt the growth of a significant capacity in bullshit exegesis. Academic bullshit being deliberately cryptic, a lot of individual and collective efforts will be put into offering various—equally cryptic and useless—applications and explanations about the meaning and implications of given pieces of bullshit. This will in turn prompt a feedback process where large layered constructions of bullshit will be produced and circulated. This uses up time and resources that could instead be used to do something actually useful. Finally, bullshit disempowers those who use or are exposed to it. By being both useless and ambiguous, bullshit weakens the connection between participants, language and reality. As said earlier, I do not posit a simple connection here, but I conceive language as the main human tool to build a shared understanding of reality. When language is used for the opposite, it makes it all the much harder, not only to understand the world, but also to share its understandings. And, ultimately, shared understandings are the basic political tools needed to change the world. Conversely, language emptied of any meaningful connection with people's experience is a tool to foster obedience. And the fact that bullshit, as a specific form of language, was first described in political and business discourses is no accident. In those fields, bullshit is used with a purpose. In my opinion, most academic bullshit is not used with such a purpose nor such a level of Machiavellianism. It is mostly the product of individual opportunism, pluralistic ignorance and gullibility. Some academics will discover on their own that they can successfully get away with bullshit instead of proper academic analysis—something that will be easier in newer disciplinary fields (academic nursing being an example) or during periods of paradigmatic change (postmodernism in social sciences). The points I wanted to make here are threefold. First, I believe that what I have described as nursing bullshit exists and is too widely accepted. Second, once bullshit takes hold somewhere, it creates a feedback process fostering its own growth. Third, academic bullshit is not only ridiculous, but is actually dangerous for the scientific endeavour. This brings me to my conclusion. I could have written this text using a term less offensive than bullshit (the Sokal hoax is often discussed using the term ‘fashionable nonsense’). But, in my opinion, the nursing discipline needs a good shake-out. In some environments, bullshit has reached the point where I sometimes feel more energy is spent in bullshit exegesis and hermeneutics than in improving the understanding of the world or improving practice.

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