Instructions

Read the passage carefully and answer the THREE questions that follow.

Comprehension:
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are. It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Question 16

When will a liar BEST turn into a bullshitter?

Solution

We are told that a liar believes that he knows the truth and attempts to convince us of the opposite, while a bullshitter is not concerned about either the truth or lies but only about deceiving the listener. Hence, their agendas differ largely - the former focuses on lying, while the latter engages in deception [ the end outcome]. Hence, for a liar to become a bullshitter, he needs to focus on the outcome - i.e. deceiving others. Option C comes closest to capturing this idea.

Option A: The statement here is quite vague - deception is involved in both cases. The liar much be unconcerned by/detached from the truth [it is unclear if this relates to the idea of 'not responding']

Option B: We cannot conclusively state that a liar can transform into a bullshitter by not being worried about the correct 'apprehension of reality' - the idea is not relevant to the discussion on a bullshitter [i.e. the author has not presented it as a trait of a bullshitter]

Option D: The same applies to the bullshitter - both categories of individuals conceal their intentions [only that in the case of bullshitters, they are much less or not at all concerned about the truth]

Option E: Note that a bullshitter is not concerned with the state of affairs as demonstrated by these lines - "What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs."


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