One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.
—Harry Frankfurt, On BullshitThieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday1. Introduction
Begin with the idea of an epistemic marketplace where hearers/readers and speakers/writers trade ideas, concepts, knowledge, and so forth, and where transactions between individuals are incentivized by reputational gains and losses rather than monetary transactions. Speakers and writers benefit by creating good ideas, and hearers and readers benefit by avoiding bad ones. Here, epistemic injustice, wronging someone in “their capacity as a knower,” often happens in the epistemic marketplace, just as producers and consumers of material goods suffer injustices in the actual marketplace, speakers/writers and hearers/readers can too in the epistemic one.
Before proceeding, it would be helpful to clarify what is meant by “epistemic marketplace” and how it differs from related terms like “marketplace of ideas” and “epistemic regime.” The traditional marketplace of ideas, associated with Mill and later First Amendment jurisprudence, is a normative concept where truth emerges from the free competition of ideas within the public discourse. The epistemic regime, by contrast, is a technical notion referring to the institutional and normative structures that govern what counts as knowledge. The epistemic marketplace, as used here, is distinct from both. It is a descriptive, economic framing of the exchange of ideas and knowledge between speakers/writers and hearers/readers, governed not by formal pricing structures or institutional authority, but by reputational incentives and the social benefits that flow from being seen as a competent and trustworthy knower. Like any market operating under scarcity, it creates conditions under which agents are incentivized to game the system when the costs of doing so are low and the benefits high. It is precisely those conditions that make idea appropriation and bullshitting predictable.
Originally, the idea of epistemic injustice, coined by Miranda Fricker, applied to testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustices borne by racial and gender minorities, and other marginalized groups, as epistemic agents. The aim of this paper is to apply the notion of epistemic injustice to epistemic agents who, as a result of prejudice toward their social identity or structural position, are susceptible to epistemic injustices that have been neglected in the philosophical literature: idea appropriation and bullshitting. In the epistemic marketplace, speakers and writers are vulnerable to epistemic injustice when the credit for their ideas is taken by someone else who reaps a reputational boost as a result. Hearers and readers are victims of epistemic injustice when targeted by bullshitting – the practice of making assertions without regard for their accuracy, to attain the bullshitter’s aims, that exploits their limited access to the institutional resources required to interrogate and resist it.
First, we introduce the idea of epistemic injustice. Next, we explore the value of reputations and their management by social, cooperative creatures like us. Then, we explore why people practice idea appropriation and bullshitting, how these practices signal qualities and impact reputations, and why they are sometimes forms of epistemic injustice. Finally, we end with an exploration of how widespread idea appropriation and bullshitting impede the epistemic marketplace.
2. Some forms of epistemic injustice
The notion of epistemic injustice was introduced by Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Reference Fricker2007), a topic in the subfield of social epistemology. The primary idea is that epistemic injustice is a kind of “injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (27 – original emphasis). To illustrate, people are subject to different kinds of injustice relative to different aspects of their agency: one can be subject, for example, to economic injustice only if one is an economic agent. A fictional example of epistemic injustice used by Fricker is found in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird when a Black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of beating and raping a white woman in Maycomb County, Alabama. And yet, despite the fact that his attorney, Atticus Finch, gives robust evidence to corroborate Robinson’s claims of innocence, his testimony falls on the deaf ears of the jury who disregard it due to their prejudice toward his racial identity. This example highlights key aspects of epistemic injustice: it requires that an epistemic agent is treated as less epistemically robust than they otherwise would be due to prejudice toward their social identity or structural position.
Philosophers have largely applied the notion of epistemic injustice to historically disadvantaged groups whose members are, ceteris paribus, more vulnerable to epistemic injustice than members of other groups (Bartlett Reference Bartlett2022). However, epistemic injustice is not confined to such groups, but instead arguably applies under a greater range of conditions, especially for epistemic agents whose social identity or structural position makes them susceptible to it (Spencer Reference Spencer2022; Peet Reference Peet2017). Here, the notion of epistemic injustice can be extended to practices such as idea appropriation and bullshitting, where individuals with specific social identities or structural positions are liable to idea appropriation or manipulative bullshitting. Such practices are incentivized by reputational boosts – either as a result of the credit gained from idea appropriation or the ability to produce convincing bullshit – both of which signal intelligence and competence to potential cooperators. Before exploring these forms of epistemic injustice further, though, we should pause to explore the dynamics of reputational management in the next section.
3. Why reputations matter (and how we know)
Humans are highly cooperative creatures who have only partial knowledge of the beliefs and intentions of others. Cooperation is a robust survival tool – an evolutionary superpower – afforded to humans alone among animals. Most other cooperative species, such as beavers and wolves, only cooperate on a limited number of tasks with mates and family members. Humans cooperate, by contrast, with strangers on a wide range of tasks under the right social and epistemic conditions, among them that they believe cooperation to be valuable and that their partner is trustworthy. Unfortunately, humans also exploit each other, and so as a highly cooperative species we are susceptible to cheaters and free riders – those who violate norms for their own gain or take without contributing their fair share. Reputations are valuable, in part, as mitigation against the downsides of cooperation. As Sperber and Baumard write:
[Humans] depend for their survival and welfare on frequent and varied cooperation with others. In the short run, it would often be advantageous to cheat, that is, to take the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs. Cheating however may seriously compromise one’s reputation and one’s chances of being able to benefit from future cooperation. In the long run, cooperators who can be relied upon to act in a mutually beneficial manner are likely to do better in what may be called the “cooperation market” (Reference Sperber and Baumard2012: 495).
Here, we can appreciate why there are social pressures and incentives that discourage cheating and free riding. To be cheated makes one a sucker, and no one wants that. One way to mitigate cheating and free riding is reputation monitoring. Participation in the “cooperation market” is likely why people value their reputations so highly. Consider that many people would prefer “jail time, amputation of limbs, and death” to extreme reputational damage like acquiring a reputation as a Nazi or child molester (Vonash et al. Reference Vonash, Reynolds, Winegard and Baumeister2018: 604). Even kids as young as five are incentivized to protect their reputation by avoiding “cheating at the cost of losing a highly desirable prize” (Fu et al. Reference Fu, Heyman, Qian, Guo and Lee2016: 277). Good reputations facilitate cooperation (Henrich Reference Henrich2015) and mate choice (Miller Reference Miller2007). People avoid sharing “fake news” to protect their reputations (Altay et al. Reference Altay, Hacquin and Mercier2020). This evidence, taken together, reveals that people highly value a good reputation because it is highly prized among potential cooperation partners.
Signals is a tool for managing reputations. The theory that makes sense of these signals – namely signaling theory – was discovered independently both in evolutionary biology (Zahavi Reference Zahavi1975) and economics (Spence Reference Spence1973), counts some behavior as a signal of what would otherwise be opaque qualities that affect the behavior of others. Peacocks are a classic example: their colorful plumage is costly to grow and hampers predator avoidance, thereby signaling robust fitness to potential sexual partners. Engagement rings are another: genuine ones are expensive, and the fake ones do not fool jewelers – the expense acts as a costly signal of the giver’s sincere intent to marry, especially if the giver were poor or insincere. A stable signaling system has the following features:
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(1) Individuals have a quality hard to perceive directly that could be reliably signaled.
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(2) Observers would benefit from accurate information about that quality.
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(3) Without those signals, signalers could deceive observers about the quality, benefiting at the observers’ expense.
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(4) The cost of the signal must benefit the signaler, where the cost at the margin doesn’t exceed the benefit (Bird and Smith Reference Bird and Smith2005: 224).
Individuals use signals to convey information about valuable qualities that would otherwise be opaque to third parties: it isn’t apparent by looking at someone whether they are intelligent, and we thus need signals that would be hard to fake for those without the relevant qualities. Hence, the need for a stable signaling system that idea producers and consumers can use to publicize and learn of qualities that might otherwise go unrecognized and to boost their reputations.
It is worth highlighting that people distinguish between epistemic and moral reputations: the former is an agent’s reputation in an epistemic capacity, and the latter is an agent’s reputation in a moral capacity, especially their pro-social and trustworthy aspects (Altay et al. Reference Altay, Majima and Mercier2020). There are thus tradeoffs between epistemic and moral reputations, especially with respect to practices such as idea appropriation – one can improve their epistemic reputation by stealing clever ideas, but if detected, they risk significant damage to their moral reputation.
So, then, how do reputations and signals relate to epistemic injustice? Boosts to one’s epistemic reputation can incentivize practices such as idea appropriation and bullshitting, and in some cases, those practices rise to epistemic injustice depending on the social identity or structural position of the victim and the prejudice they face as a result. To better understand this, we first explore idea appropriation and bullshitting as forms of epistemic injustice in the next two sections.
4. Idea appropriation as epistemic injustice
Speakers and writers are epistemic producers. Within an epistemic marketplace, the quality of the ideas and knowledge they produce, as determined by the marketplace, can seriously impact their epistemic reputation. Since the quality of one’s epistemic reputation influences the degree to which potential cooperators view one as competent and thus worthy of cooperation, one’s epistemic reputation has weighty practical implications. We should thus expect there to be a strong temptation, especially when the risk of getting caught is low, to claim credit for the ideas of others – the practice of idea appropriation – as an avenue to boost one’s epistemic reputation. Idea appropriation is, roughly, the practice of (wrongly) attributing credit for an idea or concept to someone other than the agent who produced it, thus depriving the original speaker or writer of the reputational boost they rightfully deserve. People understand that credit for a good idea or concept can boost epistemic reputations, e.g., even small children understand the connection between epistemic production and reputation:
[Children] think it is bad to take someone else’s idea, even if you don’t take the credit yourself and instead give credit to someone else. These results [from several studies] support the view that children think it is bad to steal ideas by virtue of the negative influence such theft has on the originator of the ideas […] (Shaw and Olson Reference Shaw and Olson2015: 507 – my emphasis).
Although people can boost their epistemic reputation by appropriating the ideas of others, they face two risks in doing so. The first is that the act of appropriation can backfire if the idea they appropriated is deemed bad. The second is that their appropriation is discovered by others, resulting in a major hit to their moral reputation. As researchers who study idea appropriation explain:
[Someone] who presents an idea as having been acquired by themselves, by contrast with owing the idea to someone else, is deemed more competent—even in mundane situations when the idea is of no great import […] idea appropriate can backfire if the idea turns out to have been bad, in which case the [appropriator] is deemed less competent (Altay et al. Reference Altay, Majima and Mercier2020: 8 – my emphasis).
And the second risk of idea appropriation is taking a major hit to their moral reputation if one is caught. This highlights the reputational tradeoff idea appropriators face:
[Even] people who merely appropriate an idea by omitting to mention its social source damage their moral reputations and […] people who falsely attribute an idea to someone else damage their moral reputation less than those who appropriate it for themselves (Ibid., 8 – my emphasis).
People are inclined to punish those who engage in idea appropriation, even when there is little reputational harm to the wronged speaker or writer. The empirical evidence suggests that the motivation to punish idea appropriation, even when there are little to no opportunity costs to the original speaker or writer, is driven by aversion to attempts to boost one’s epistemic reputation on the cheap, so to speak. As researchers from a related set of studies explain:
[People] condemn plagiarism even in a case where the idea originator actually benefits from the act. This last finding provides the strongest demonstration that negative reactions to plagiarism go beyond notion of harm (monetary and reputational) to the idea originator […] our studies provide unique support for the notion that people condemn harmless plagiarism cases and that our false benefit mechanism [the impression by third parties that the plagiarizer would falsely improve their reputation] plays a key role in driving this effect (Silver and Shaw Reference Silver and Shaw2018: 217).
How does idea appropriation boost epistemic reputations? One path is signaling: appropriating a clever idea acts as a hard-to-fake signal of intelligence – taking credit for a good idea makes one appear competent to others, thereby signaling intelligence and creativity and conferring social prestige (Bird and Smith Reference Bird and Smith2005; Buccafusco and Sprigman Reference Buccafusco and Sprigman2010). Agents with qualities like intelligence and creativity must signal for that prestige because those qualities cannot be detected directly, are costly or hard to fake, and benefit both senders and receivers of that signal who are looking for fruitful cooperators.
This empirical evidence highlights that people value both epistemic and moral reputations: people are sensitive to the risk that idea appropriation will be detected and harm their moral reputation, typically only engaging in appropriation when they believe the risk to be low (Altay et al. Reference Altay, Majima and Mercier2020). Further, people who want to boost their reputation via idea appropriation would be more likely to target those more vulnerable to that practice due to their social identity or structural position, thus minimizing risk to their moral reputations – either because idea appropriation would be less likely to be detected or because detection would be less likely to invite reputational damage. Here are some examples:
BLACK MUSICIANS
Marty Smith is a music producer operating in the early 1950s American music industry. He regularly seeks out talented black musicians in the South, promising them modest payment and exposure if they sign contracts that transfer creative and publishing rights to him. He then pays white musicians to re-record and perform music written by black artists for a largely white audience, taking writing and production credits for himself. He targets black musicians because he knows that in this era, the combination of racial segregation, limited legal recourse, and the systematic dismissal of black artistic credibility means that any complaint or claim of authorship will be ignored or suppressed. The prejudice surrounding their racial identity ensures that the epistemic and reputational damage of idea appropriation falls entirely on them, while Marty absorbs the reputational benefits.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Rachel Carruthers is an esteemed biochemistry professor at a top-ranked research university. Her path to academic esteem is paved by appropriating the work of graduate students working in her laboratory. She targets bright graduate students exactly because their position in the supervisory hierarchy—dependent on her for letters of recommendation, publication credits, and career advancement—affords them little institutional recourse if she appropriates their work. She often gives her graduate students little to no credit, taking it for herself, even when she contributed nothing to the research.
BLACK MUSICIANS and GRADUATE STUDENTS are clear examples of idea appropriation. In the first example, Marty deserves no creative credit for the music he takes credit for, while giving none to the talented Black musicians who did the creative work in the first place. And the same holds for the second example, where Rachel takes credit for the intellectual work of her graduate students while contributing little to nothing herself.
The residual issue, then, is whether BLACK MUSICIANS and GRADUATE STUDENTS are in fact cases of epistemic injustice. They very clearly are. In the first case, Marty takes advantage of talented Black musicians not only because of their talent, but especially because their racial identity and the prejudice it generates in the early 1950s American music industry means that blowback from a discovery of idea appropriation is highly unlikely. Marty thus risks little to his moral reputation by appropriating the creative work of Black musicians to improve his epistemic reputation and enrich himself at their expense – the structural conditions of the era ensure that their complaints will go unheard. The same applies to GRADUATE STUDENTS: Rachel targets talented and eager graduate students precisely because the supervisory hierarchy of academia places them in a position of institutional subordination – almost wholly dependent on her for opportunities to publish, letters of recommendation, and career advancement – affording them very few avenues by which to contest the idea appropriation. The social identity of graduate student, with its attendant credibility deficits and power asymmetries, is what makes them systematically vulnerable to idea appropriation, making Rachel’s exploitation of them an epistemic injustice rather than merely an opportunistic wrong.
The second reason is the robust signal conveyed by unacknowledged and unpunished idea appropriation to other members of society: that those at the margins who create or produce new ideas and knowledge do not deserve, or deserve less, reputational credit, and other benefits like financial rewards, due to the prejudice surrounding their social identity or structural position. Not only do such signals, especially when received by large swaths of the population, further incentivize the practice of idea appropriation, but they reinforce the idea that epistemic agents at the margins are lesser epistemic agents and thereby incentivize further epistemic injustice. Another form of epistemic injustice occurs on the hearer or reader side that we examine next.
5. Bullshit as epistemic injustice
Individuals are often hearers and readers who believe and act on ideas and knowledge produced by writers and speakers. And it is in this capacity that they are subject to bullshitting – a practice whose conceptual foundations were laid by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt:
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. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says (Reference Frankfurt2005: 14 – my emphasis).
The rough idea is that bullshitting can be distinguished from truth-telling and lying in that the latter practices are defined in relation to the truth: truth-telling is the practice of conveying the truth as understood by the agent, while lying is the practice of asserting what one believes to be false. There is thus a deep sense in which the bullshitter lacks any determinate relationship to the truth, compared to the truth-teller and the liar. For the purposes of this paper, the concern is with bullshitting as a practice rather than bullshit as a textual product, since it is the bullshitter’s active indifference toward inquiry, and the harm that indifference inflicts on its victims, that generates the conditions for epistemic injustice.
Frankfurt’s influential account has been refined and extended in the subsequent philosophical literature. An important clarification concerns Frankfurt’s claim that bullshitting is marked by a simple indifference to the truth or falsity of one’s assertions. Fallis and Stokke (Reference Fallis and Stokke2017) argue that this framing is too narrow and that bullshitting is better understood as indifference toward inquiry itself – the cooperative enterprise of finding the truth through the good faith exchange of reasons and evidence – rather than mere indifference to the truth of individual assertions. On this expanded view, a bullshitter can care whether what they say happens to be true and still be bullshitting if they take no responsibility for the accuracy of their assertions as contributions to a shared epistemic project. This crucial refinement means that bullshitting and lying are neither mutually exclusive nor equivalent – most lies are not cases of bullshitting, and most bullshitting is not lying (Fallis and Stokke Reference Fallis and Stokke2017). Indeed, a bullshitter might even wish that what they say were true and still be bullshitting if they fail to take responsibility for whether it actually is, thereby making their assertions epistemically irresponsible rather than deceptive (Heffer Reference Heffer2020).
A further refinement comes from the distinction between hard and soft bullshit that is hinted at in Frankfurt’s work but made explicit elsewhere (Hicks et al. Reference Hicks, Humphries and Sloan2024). Hard bullshit occurs when the bullshitter actively intends to mislead their audience about their own agenda, thus sliding close to lying in its deliberateness. Soft bullshit, by contrast, occurs when the speaker simply takes no responsibility for the accuracy of their assertions, without any determinate intent to deceive. It is soft bullshit, in particular, that is most relevant to the epistemic injustice argument developed here. Unlike lying or hard bullshitting, where truth indirectly shapes the content of the deception, soft bullshit lacks any stable relationship, even negative, to truth that could be probed or disconfirmed, making it especially resistant to the epistemic vigilance of vulnerable knowers who lack the institutional resources to interrogate it effectively.
To add to the bullshitting as epistemic injustice picture, the ability to produce compelling bullshit is considered by onlookers – perhaps wrongly, as I discuss below – as an honest signal of the speaker or writer’s intelligence, and thereby boosts the epistemic reputation of the bullshitter. There is thus a strong incentive, when the risk of detection and exposure is relatively low, to produce convincing bullshit to improve one’s epistemic reputation. An honest signal of intelligence has survival value in that it conveys genetic quality and fitness to potential mates (McKeown Reference McKeown2013) and facilitates the manipulation and influencing of others (Whiten Reference Whiten2018). With regard to bullshit production, we have empirical data showing that the ability to produce plausible bullshit is taken as an honest signal of intelligence by onlookers:
[Skilled] bullshit producers are perceived by others as highly intelligent. From the perspective of navigating social systems, being perceived as intelligent may be just as valuable to an agent as actually being intelligent, as this perception may afford one opportunities to obtain status and form relationships as well as have greater trust placed in their competence (Turpin et al. Reference Turpin, Kara-Yakoubian, Walker, Walker, Fugelsang and Stolz2021: 8 – my emphasis).
And,
We find that those more skilled in producing satisfying and seemingly accurate bullshit score higher on measures of cognitive ability and are perceived by others as more intelligent. Overall, the ability to produce satisfying bullshit may serve to assist individuals in navigating social systems, both as an energetically efficient strategy for impressing others and as an honest signal of one’s intelligence (ibid., 9).
Intelligence is a quality that is hard to observe directly, yet one that would benefit the quality holder to signal and potential cooperators to know about – there is real value in distinguishing competent from incompetent cooperators. There are, then, robust incentives to signal one’s intelligence by producing convincing bullshit to boost one’s epistemic reputation. The issue here is how the production of compelling bullshit counts as a form of epistemic injustice: hearers and readers who lack the institutional resources to interrogate and resist it are more often easier targets for bullshitters relative to their peers.
A couple of objections arise here that are worth addressing. The first is that the Turpin et al. finding may perhaps better reflect the relationship between intelligence and linguistic facility more generally, rather than anything distinctive about bullshit production per se – that is, observers are responding to vocabulary, fluency, and coherence rather than to the bullshitting itself. And that may well be true, especially since the authors did not run a study to rule out linguistic ability as a confound. However, the issue is beside the point: what matters for the argument is not whether bullshitting is an independent signal of intelligence, but whether it functions that way in the eyes of observers. If convincing bullshit is perceived as intelligent – whether as an independent signal or as an indirect signal of underlying linguistic ability – the reputational incentive to produce it follows directly.
The second objection holds that there is nothing clearly distinctive about bullshitting compared to, for example, a compelling lie with regard to epistemic injustice. On this view, the intention of the bullshitter is irrelevant to epistemic injustice simply because whether they are bullshitters or liars, the result would be identical: voters, hearers and readers, and epistemically vulnerable agents will suffer the same costs as a result of bullshitting or lying – call this the no-difference objection.
Fortunately, the no-difference objection fails because it assumes that because bullshitting is only differentiated from lying based on the bullshitter’s intentions – that is, whether they aim to conceal the truth or are indifferent to it. This assumption is wrong, and the distinction between hard and soft bullshit helps clarify why (Hicks et al. Reference Hicks, Humphries and Sloan2024). Hard bullshit occurs when the bullshitter actively intends to mislead their audience about their own agenda, thereby sliding uncomfortably close to lying – and it is here where the no-difference objection has the most bite. Soft bullshit, by contrast, occurs when the bullshitter takes no responsibility for the accuracy of their assertions whatsoever (Fallis and Stokke Reference Fallis and Stokke2017). This produces a distinctive epistemic harm that lying does not: the normal tools of epistemic vigilance – checking, seeking corroboration, probing for inconsistencies – are systematically undermined because the bullshitter’s assertions are not organized around any stable (even negative) relationship to the truth that could be used to interrogate the salient claims. It is precisely this indeterminacy that makes soft bullshit particularly harmful to epistemically vulnerable knowers who lack the institutional resources required to get traction against assertions with no determinate truth conditions to probe. The no-difference objection, then, mistakes similarity of outcome for identity of mechanism. Bullshitting and lying may sometimes produce comparable epistemic harm, but they do so in ways that are structurally distinct and that matter for epistemic injustice.
For example, Sally is worried that the local politician is trying to fool her and other voters with a heartbreaking story about his abusive parents. Because the politician is a soft bullshitter – indifferent to the truth of his assertions rather than carefully engineering a false impression – his childhood story is a compelling, indeterminate mix of accurate and inaccurate claims, none of which he takes responsibility for. Sally could verify parts of his story – maybe his city of origin, the names of his parents, and the like – and those verified elements would wrongly lend his bullshit story credibility. This is precisely what makes soft bullshit epistemically pernicious: unlike a narrative comprised solely of lies, where epistemic vigilance has a lot of targets to probe and disconfirm, soft bullshit offers no such foothold. The politician’s indifference to truth means there is no targeted false impression to unravel – only a fog of assertions that partially verify and partially don’t, leaving epistemically vulnerable knowers like Sally without the institutional resources to resist it. The result is that epistemic agents who lack the institutional resources to identify and interrogate bullshit, and who are more likely to be targeted by it due to their social identity or structural position, are more susceptible to believing and acting on his story because soft bullshit is specifically resistant to the kind of verification they have access to. Here are a couple of examples:
POLITICIAN
George Santos is a politician running for re-election in a poor and minority district. George excels at using anecdotes about his life—accurate and fictional alike—to convince the voters in his district that he best represents their interests. George has been re-elected many times due to his bullshitting abilities, at the expense of his constituents who lack the institutional resources to effectively interrogate and resist his compelling but epistemically irresponsible assertions.
CULT LEADER
Keith Raniere is a cult leader who teaches his followers that he has created a path to avoid death that leads to “heaven on Earth.” He has grown the ranks of the cult via his bullshitting abilities, deliberately targeting those from poor, uneducated, and marginalized groups—people often ignored by government entities and elite institutions, and who consequently lack the institutional resources and access to expertise required to effectively interrogate and resist his epistemically irresponsible claims.
POLITICIAN and CULT LEADER are clear examples of bullshitting. In both examples, George and Keith employ compelling bullshit to convince constituents and members that they should vote for them or contribute money to their cause. A major aspect of their success is their ability to use bullshitting to manipulate and exploit epistemically vulnerable agents as a mere means to an end, leaving those targeted without the epistemic foothold required to recognize or resist the manipulation.
The remaining issue, then, is whether POLITICIAN and CULT LEADER are cases of epistemic injustice. One might object that the poor and undereducated do not constitute a social identity stable enough or subject to sufficient prejudice to qualify and that their epistemic vulnerability is merely local and temporary rather than systematic. This objection, however, proves too much. Fricker’s own framework makes clear that epistemic injustice does not require a globally or permanently marginalized social identity – only that, in a given context, falling into an identity category or structural position generates a prejudice-driven credibility deficit sufficient to wrong someone in their capacity as a knower. As Fricker illustrates:
Consider the following case […] There is a large international conference dominated by research scientists and some historians of science, with only a smattering of philosophers of science. It becomes clear that the philosophers of science are regarded by the majority of the other delegates as out of touch with the realities of scientific practice, so much so that they are, frankly, held in some intellectual disdain. In this context, it would seem, simply falling into the identity category ‘philosopher of science’ renders one’s word likely to be dismissed as the vain speculations of an out-of-touch academic. Thus there are genuine cases of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit [necessary for testimonial epistemic injustice] going on here (ibid., 28-9—my emphasis).
If philosophers of science can suffer epistemic injustice in virtue of a contextually operative identity category – despite being otherwise privileged – then poor and undereducated voters, systematically targeted by bullshitters who exploit their limited institutional resources and structural disadvantages, qualify straightforwardly as victims of epistemic injustice.
Many, though not all, instances of bullshitting are epistemically unjust. The claim here is not that poor and uneducated voters, and members of marginalized groups, are somehow more gullible or epistemically deficient than others – indeed, the empirical research on gullibility does not support any straightforward connection between susceptibility to bullshit and social identity or education level (Blötner and Bergold Reference Blötner and Bergold2023). The injustice lies, instead, in the fact that such agents, even when their epistemic vigilance is triggered, typically lack the institutional resources – access to expertise, legal resources, fact-checking infrastructure, and platforms for redress – required to act effectively on their suspicions and to disincentivize others from taking advantage of them. This structural inability to respond to bullshitting, rather than heightened susceptibility to being fooled by it, is what makes bullshitting epistemically unjust when directed at those in structurally disadvantaged positions. Such agents are exploited for the benefit of bullshitters. And as we explore in the last section, idea appropriation and bullshitting encumber the epistemic marketplace by amplifying epistemic injustice as a negative externality.
6. Hampering the epistemic marketplace
Throughout the paper until now, we have focused on idea appropriation and bullshitting as epistemic injustices impacting individual speakers/writers and hearers/readers. When we situate these practices in the wider epistemic marketplace, however, their significance expands considerably by constituting serious negative externalities that not only harm individual victims of epistemic injustice but also degrade the epistemic marketplace as a whole.
To engage in practices such as idea appropriation and bullshitting degrades epistemic norms, even if only at the margins, which act like guardrails against epistemic injustice – even if a single agent isn’t responsible for the weakening of those norms, they still shouldn’t contribute to collectively harmful activities caused by a group “where individual inputs into the harmful action are negligible’: helping a group of sharpshooters kill a child would be wrong, even if the child would die anyway (Brennan Reference Brennan2018: 4). This holds too of practices like idea appropriation and bullshitting that, even if only at the margins, undercuts and weakens the norms that guard against negative epistemic externalities.
With respect to widespread idea appropriation in the marketplace, the negative externalities should be obvious. Just as in a society without intellectual property protections, intellectual innovation would be diminished at the margins, if not more so: if the chance of receiving credit for one’s intellectual innovation is diminished, then ceteris paribus, so are the incentives to produce it. And even if idea appropriation isn’t a widespread practice, appropriation by high-status speakers or writers may alone be enough to dampen innovation. The same applies to widespread bullshitting: it erodes the trust that hearers and readers place in the assertions of others, forcing them to invest more time and resources into investigating compelling claims to determine whether they are bullshit, and at worst, leaving them unable to trust others as much as they would in a marketplace less saturated with convincing bullshitting.
Other people are also less likely to trust hearers and readers who have previously been taken in by convincing bullshit, especially because the empirical evidence reveals that many people who are good at producing bullshit are often not themselves susceptible to it (Blötner and Bergold Reference Blötner and Bergold2023). As we know from the section on idea appropriation, one can take a hit to their epistemic reputation if they adopt or take credit for a bad idea or concept because it reflects poorly on their intellectual abilities (Altay et al. Reference Altay, Majima and Mercier2020: 8). Consuming convincing bullshit, if recognized as such, hurts the epistemic reputation of the hearers and readers taken in by it.
In either case, idea appropriation and bullshitting as negative externalities in the epistemic marketplace not only hamper innovation and trust for speakers/writers and hearers/readers, but they also carry the added cost of producing emergent epistemic injustice: within a society where idea appropriation and bullshitting are widespread, there will be a plausible increase, even if only at the margins, of cases of epistemic injustice where those in structurally disadvantaged positions face greater exposure to idea appropriation and bullshitting with fewer institutional resources to resist it. This partly results from the fact that, as social and cooperative creatures, what people are ‘able to know is inextricably tied to […] the epistemic commons – the stock of facts, ideas, and perspectives that are alive in society’s discourse’ (Joshi Reference Joshi2021: 2, Hardin Reference Hardin1969). These practices generate negative externalities and encourage epistemic injustice toward those least equipped to resist and disincentivize it.
7. Conclusion
To conclude, idea appropriation and bullshitting are forms of epistemic injustice – that is, they are practices that wrong agents in their capacity as knowers. When someone appropriates an idea, they deprive the originator of the reputational credit that belongs to them as a result of their cognitive labor, while exploiting the structural conditions that make certain producers more vulnerable to deprivation. The wrong is both reputational and epistemic: the appropriator treats the idea producer as a mere instrument for their own gain rather than as an agent that deserves for their creativity and cognitive labor. When someone bullshits their audience, they commit epistemic injustice by treating them as a mere means to an end that exploits their limited access to the institutional resources required to interrogate and resist compelling but epistemically irresponsible assertions. Both practices are incentivized by reputational gains, generate negative externalities in the marketplace, and, when widespread, corrode the epistemic commons on which we all depend to navigate our social and political lives. Addressing epistemic injustice is thus a precondition for a healthy epistemic marketplace.
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