Bullshit philosophy

Academic journals and peer review serve dual roles in the academic ecosystem: advancing knowledge and advancing careers. This duality can lead researchers to employ strategic opportunism to game the system through a variety of means ranging from fraud to plagiarism. This paper highlights another strategy that can seem instrumentally rational in the face of these pressures: bullshitting. With respect to philosophical research, such an approach is especially troublesome because the bullshitter takes advantage of the degree to which philosophical practice, in aiming at understanding, relies on the principle of charity. As I demonstrate in this paper, this extension of charity to others is not just something we do for moral reasons, it has an important epistemic purpose as well, one closely tied to an epistemic aim of philosophy. In undermining charity, the bullshitter undermines the philosophical enterprise itself. Bullshit philosophical inquiry thus risks leaving us both morally and epistemically worse off.