It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false.
[2] In business and management, guidance for comprehending, recognizing, acting on and preventing bullshit, are proposed for stifling the production and spread of this form of misrepresentation in the workplace, media and society.
[5] The word is generally used in a depreciatory sense, but it may imply a measure of respect for language skills or frivolity, among various other benign usages.
In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of bullshit as related to, but distinct from, lying;[6] the liar tells untruth, the bullshitter aims to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true—it may be.
"Bull", meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century, while the term "bullshit" has been used as early as 1915 in British[8] and American[9] slang and came into popular usage only during World War II.
Although there is no confirmed etymological connection, these older meanings are synonymous with the modern expression "bull", generally considered and used as a contraction of "bullshit".
[10] "Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy.
During the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, the Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner ran a radio advertisement that began with an actor exclaiming: "Bullshit!
He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with Ludwig Wittgenstein's disdain of "non-sense" talk and with the popular concept of a "bull session", in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment.
He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon the (at that time) growing influence of postmodernism and anti-realism in academia[12] as well as situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.
Indeed, Sokal's aim in creating it was to show that the "postmodernist" editors who accepted his paper for publication could not distinguish nonsense from sense, and thereby by implication that their field was "bullshit".
[16] This is particularly in response to terminology (see Hallucination (artificial intelligence)) that had been used to describe cases where ChatGPT would utter falsehoods (such as making up references).
[6][18] University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom and professor Jevin West began a college course on "Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World".
According to researchers from Queen’s University in Belfast (2008): “along with a pervasive and balkanized social media ecosystem and high internet immersion, public life provides abundant opportunities to bullshit and lie on a scale we could have scarcely credited 30 years ago”.
"[24] Given that much of the early scientific work on bullshit focused on those more likely to fall for it (i.e., the "bullshittees"), some researchers have turned their attention to examining those more likely to produce it (i.e., the "bullshitters").
[27][28] Outside of the academic world, among natural speakers of North American English, as an interjection or adjective, bullshit conveys general displeasure, an objection to, or points to unfairness within, some state of affairs.