Another philosopher to take up the issue of bullshit, G. A. Cohen, notes that a lot of bullshit—particularly of the academic variety—is meaningless and so cloaked in rhetoric and convoluted language that no one can even critique it. Thus for Cohen, bullshit is “unclarifiable unclarity.” Not only is the bullshitter’s prose unclear, but the ideas underlying it are so ill-formed that it cannot possibly be clarified. Cohen suggests a test for unclarity: If you can negate a sentence and its meaning doesn’t change, it’s bullshit. “Shakespeare’s Prospero is ultimately the fulcrum of an epistemic tragedy, precisely because of his failure to embrace the hermeneutics of the transfinite.”What these notions of bullshit have in common is that the speaker aims to persuade or impress, rather than to lead the listener toward the truth. The speaker may do this with active obfuscation, or simply by talking nonsense to conceal the fact that he or she doesn’t actually know anything about the subject at hand.
Yes, much of academic writing -- at least in philosophy -- appears to me to be a word salad. It's even worse on the net with many men (and it's always men) trying to pose by stringing together words that, as a collective whole, simply don't appear to have any meaning. I find it infuriating and I don't tend to be polite to these people.
