Dunkin DonutsMy nameInstitutionCourseInstructorDate.docx

Dunkin Donuts
My name
Institution
Course
Instructor
Date
Introduction
Consumer Reference
Feasibility Test
Market Scope
Testing and Customer Acceptance
Staffing
Roll Out Plan
CUSTOMER PREFERENCE
Market research and analysis
Competitor strategies

There is need to do market analysis so as to understand further
what the customers want. Without market research, products and
services offered will be null and void. Market research will also
help understand what kind of product the customer and it is not
being offered by competitors. It helps the business understand
the strategies of competitors. The business will find ways of
outperforming competitors based on what the customers prefer.
3
FEASIBILITY TEST
Costs of starting the business
Profit projections
It is important to perform a feasibility test so to find out how
much the business will cost. This the point that determines
whether it is worth investing in the business. This where a
forecast will be made to see projections. How long will it take
the business to realize profits.
4
MARKET SCOPE
Customers explore new brands
Implement new technologies
Make informed decisions
Undertaking market scope is to find the rational consumers who
are keen on trying to explore new brands in the market. This

phase helps in implementing new techniques of how to to do
business. It will assist the company in making informed
decisions hence reducing customer loss. It enables the company
to meet customer demands effectively. Satisfied customers will
ensure that the business keep growing.
5
CUSTOMER ACCEPTANCE
The ultimate goal for every study is to answer key questions and
provide up-to-date and reliable information to support the
client’s strategic business planning.
Pricing strategies
The best way for a business to penetrate the market is if the
customers accept the products and services that are being
offered by the business. Here the business will set prices that
are favorable to the customers. Not too high to push away
consumers and not too low to avoid making losses.
6
DUNKIN’S STAFFING
Employ qualified employees
Employees who share the visions of the business
Clearly state roles of each employee
Services will not perform themselves. A business needs
employees to attend to customers. A business needs qualified

employees who relate easily to customers and work faster to
meet the requests of customers. Good employees will the reason
customers keep coming to buy from the business. If the area is
full youths, the business needs youths who can easily
understand the demands of customers.
7
ROLL OUT
Identify your niche and make sure the uniqueness of your
product stands out.
Brand the product well in order to attract new customers as
well.
Perform a SWOT analysis and monitor your products’ life cycle.
After all factors have been considered and observed, it is time
to roll out the business. The best to win customers when the
business becomes operational is to brand the business. Unique
branding will draw customers away from competitors. The
business needs to do a SWOT analysis and monitor the lifecycle
of the products. The business needs to find a suitable location to
set up the business. This is where the business finds out if the
customers are satisfied with the services being offered.
8
Conclusion
offer unique services
Meet the demands of customers
Employ reasonable prices

In conclusion, for a business to be a success the level of
attracting customers should be high. The business must employ
better strategies that will run competitors out of business. The
best strategies is offering unique products, reasonable prices on
products. Employees should be qualified and easily understand
the preferences of customers.
9
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) Chapter 3: Why
Do Those in
Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?
In this chapter, I’d like to start exploring some of the moral and
psychological
effects of being trapped inside a bullshit job.
In particular, I want to ask the obvious question: Why is this
even a problem? Or
to phrase it more precisely: Why does having a pointless job so
regularly cause
people to be miserable? On the face of it, it’s not obvious that it
should. After all,
we’re talking about people who are effectively being paid—
often very good money
—to do nothing. One might imagine that those being paid to do
nothing would
consider themselves fortunate, especially when they are more or
less left to
themselves. But while every now and then I did hear testimonies

from those who
said they couldn’t believe their luck in landing such a position,
the remarkable
thing is how very few of them there were.1 Many, in fact,
seemed perplexed by
their own reaction, unable to understand why their situation left
them feeling so
worthless or depressed. Indeed, the fact that there was no clear
explanation for
their feelings—no story they could tell themselves about the
nature of their
situation and what was wrong about it—often contributed to
their misery. At least
a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker
forced to sit for seven
and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18
an hour, or a
junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact
same seminar on
innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a
year, is just
confused.
In an earlier book about debt, I wrote about the phenomenon of
“moral
confusion.” I took as my example the fact that throughout
human history, most
people seem to have agreed both that paying back one’s debts
was the essence of
morality and that moneylenders were evil. While the rise of
bullshit jobs is a
comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar
moral
embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to
assume that human
beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to

find themselves a
situation where they can get the most benefit for the least
expenditure of time
and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially
if we are talking
about such matters in the abstract. (“We can’t just give poor
people handouts!
Then they won’t have any incentive to look for work!”) On the
other hand, our
own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends
to contradict
these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and
react to
situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would
predict. The only
reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials,
these theories
about human nature are wrong.
In this chapter, I don’t just want to ask why people are so
unhappy doing what
seems to them meaningless make-work, but to think more
deeply about what that
unhappiness can tell us about what people are and what they are
basically about.
Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory page !1
ABOUT ONE YOUNG MAN APPARENTLY HANDED A
SINECURE WHO
NONETHELESS FOUND HIMSELF UNABLE TO HANDLE
THE SITUATION
I will begin with a story. The following is the tale of a young

man named Eric,
whose first experience of the world of work was of a job that
proved absolutely,
even comically, pointless.
Eric: I’ve had many, many awful jobs, but the one that was
undoubtedly pure,
liquid bullshit was my first “professional job” postgraduation, a
dozen years ago. I
was the first in my family to attend university, and due to a
profound naïveté
about the purpose of higher education, I somehow expected that
it would open up
vistas of hitherto-unforeseen opportunity.
Instead, it offered graduate training schemes at
PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG,
etc. I preferred to sit on the dole for six months using my
graduate library
privileges to read French and Russian novels before the dole
forced me to attend
an interview which, sadly, led to a job.
That job involved working for a large design firm as its
“Interface Administrator.”
The Interface was a content management system—an intranet
with graphical
user interface, basically—designed to enable this company’s
work to be shared
across its seven offices around the UK.
Eric soon discovered that he was hired only because of a
communication problem
in the organization. In other words, he was a duct taper: the
entire computer
system was necessary only because the partners were unable to

pick up the phone
and coordinate with one another:
Eric: The firm was a partnership, with each office managed by
one partner. All of
them seem to have attended one of three private schools and the
same design
school (the Royal College of Art). Being unbelievably
competitive fortysomething
public schoolboys, they often tried to outcompete one another to
win bids, and on
more than one occasion, two different offices had found
themselves arriving at
the same client’s office to pitch work and having to hastily
combine their bids in
the parking lot of some dismal business park. The Interface was
designed to make
the company supercollaborative, across all of its offices, to
ensure that this (and
other myriad fuckups) didn’t happen again, and my job was to
help develop it,
run it, and sell it to the staff.
The problem was, it soon became apparent that Eric wasn’t even
really a duct
taper. He was a box ticker: one partner had insisted on the
project, and, rather 1
In earlier chapters, the author proposed categories of bullshit
jobs. A “duct taper” is someone assigned to 1
inadequately repair something that was poorly designed in the
first place, while a box ticker is someone
assigned to complete forms confirming that things that didn’t
need doing have been done. —GH

than argue with him, the others pretended to agree. Then they
did everything in
their power to make sure it didn’t work.
Eric: I should have realized that this was one partner’s idea that
no one else
actually wanted to implement. Why else would they be paying a
twenty-one-year-
old history graduate with no IT experience to do this? They’d
bought the cheapest
software they could find, from a bunch of absolute crooks, so it
was buggy, prone
to crashing, and looked like a Windows 3.1 screen saver. The
entire workforce
was paranoid that it was designed to monitor their productivity,
record their
keystrokes, or flag that they were torrenting porn on the
company internet, and
so they wanted nothing to do with it. As I had absolutely no
background in coding
or software development, there was very little I could do to
improve the thing, so
I was basically tasked with selling and managing a badly
functioning, unwanted
turd. After a few months, I realized that there was very little for
me to do at all
most days, aside from answer a few queries from confused
designers wanting to
know how to upload a file, or search for someone’s email on the
address book.
The utter pointlessness of his situation soon led to subtle—and
then, increasingly

unsubtle—acts of rebellion:
Eric: I started arriving late and leaving early. I extended the
company policy of “a
pint on Friday lunchtime” into “pints every lunchtime.” I read
novels at my desk.
I went out for lunchtime walks that lasted three hours. I almost
perfected my
French reading ability, sitting with my shoes off with a copy of
Le Monde and a
Petit Robert. I tried to quit, and my boss offered me a £2,600
raise, which I
reluctantly accepted. They needed me precisely because I didn’t
have the skills to
implement something that they didn’t want to implement, and
they were willing
to pay to keep me. (Perhaps one could paraphrase Marx’s
Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: to forestall their fears
of alienation from
their own labor, they had to sacrifice me up to a greater
alienation from potential
human growth.)
As time went on, Eric became more and more flagrant in his
defiance, hoping he
could find something he could do that might actually cause him
to be fired. He
started showing up to work drunk and taking paid “business
trips” for
nonexistent meetings:
Eric: A colleague from the Edinburgh office, to whom I had
poured out my woes
when drunk at the annual general meeting, started to arrange
phony meetings

with me, once on a golf course near Gleneagles, me hacking at
the turf in
borrowed golf shoes two sizes too large. After getting away
with that, I started
arranging fictional meetings with people in the London office.
The firm would put
me up in a nicotine-coated room in the St. Athans in
Bloomsbury, and I would
meet old London friends for some good old-fashioned all-day
drinking in Soho
pubs, which often turned into all-night drinking in Shoreditch.
More than once, I
returned to my office the following Monday in last
Wednesday’s work shirt. I’d
long since stopped shaving, and by this point, my hair looked
like it was robbed
from a Zeppelin roadie. I tried on two more occasions to quit,
but both times my
boss offered me more cash. By the end, I was being paid a
stupid sum for a job
that, at most, involved me answering the phone twice a day. I
eventually broke
down on the platform of Bristol Temple Meads train station one
late summer’s
afternoon. I’d always fancied seeing Bristol, and so I decided to
“visit” the Bristol
office to look at “user take-up.” I actually spent three days
taking MDMA at an
anarcho-syndicalist house party in St. Pauls, and the
dissociative comedown
made me realize how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a

state of utter
purposelessness.
After heroic efforts, Eric did finally manage to get himself
replaced:
Eric: Eventually, responding to pressure, my boss hired a junior
fresh out of a
computer science degree to see if some improvements could be
made to our
graphical user interface. On this kid’s first day at work, I wrote
him a list of what
needed to be done—and then immediately wrote my resignation
letter, which I
posted under my boss’s door when he took his next vacation,
surrendering my
last paycheck over the telephone in lieu of the statutory notice
period. I flew that
same week to Morocco to do very little in the coastal town of
Essaouira. When I
came back, I spent the next six months living in a squat,
growing my own
vegetables on three acres of land. I read your Strike! piece when
it first came out.
It might have been a revelation for some that capitalism creates
unnecessary jobs
in order for the wheels to merely keep on turning, but it wasn’t
to me.
The remarkable thing about this story is that many would
consider Eric’s a dream
job. He was being paid good money to do nothing. He was also
almost completely
unsupervised. He was given respect and every opportunity to
game the system.
Yet despite all that, it gradually destroyed him.

Why?
To a large degree, I think, this is really a story about social
class. Eric was a young
man from a working-class background—a child of factory
workers, no less—fresh
out of college and full of expectations, suddenly confronted
with a jolting
introduction to the “real world.” Reality, in this instance,
consisted of the fact that
(a) while middle-aged executives can be counted on to simply
assume that any
twentysomething white male will be at least something of a
computer whiz (even
if, as in this case, he had no computer training of any kind), and
(b) might even
grant someone like Eric a cushy situation if it suited their
momentary purposes,
(c) they basically saw him as something of a joke. Which his
job almost literally
was. His presence in the company was very close to a practical
joke some
designers were playing on one another.
Even more, what drove Eric crazy was the fact there was simply
no way he could
construe his job as serving any sort of purpose. He couldn’t
even tell himself he
was doing it to feed his family; he didn’t have one yet. Coming
from a background
where most people took pride in making, maintaining, and
fixing things, or

anyway felt that was the sort of thing people should take pride
in, he had
assumed that going to university and moving into the
professional world would
mean doing the same sorts of thing on a grander, even more
meaningful, scale.
Instead, he ended up getting hired precisely for what he wasn’t
able to do. He
tried to just resign. They kept offering him more money. He
tried to get himself
fired. They wouldn’t fire him. He tried to rub their faces in it,
to make himself a
parody of what they seemed to think he was. It didn’t make the
slightest bit of
difference.
To get a sense of what was really happening here, let us imagine
a second history
major—we can refer to him as anti-Eric—a young man of a
professional
background but placed in exactly the same situation. How might
anti-Eric have
behaved differently? Well, likely as not, he would have played
along with the
charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms
of self-
annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate
social capital,
connections that would eventually allow him to move on to
better things. He
would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very
project of
professional advancement would have given him a sense of
purpose. But such

attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from
professional
backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age.
Eric, who had not
been trained to act and think this way, couldn’t bring himself to
do it. As a result,
he ended up, for a time, at least, in a squat growing tomatoes.2
concerning the experience of falseness and purposelessness at
the core of bullshit
jobs, and the importance now felt of conveying the experience
of falseness and
purposelessness to youth
In a deeper way, Eric’s story brings together almost everything
that those with
bullshit jobs say is distressing about their situation. It’s not just
the
purposelessness— though certainly, it’s that. It’s also the
falseness. I’ve already
mentioned the indignation telemarketers feel when they are
forced to try to trick
or pressure people into doing something they think is against
their best interests.
This is a complicated feeling. We don’t even really have a name
for it. When we
think of scams, after all, we think of grifters, confidence artists;
they are easy to
see as romantic figures, rebels living by their wits, as well as
admirable because
they have achieved a certain form of mastery. This is why they
make acceptable
heroes in Hollywood movies. A confidence artist could easily
take delight in what
she’s doing. But being forced to scam someone is altogether
different. In such

circumstances, it’s hard not to feel you’re ultimately in the
same situation as the
person you’re scamming: you’re both being pressured and
manipulated by your
employer, only in your case, with the added indignity that
you’re also betraying
the trust of someone whose side you should be on. One might
imagine the
feelings sparked by most bullshit jobs would be very different.
After all, if the
employee is scamming anyone, it’s his employer, and he’s doing
it with his
employer’s full consent. But somehow, this is precisely what
many report to be so
disturbing about the situation. You don’t even have the
satisfaction of knowing
you’re putting something over on someone. You’re not even
living your own lie.
Most of the time, you’re not even quite living somebody else’s
lie, either. Your job
is more like a boss’s unzippered fly that everyone can see but
also knows better
than to mention.
If anything, this appears to compound the sense of
purposelessness.
Perhaps anti-Eric would, indeed, have found a way to turn
around that
purposelessness and seen himself as in on the joke; perhaps if
he were a real go-

getter, he’d have used his administrative skills to effectively
take over the office;
but even children of the rich and powerful often find this
difficult to pull off. The
following testimony gives a sense of the moral confusion they
can often feel:
Rufus: I got the job because my dad was a Vice President at the
company. I was
charged with handling complaints. Given that it was (in name) a
biomedical
company, all returned product was considered a biohazard. So I
was able to
spend a lot of time in a room all by myself, with no supervision
and essentially no
work to do. The bulk of my memory of the job involves either
playing
Minesweeper or listening to podcasts.
I did spend hours poring over spreadsheets, tracking changes on
Word
documents, etc., but I guarantee you that I contributed nothing
to this company. I
spent every minute at the office wearing headphones. I paid
only the smallest
attention possible to the people around me and the “work” I was
assigned.
I hated every minute working there. In fact, more days than not,
I went home
early from work, took two- or three-hour lunch breaks, spent
hours “in the
bathroom” (wandering around), and nobody ever said a word. I
was compensated
for every minute.

Thinking back on it, it was kind of a dream job.
Retrospectively, Rufus understands that he got a ridiculously
sweet deal—he
seems rather baffled, actually, why he hated the job so much at
the time. But
surely he couldn’t have been entirely unaware of how his
coworkers must have
seen him: boss’s kid getting paid to goof off; feels he’s too
good to talk to them;
supervisors clearly informed “hands off.” It could hardly have
evoked warm
feelings.
Still, this story raises another question: If Rufus’s father didn’t
actually expect his
son to do the job, why did he insist he take it in the first place?
He could
presumably just as easily have given his son an allowance, or,
alternately,
assigned him a job that needed doing, coached him on his
duties, and taken some
minimal effort to make sure those tasks were actually carried
out. Instead, he
seems to have felt it was more important for Rufus to be able to
say he had a job
than to actually acquire work experience.
That’s puzzling. It’s all the more puzzling because the father’s
attitude appears to
be extremely common. It wasn’t always so. There was once a
time when most
students in college whose parents could afford it, or who

qualified for
scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered
a good thing that
there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life
where money was not
the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to
pursue other forms
of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual
experimentation, altered states
of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art.
Nowadays it is
considered important they should work. However, it is not
considered important
they should work at anything useful. In fact, like Rufus they’re
barely expected to
work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so. A number of
students wrote just
to complain to me about this phenomenon. Here Patrick reflects
on his job as a
casual retail assistant in a student union convenience store:
Patrick: I didn’t actually need the job (I was getting by
financially without it), but
after some pressure from my family, I applied for it out of some
warped sense of
obligation to get experience in work to prepare me for whatever
lay ahead beyond
university. In reality, the job just took away time and energy
from other activities
I had been doing, like campaigning and activism, or reading for
pleasure, which I
think made me resent it even more.
The job was pretty standard for a student union convenience
store and involved
serving people on the till (could have easily been done by a

machine) with the
explicitly stated requirement, in my performance review after
my trial period,
that I “should be more positive and happy when serving
customers.” So not only
did they want me to do work that could have been performed by
a machine just as
effectively, they wanted me to pretend that I was enjoying that
state of affairs.
It was just about bearable if my shift was during lunchtime,
when it got really
busy, so time went by relatively quickly. Being on shift on a
Sunday afternoon
when nobody frequented the SU was just appalling. They had
this thing about us
not being able to just do nothing, even if the shop was empty.
So we couldn’t just
sit at the till and read a magazine. Instead, the manager made up
utterly
meaningless work for us to do, like going round the whole shop
and checking that
things were in date (even though we knew for a fact they were
because of the
turnover rate) or rearranging products on shelves in even more
pristine order
than they already were.
The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so
much time to
think, because the work was so lacking in any intellectual
demand. So I just
thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be
done by a
machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and
just endlessly

theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human
beings have to do
that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive. I
couldn’t stop thinking
about how miserable it made me.
This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire
world of social
and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to
college and then tell it to
stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves. Parents now feel
it is important
that young minds should have this experience. But what,
precisely, was Patrick
supposed to be learning through this exercise?
Here’s another example:
Brendan: I’m at a small college in Massachusetts training to be
a high school
history teacher. Recently I started work at the dining commons.
A coworker told me on my first day: “Half of this job is making
things look clean,
and the other half is looking busy.”
For the first couple of months, they had me “monitor” the back
room. I would
clean the buffet slider, restock the desserts, and wipe down
tables when people
left. It’s not a big room, so usually I could do all my tasks in
five minutes out of

every thirty. I ended up being able to get a lot of reading for my
coursework done.
However, sometimes one of the less understanding supervisors
would be
working. In that case, I would have to keep the corner of my eye
open at all times
in order to make sure they would always see me acting busy. I
have no idea why
the job description couldn’t just acknowledge that I wouldn’t
have much to do— if
I didn’t have to spend so much time and energy looking busy, I
could get my
reading and the table cleaning done quicker and more
efficiently.
But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are
simply talking about
teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing
would be to leave
them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in
every sense except that
you don’t get paid for it (though if you’re receiving a
scholarship or an allowance,
you actually are getting paid for it). In fact, like almost all the
other activities
Patrick or Brendan might have been engaged in had they not
been obliged to take
on “real world” jobs, their classwork is actually more real than
the largely make-
work projects they ended up being forced to do. Schoolwork has
real content. One
must attend classes, do the readings, write exercises or papers,
and be judged on
the results. But in practical terms, this appears to be exactly
what makes

schoolwork appear inadequate to those authorities—parents,
teachers,
governments. administrators—who have all come to feel that
they must also teach
students about the real world. It’s too results-oriented. You can
study any way
you want to so long as you pass the test. A successful student
has to learn self-
discipline, but this is not the same as learning how to operate
under orders. Of
course, the same is true of most of the other projects and
activities students
might otherwise be engaged in: whether rehearsing for plays,
playing in a band,
political activism, or baking cookies or growing pot to sell to
fellow students. All
of which might be appropriate training for a society of self-
employed adults, or
even one made up primarily of the largely autonomous
professionals (doctors,
lawyers, architects, and so forth) that universities were once
designed to produce.
It might even be appropriate to train young people for the
democratically
organized collectives that were the subject of Patrick’s reveries
about full
communism. But as Brendan points out, it is very much not
preparation for work
in today’s increasingly bullshitized workplace:
Brendan: A lot of these student work jobs have us doing some

sort of bullshit task
like scanning IDs, or monitoring empty rooms, or cleaning
already-clean tables.
Everyone is cool with it, because we get money while we study,
but otherwise
there’s absolutely no reason not to just give students the money
and automate or
eliminate the work.
I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole thing works, but
a lot of this work
is funded by the Feds and tied to our student loans. It’s part of a
whole federal
system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby
promising to coerce
them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get
rid of—
accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train
and prepare us
for our future bullshit jobs.
Brendan has a point, and I’ll be returning to his analysis in a
later chapter. Here,
though, I want to focus on what students forced into these
make-work jobs
actually learn from them—lessons that they do not learn from
more traditional
student occupations and pursuits such as studying for tests,
planning parties, and
so on. Even judging by Brendan’s and Patrick’s accounts (and I
could easily
reference many others), I think we can conclude that from these
jobs, students
learn at least five things:
1. how to operate under others’ direct supervision;

2. how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done;
3. that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or
important, that one
actually enjoys;
4. that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful
or important and
that one does not enjoy; and
5. that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public,
even when one is
being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to
pretend to be
enjoying it.
This is what Brendan meant by how make-work student
employment was a way
of “preparing and training” students for their future bullshit
jobs. He was
studying to be a high school history teacher—a meaningful job,
certainly, but, as
with almost all teaching positions in the United States, one
where the proportion
of hours spent teaching in class or preparing lessons has
declined, while the total
number of hours dedicated to administrative tasks has increased
dramatically.
This is what Brendan is suggesting: that it’s no coincidence that
the more jobs
requiring college degrees become suffused in bullshit, the more
pressure is put on
college students to learn about the real world by dedicating less
of their time to
self-organized goal-directed activity and more of it to tasks that
will prepare them
for the more mindless aspects of their future careers.

WHY MANY OF OUR FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS ON
HUMAN
MOTIVATION APPEAR TO BE INCORRECT
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human
heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of
the
brain unfolding to success . . . such emotions make a man forget
food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
—Nikola Tesla
If the argument of the previous section is correct, one could
perhaps conclude
that Eric’s problem was just that he hadn’t been sufficiently
prepared for the
pointlessness of the modern workplace. He had passed through
the old education
system—some traces of it are left—designed to prepare students
to actually do
things. This led to false expectations and an initial shock of
disillusionment that
he could not overcome.
Perhaps. But I don’t think that’s the full story. There is
something much deeper
going on here. Eric might have been unusually ill-prepared to
endure the
meaninglessness of his first job, but just about everyone does
see such
meaninglessness as something to be endured—despite the fact
that we are all
trained, in one way or another, to assume that human beings

should be perfectly
delighted to find themselves in his situation of being paid good
money not to
work.
Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking
why we assume that
someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself
fortunate. What is the
basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows?
The obvious place
to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of
thought into a
science. According to classical economic theory, homo
oeconomicus, or
“economic man”—that is, the model human being that lies
behind every
prediction made by the discipline— is assumed to be motivated
above all by a
calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations
by which
economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on
one simple
assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose
the course of
action that provides the most of what he wants for the least
expenditure of
resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that
makes the equations
possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated
motivations, there
would be too many factors to take into account, it would be
impossible to
properly weight them, and predictions could not be made.
Therefore, while an
economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that

human beings are
not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are
makes it possible
to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this
proportion—and
only this—is the subject matter of economic science.
This is a reasonable statement as far as it goes. The problem is
there are many
domains of human life where the assumption clearly doesn’t
hold—and some of
them are precisely in the domain of what we like to call the
economy.
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press 2005)
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. So the phenomenon has not aroused
much deliberate
concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.
In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit

is, why there is so
much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a
conscientiously developed
appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no
theory. I propose to
begin the development of a theoretical understanding of
bullshit, mainly by providing
some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall
not consider the rhetorical
uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough
account of what bullshit is
and how it differs from what it is not—or (putting it somewhat
differently) to articulate,
more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.
Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both
necessary and sufficient for the
constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For
one thing, the expression
bullshit is often employed quite loosely—simply as a generic
term of abuse, with no very
specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is
so vast and amorphous
that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid
being procrustean.
Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful,
even though it is not likely to
be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions
about bullshit remain, after
all, not only unanswered but unasked.
So far as I am aware, very little work has been done on this
subject. I have not
undertaken a survey of the literature, partly because I do not
know how to go about it.
To be sure, there is one quite obvious place to look—the Oxford

English Dictionary. The
OED has an entry for bullshit in the supplementary volumes,
and it also has entries for
various pertinent uses of the word bull and for some related
terms. I shall consider some
of these entries in due course. I have not consulted dictionaries
in languages other than
English, because I do not know the words for bullshit or bull in
any other language.
Another worthwhile source is the title essay in The Prevalence
of Humbug by Max
Black. I am uncertain just how close in meaning the word
humbug is to the word 1
bullshit. Of course, the words are not freely and fully
interchangeable; it is clear that
they are used differently. But the difference appears on the
whole to have more to do
with considerations of gentility, and certain other rhetorical
parameters, than with the
strictly literal modes of significance that concern me most. It is
more polite, as well as
less intense, to say “Humbug!” than to say “Bullshit!” For the
sake of this discussion, I
shall assume that there is no other important difference between
the two.
Max Black, The Prevalence of Humbug (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985).1
Frankfurt, On Bullshit, page !1
Black suggests a number of synonyms for humbug, including
the following: balderdash,
claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, imposture, and quackery.

This list of quaint
equivalents is not very helpful. But Black also confronts the
problem of establishing the
nature of humbug more directly, and he offers the following
formal definition:
HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying,
especially by
pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts,
feelings, or
attitudes. 2
A very similar formulation might plausibly be offered as
enunciating the essential
characteristics of bullshit. As a preliminary to developing an
independent account of
those characteristics, I will comment on the various elements of
Black’s definition.
Deceptive misrepresentation: This may sound pleonastic. No
doubt what Black has in 3
mind is that humbug is necessarily designed or intended to
deceive, that its
misrepresentation is not merely inadvertent. In other words, it is
deliberate
misrepresentation. Now if, as a matter of conceptual necessity,
an intention to deceive is
an invariable feature of humbug, then the property of being
humbug depends at least in
part upon the perpetrator’s state of mind. It cannot be identical,
accordingly, with any
properties—either inherent or relational—belonging just to the
utterance by which the
humbug is perpetrated. In this respect, the property of being
humbug is similar to that
of being a lie, which is identical neither with the falsity nor

with any of the other
properties of the statement the liar makes, but which requires
that the liar makes his
statement in a certain state of mind—namely, with an intention
to deceive.
It is a further question whether there are any features essential
to humbug or to lying
that are not dependent upon the intentions and beliefs of the
person responsible for the
humbug or the lie, or whether it is, on the contrary, possible for
any utterance
whatsoever to be—given that the speaker is in a certain state of
mind—a vehicle of
humbug or of a lie. In some accounts of lying there is no lie
unless a false statement is
made; in others a person may be lying even if the statement he
makes is true, as long as
he himself believes that the statement is false and intends by
making it to deceive. What
about humbug and bullshit? May any utterance at all qualify as
humbug or bullshit,
given that (so to speak) the utterer’s heart is in the right place,
or must the utterance
have certain characteristics of its own as well?
Short of lying: It must be part of the point of saying that
humbug is “short of lying” that
while it has some of the distinguishing characteristics of lies,
there are others that it
lacks. But this cannot be the whole point. After all, every use of
language without
exception has some, but not all, of the characteristic features of
lies—if no other, then at
least the feature simply of being a use of language. Yet it would
surely be incorrect to

describe every use of language as short of lying. Black’s phrase
evokes the notion of
Ibid., p. 143.2
“Pleonasm” is a literary and linguistic term that means adding
an extra word to express a meaning that the other 3
words have already been expressed. Basically, what most
people call “being redundant.” —GH
some sort of continuum, on which lying occupies a certain
segment while humbug is
located exclusively at earlier points. What continuum could this
be, along which one
encounters humbug only before one encounters lying? Both
lying and humbug are
modes of misrepresentation. It is not at first glance apparent,
however, just how the
difference between these varieties of misrepresentation might be
construed as a
difference in degree.
Especially by pretentious word or deed: There are two points to
notice here. First, Black
identifies humbug not only as a category of speech but as a
category of action as well; it
may be accomplished either by words or by deeds. Second, his
use of the qualifier
“especially” indicates that Black does not regard
pretentiousness as an essential or
wholly indispensable characteristic of humbug. Undoubtedly,
much humbug is

pretentious. So far as concerns bullshit, moreover, “pretentious
bullshit” is close to
being a stock phrase. But I am inclined to think that when
bullshit is pretentious, this
happens because pretentiousness is its motive rather than a
constitutive element of its
essence. The fact that a person is behaving pretentiously is not,
it seems to me, part of
what is required to make his utterance an instance of bullshit. It
is often, to be sure,
what accounts for his making that utterance. However, it must
not be assumed that
bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its
motive.
Misrepresentation . . . of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or
attitudes: This provision
that the perpetrator of humbug is essentially misrepresenting
himself raises some very
central issues. To begin with, whenever a person deliberately
misrepresents anything, he
must inevitably be misrepresenting his own state of mind. It is
possible, of course, for a
person to misrepresent that alone—for instance, by pretending
to have a desire or a
feeling which he does not actually have. But suppose that a
person, whether by telling a
lie or in another way, misrepresents something else. Then he
necessarily misrepresents
at least two things. He misrepresents whatever he is talking
about—i.e., the state of
affairs that is the topic or referent of his discourse—and in
doing this he cannot avoid
misrepresenting his own mind as well. Thus someone who lies
about how much money
he has in his pocket both gives an account of the amount of

money in his pocket and
conveys that he believes this account. If the lie works, then its
victim is twice deceived,
having one false belief about what is in the liar’s pocket and
another false belief about
what is in the liar’s mind.
Now it is unlikely that Black wishes the referent of humbug to
be in every instance the
state of the speaker’s mind. There is no particular reason, after
all, why humbug may not
be about other things. Black probably means that humbug is not
designed primarily to
give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs
may be the topic, but that
its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false
impression concerning what is
going on in the mind of the speaker. Insofar as it is humbug, the
creation of this
impression is its main purpose and its point.
Understanding Black along these lines suggests a hypothesis to
account for his
characterization of humbug as “short of lying.” If I lie to you
about how much money I
have, then I do not thereby make an explicit assertion
concerning my beliefs. Therefore,
one might with some plausibility maintain that although in
telling the lie I certainly
misrepresent what is in my mind, this misrepresentation—as
distinct from my

misrepresentation of what is in my pocket—is not strictly
speaking a lie at all. For I do
not come right out with any statement whatever about what is in
my mind. Nor does the
statement I do affirm—e.g., “I have twenty dollars in my
pocket”—imply any statement
that attributes a belief to me. On the other hand, it is
unquestionable that in so
affirming, I provide you with a reasonable basis for making
certain judgments about
what I believe. In particular, I provide you with a reasonable
basis for supposing that I
believe I have twenty dollars in my pocket. Since this
supposition is by hypothesis false,
I do in telling the lie tend to deceive you concerning what is in
my mind even though I
do not actually tell a lie about that. In this light, it does not
seem unnatural or
inappropriate to regard me as misrepresenting my own beliefs in
a way that is “short of
lying.”
It is easy to think of familiar situations by which Black’s
account of humbug appears to
be unproblematically confirmed. Consider a Fourth of July
orator, who goes on
bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose
Founding Fathers under
divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.” This is
surely humbug. As
Black’s account suggests, the orator is not lying. He would be
lying only if it were his
intention to bring about in his audience beliefs that he himself
regards as false,
concerning such matters as whether our country is great,
whether it is blessed, whether

the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did
was in fact to create a new
beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what
his audience thinks
about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our
country’s history, or the
like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about
these matters that
motivates his speech.
It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not
fundamentally that the
speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black’s
account suggests, the
orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression
of himself. He is not
trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he
cares about is what
people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot,
as someone who has
deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of
our country, who
appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the
greatness of our history,
whose pride in that history is combined with humility before
God, and so on.
Black’s account of humbug appears, then, to fit certain
paradigms quite snugly.
Nonetheless, I do not believe that it adequately or accurately
grasps the essential
character of bullshit. It is correct to say of bullshit, as he says
of humbug, both that it is
short of lying and that those who perpetrate it misrepresent
themselves in a certain way.
But Black’s account of these two features is significantly off

the mark. I shall next
attempt to develop, by considering some biographical material
pertaining to Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a preliminary but more accurately focused
appreciation of just what the 4
central characteristics of bullshit are.
Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by
Longfellow could serve him as a
motto: 5
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.
The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did
not cut corners. They
worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their
work. Every part of the
product was considered, and each was designed and made to be
exactly as it should be.
These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline
even with respect to
features of their work that would ordinarily not be visible.
Although no one would notice
if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be
bothered by their

consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might
perhaps also say, there
was no bullshit.
It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods
as in some way analogues
of bullshit. But in what way? Is the resemblance that bullshit
itself is invariably
produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner, that it is never
finely crafted, that in
the making of it there is never the meticulously attentive
concern with detail to which
Longfellow alludes? Is the bullshitter by his very nature a
mindless slob? Is his product
necessarily messy or unrefined? The word shit does, to be sure,
suggest this. Excrement
is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or
dumped. It may have a more or
less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly
not wrought.
The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a
certain inner strain.
Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and
objectivity. It entails accepting
standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse
or whim. It is this
selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as
inapposite. But in fact it is not
out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of
public relations, and the
nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with
instances of bullshit so
unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable
and classic paradigms of
the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely

sophisticated craftsmen who—
with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market
research, of public
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was a philosophy professor
in the English analytic tradition. He was born in 4
Austria but spent his professional life at Oxford, where he wrote
several highly influential works on the relation
between language and thought. He was famously serious and
passionate about philosophy. — GH
This is reported by Norman Malcolm, in his introduction to
Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford: 5
Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xiii.
opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth—dedicate
themselves tirelessly to
getting every word and image they produce exactly right.
Yet there is something more to be said about this. However
studiously and
conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he
is also trying to get away
with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of
the slovenly craftsman,
some kind of laxity that resists or eludes the demands of a
disinterested and austere
discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated,
evidently, with simple
carelessness or inattention to detail. I shall attempt in due
course to locate it more
correctly.

Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to
identifying and combating
what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “nonsense.”
He was apparently like
that in his personal life as well. This comes out in an anecdote
related by Fania Pascal,
who knew him in Cambridge in the 1930s:
I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home
feeling sorry for
myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just like a dog
that has been
run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that
has been
run over feels like.” 6
Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary,
almost unbelievable,
that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself
as having said. That
characterization of her feelings—so innocently close to the
utterly commonplace “sick as
a dog”—is simply not provocative enough to arouse any
response as lively or intense as
disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or
allusive uses of language
would not be?
So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps
Wittgenstein was
trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was only
pretending to bawl Pascal out,
just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and
the intention wrong. She
thought he was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was

only trying to cheer her up
with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing. In
that case the incident is
not incredible or bizarre after all.
But if Pascal failed to recognize that Wittgenstein was only
teasing, then perhaps the
possibility that he was serious was at least not so far out of the
question. She knew him,
and she knew what to expect from him; she knew how he made
her feel. Her way of
understanding or of misunderstanding his remark was very
likely not altogether
discordant, then, with her sense of what he was like. We may
fairly suppose that even if
her account of the incident is not strictly true to the facts of
Wittgenstein’s intention, it
is sufficiently true to her idea of Wittgenstein to have made
sense to her. For the
purposes of this discussion, I shall accept Pascal’s report at face
value, supposing that
when it came to the use of allusive or figurative language,
Wittgenstein was indeed as
preposterous as she makes him out to be.
Fania Pascal, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” in Rhees,
Recollections, pp. 28-29.6
Then just what is it that the Wittgenstein in her report considers
to be objectionable?
Let us assume that he is correct about the facts: that is, Pascal
really does not know how

run-over dogs feel. Even so, when she says what she does, she
is plainly not lying. She
would have been lying if, when she made her statement, she was
aware that she actually
felt quite good. For however little she knows about the lives of
dogs, it must certainly be
clear to Pascal that when dogs are run over they do not feel
good. So if she herself had in
fact been feeling good, it would have been a lie to assert that
she felt like a run-over dog.
Pascal’s Wittgenstein intends to accuse her not of lying but of
misrepresentation of
another sort. She characterizes her feeling as “the feeling of a
run-over dog.” She is not
really acquainted, however, with the feeling to which this
phrase refers. Of course, the
phrase is far from being complete nonsense to her; she is hardly
speaking gibberish.
What she says has an intelligible connotation, which she
certainly understands.
Moreover, she does know something about the quality of the
feeling to which the phrase
refers: she knows at least that it is an undesirable and
unenjoyable feeling, a bad feeling.
The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey
something more than simply
that she feels bad. Her characterization of her feeling is too
specific; it is excessively
particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her
account, the distinctive
kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. To the
Wittgenstein in Pascal’s
story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit.
Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal’s

characterization of how
she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it strike him that
way? It does so, I believe,
because he perceives what Pascal says as being—roughly
speaking, for now—
unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not
germane to the enterprise
of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except
in the vaguest way, how
a run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling is,
accordingly, something that
she is merely making up. She concocts it out of whole cloth; or,
if she got it from
someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without
any regard for how things
really are.
It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her.
What disgusts him is
that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is
correct. There is every
likelihood, of course, that she says what she does only in a
somewhat clumsy effort to
speak colorfully, or to appear vivacious or good-humored; and
no doubt Wittgenstein’s
reaction—as she construes it—is absurdly intolerant. Be this as
it may, it seems clear
what that reaction is. He reacts as though he perceives her to be
speaking about her
feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the
relevant facts. Her
statement is not “wrought with greatest care.” She makes it
without bothering to take
into account at all the question of its accuracy.
The point that troubles Wittgenstein is manifestly not that

Pascal has made a mistake in
her description of how she feels. Nor is it even that she has
made a careless mistake. Her
laxity, or her lack of care, is not a matter of having permitted an
error to slip into her
speech on account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent
lapse in the attention
she was devoting to getting things right. The point is rather
that, so far as Wittgenstein
can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs
without genuinely
submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an
accurate representation
of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things
right, but that she is not
even trying.
This is important to Wittgenstein because, whether justifiably or
not, he takes what she
says seriously, as a statement purporting to give an informative
description of the way
she feels. He construes her as engaged in an activity to which
the distinction between
what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no
interest in whether what
she says is true or false. It is in this sense that Pascal’s
statement is unconnected to a
concern with truth: she is not concerned with the truth-value of
what she says. That is
why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume
that she knows the truth,

and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a
proposition that she presumes
to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it
is true nor, as a lie must
be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection
to a concern with truth—
this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of
the essence of bullshit.
Now I shall consider (quite selectively) certain items in the
Oxford English Dictionary
that are pertinent to clarifying the nature of bullshit. The OED
defines a bull session as
“an informal conversation or discussion, esp. of a group of
males.” Now as a definition,
this seems wrong. For one thing, the dictionary evidently
supposes that the use of the
term bull in bull session serves primarily just to indicate
gender. But even if it were true
that the participants in bull sessions are generally or typically
males, the assertion that a
bull session is essentially nothing more particular than an
informal discussion among
males would be as far off the mark as the parallel assertion that
a hen session is simply
an informal conversation among females. It is probably true that
the participants in hen
sessions must be females. Nonetheless the term hen session
conveys something more
specific than this concerning the particular kind of informal
conversation among
females to which hen sessions are characteristically devoted.
What is distinctive about
the sort of informal discussion among males that constitutes a
bull session is, it seems to
me, something like this: while the discussion may be intense

and significant, it is in a
certain respect not “for real.”
The characteristic topics of a bull session have to do with very
personal and emotion-
laden aspects of life—for instance, religion, politics, or sex.
People are generally
reluctant to speak altogether openly about these topics if they
expect that they might be
taken too seriously. What tends to go on in a bull session is that
the participants try out
various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to
hear themselves saying
such things and in order to discover how others respond,
without its being assumed that
they are committed to what they say: it is understood by
everyone in a bull session that
the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they
really believe or how
they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level
of candor and an
experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under
discussion. Therefore
provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that
people will be
encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much
anxiety that they will be
held to it.
Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words,
upon a general
recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be

understood as being what he
means wholeheartedly or believes unequivocally to be true. The
purpose of the
conversation is not to communicate beliefs. Accordingly, the
usual assumptions about
the connection between what people say and what they believe
are suspended. The
statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that
there is no pretense that
this connection is being sustained. They are like bullshit by
virtue of the fact that they
are in some degree unconstrained by a concern with truth. This
resemblance between
bull sessions and bullshit is suggested also by the term shooting
the bull, which refers to
the sort of conversation that characterizes bull sessions and in
which the term shooting
is very likely a cleaned-up rendition of shitting. The very term
bull session is, indeed,
quite probably a sanitized version of bullshit session.
A similar theme is discernible in a British usage of bull in
which, according to the OED,
the term refers to “unnecessary routine tasks or ceremonial;
excessive discipline or ‘spit-
and-polish’; = red-tape.” The dictionary provides the following
examples of this usage:
The Squadron . . . felt very bolshie about all that bull that was
flying
around the station (I. Gleed, Arise to Conquer vi. 51, 1942);
Them turning
out the guard for us, us marching past eyes right, all that sort of
bull (A.
Baron, Human Kind xxiv. 178, 1953); the drudgery and ‘bull’ in
an MP’s

life (Economist 8 Feb. 470/471, 1958).
Here the term bull evidently pertains to tasks that are pointless
in that they have
nothing much to do with the primary intent or justifying
purpose of the enterprise which
requires them. Spit-and polish and red tape do not genuinely
contribute, it is presumed,
to the “real” purposes of military personnel or government
officials, even though they
are imposed by agencies or agents that purport to be
conscientiously devoted to the
pursuit of those purposes. Thus the “unnecessary routine tasks
or ceremonial” that
constitute bull are disconnected from the legitimating motives
of the activity upon
which they intrude, just as the things people say in bull sessions
are disconnected from
their settled beliefs, and as bullshit is disconnected from a
concern with the truth.
The term bull is also employed, in a rather more widespread and
familiar usage, as a
somewhat less coarse equivalent of bullshit. In an entry for bull
as so used, the OED
suggests the following as definitive: “trivial, insincere, or
untruthful talk or writing;
nonsense.” Now it does not seem distinctive of bull either that it
must be deficient in
meaning or that it is necessarily unimportant; so “nonsense” and
“trivial,” even apart
from their vagueness, seem to be on the wrong track. The focus
of “insincere, or
untruthful” is better, but it needs to be sharpened. The entry at
hand also provides the 7
following two definitions:

1914 Dialect Notes IV. 162 Bull, talk which is not to the
purpose; ‘hot air’.
It may be noted that the inclusion of insincerity among its
essential conditions would imply that bull cannot be 7
produced inadvertently; for it hardly seems possible to be
inadvertently insincere.
1932 Times Lit. Supp. 8 Dec. 933/3 ‘Bull’ is the slang term for
a
combination of bluff, bravado, ‘hot air’, and what we used to
call in the
Army ‘Kidding the troops’.
“Not to the purpose” is appropriate, but it is both too broad in
scope and too vague. It
covers digressions and innocent irrelevancies, which are not
invariably instances of bull;
furthermore, saying that bull is not to the purpose leaves it
uncertain what purpose is
meant. The reference in both definitions to “hot air” is more
helpful.
When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes
out of the speaker’s
mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty,
without substance or content.
His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the
purpose it purports to serve.
No more information is communicated than if the speaker had
merely exhaled. There

are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally,
which make hot air seem an
especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is
speech that has been emptied
of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which
everything nutritive has
been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of
nourishment, what remains
when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this
respect, excrement is a
representation of death that we ourselves produce and that,
indeed, we cannot help
producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps
it is for making death so
intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it
cannot serve the purposes
of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of
communication.
Now consider these lines from Pound’s Canto LXXIV, which
the OED cites in its entry
on bullshit as a verb:
Hey Snag wots in the bibl’?
Wot are the books ov the bible?
Name ’em, don’t bullshit ME. 8
This is a call for the facts. The person addressed is evidently
regarded as having in some
way claimed to know the Bible, or as having claimed to care
about it. The speaker
suspects that this is just empty talk, and demands that the claim
be supported with
facts. He will not accept a mere report; he insists upon seeing

the thing itself. In other
words, he is calling the bluff. The connection between bullshit
and bluff is affirmed
explicitly in the definition with which the lines by Pound are
associated:
Here is part of the context in which these lines occur: “Les
Albigeois, a problem of history, / and the fleet at Salamis 8
made with money lent by the state to the shipwrights / Tempus
tacendi, tempus loquendi. / Never inside the country
to raise the standard of living / but always abroad to increase
the profits of usurers, / dixit Lenin, / and gun sales lead
to more gun sales / they do not clutter the market for gunnery /
there is no saturation / Pisa, in the 23rd year of the
effort in sight of the tower / and Till was hung yesterday / for
murder and rape with trimmings plus Cholkis / plus
mythology, thought he was Zeus ram or another one / Hey Snag
wots in the bibl’? / Wot are the books ov the bible? /
Name ’em, don’t bullshit ME.”
As v. trans. and intr., to talk nonsense (to); . . . also, to bluff
one’s way
through (something) by talking nonsense.
It does seem that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is
closer to bluffing, surely, than
to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the
fact that it is more like
the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant
difference here between a
bluff and a lie?

Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or
deception. Now the concept
most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity:
the liar is essentially
someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing,
too, is typically devoted to
conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is
more especially a matter
not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its
nearness to bullshit. For the
essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In
order to appreciate this
distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not
be in any respect (apart
from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not
genuine need not also be
defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy.
What is wrong with a
counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This
points to a similar and
fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although
it is produced without
concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is
faking things. But this does
not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
In Eric Ambler’s novel Dirty Story, a character named Arthur
Abdel Simpson recalls
advice that he received as a child from his father:
Although I was only seven when my father was killed, I still
remember him
very well and some of the things he used to say. . . . One of the
first things
he taught me was, “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your
way

through.” 9
This presumes not only that there is an important difference
between lying and
bullshitting, but that the latter is preferable to the former. Now
the elder Simpson surely
did not consider bullshitting morally superior to lying. Nor is it
likely that he regarded
lies as invariably less effective than bullshit in accomplishing
the purposes for which
either of them might be employed. After all, an intelligently
crafted lie may do its work
with unqualified success. It may be that Simpson thought it
easier to get away with
bullshitting than with lying. Or perhaps he meant that, although
the risk of being caught
is about the same in each case, the consequences of being
caught are generally less
severe for the bullshitter than for the liar. In fact, people do
tend to be more tolerant of
bullshit than of lies, perhaps because we are less inclined to
take the former as a
personal affront. We may seek to distance ourselves from
bullshit, but we are more
E. Ambler, Dirty Story (1967), I. iii. 25. The citation is
provided in the same OED entry as the one that includes the 9
passage from Pound. The closeness of the relation between
bullshitting and bluffing is resonant, it seems to me, in the
parallelism of the idioms: “bullshit your way through” and
“bluff your way through.”

likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug
than with the sense of
violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of
understanding why our
attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our
attitude toward lying is an
important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.
The pertinent comparison is not, however, between telling a lie
and producing some
particular instance of bullshit. The elder Simpson identifies the
alternative to telling a lie
as “bullshitting one’s way through.” This involves not merely
producing one instance of
bullshit; it involves a program of producing bullshit to whatever
extent the
circumstances require. This is a key, perhaps, to his preference.
Telling a lie is an act
with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood
at a specific point in a
set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of
having that point occupied
by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which
the teller of the lie
submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be
the truth. The liar is
inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie
at all, he must think he
knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he
must design his falsehood
under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way
through has much more
freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does
not limit himself to

inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is
not constrained by the
truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared,
so far as required, to
fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to
which the liar must
submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is
easier than the task of the
liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less
analytical and less deliberative
than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and
independent, with more
spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative
play. This is less a
matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the
“bullshit artist.” My guess is
that the recommendation offered by Arthur Simpson’s father
reflects the fact that he
was more strongly drawn to this mode of creativity, regardless
of its relative merit or
effectiveness, than he was to the more austere and rigorous
demands of lying.
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. 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. He
does not care whether the
things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out,
or makes them up, to
suit his purpose.
In his essay “Lying,” Saint Augustine distinguishes lies of eight
types, which he classifies
according to the characteristic intent or justification with which
a lie is told. Lies of
seven of these types are told only because they are supposed to
be indispensable means
to some end that is distinct from the sheer creation of false
beliefs. It is not their falsity
as such, in other words, that attracts the teller to them. Since
they are told only on
account of their supposed indispensability to a goal other than
deception itself, Saint
Augustine regards them as being told unwillingly: what the
person really wants is not to
tell the lie but to attain the goal. They are therefore not real
lies, in his view, and those
who tell them are not in the strictest sense liars. It is only the
remaining category that
contains what he identifies as “the lie which is told solely for
the pleasure of lying and
deceiving, that is, the real lie.” Lies in this category are not
told as means to any end 10
distinct from the propagation of falsehood. They are told simply
for their own sakes—

i.e., purely out of a love of deception:
There is a distinction between a person who tells a lie and a
liar. The
former is one who tells a lie unwillingly, while the liar loves to
lie and
passes his time in the joy of lying. . . . The latter takes delight
in lying,
rejoicing in the falsehood itself. 11
What Augustine calls “liars” and “real lies” are both rare and
extraordinary. Everyone
lies from time to time, but there are very few people to whom it
would often (or even
ever) occur to lie exclusively from a love of falsity or of
deception.
For most people, the fact that a statement is false constitutes in
itself a reason, however
weak and easily overridden, not to make the statement. For
Saint Augustine’s pure liar it
is, on the contrary, a reason in favor of making it. For the
bullshitter it is in itself neither
“Lying,” in Treatises on Various Subjects, in Fathers of the
Church, ed. R. J. Deferrari, vol. 16 (New York: Fathers of 10
the Church, 1952), p. 109. Saint Augustine maintains that
telling a lie of this type is a less serious sin than telling lies
in three of his categories and a more serious sin than telling lies
in the other four categories.
Ibid., p. 79.11

a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in
telling the truth people are
guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These
guide them as they
endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it
deceitfully. For this
reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the
truth in the same way
that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the
latter activity, which
involves making assertions without paying attention to anything
except what it suits one
to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things
are may become
attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the
truth are playing on
opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to
the facts as he
understands them, although the response of the one is guided by
the authority of the
truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and
refuses to meet its
demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He
does not reject the
authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it.
He pays no attention to
it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the
truth than lies are.
One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes
that there are indeed
facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His
interest in telling the
truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between
getting things wrong and

getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to
tell the difference.
Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying
certain statements as true
and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is
to desist both from efforts
to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean
refraining from making
any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is
to continue making
assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that
cannot be anything
except bullshit.
Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be
sure that there is
relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is
more communication of all
kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is
bullshit may not have
increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is
actually greater now, I will
mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact
that it is currently so
great.
Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require
someone to talk without
knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of
bullshit is stimulated
whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about
some topic exceed his
knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This
discrepancy is common in
public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by
their own propensities or

by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of
which they are to some
degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the
widespread conviction that it is
the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions
about everything, or at
least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s
affairs. The lack of any
significant connection between a person’s opinions and his
apprehension of reality will
be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes
it his responsibility, as a
conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in
all parts of the world.
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper
sources, in various forms of
skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to
an objective reality, and
which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things
truly are. These “antirealist”
doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested
efforts to determine what
is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the
notion of objective inquiry.
One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from
the discipline required
by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort
of discipline, which is
imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather
than seeking primarily to
arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the

individual turns toward
trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced
that reality has no
inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth
about things, he devotes
himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he
decides that since it makes no
sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead
to be true to himself.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are
determinate, and hence
susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while
supposing that the
ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as
a mistake. As conscious
beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot
know ourselves at all
without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory,
and certainly nothing in
experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the
truth about himself that
is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are
not peculiarly solid and
resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed,
elusively insubstantial—
notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of
other things. And insofar as
this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
Dunkin Donuts
My name

Institution
Course
Instructor
Date
Introduction
Consumer Reference
Feasibility Test
Market Scope
Testing and Customer Acceptance
Staffing
Roll Out Plan
CUSTOMER PREFERENCE
Market research and analysis
Competitor strategies
There is need to do market analysis so as to understand further
what the customers want. Without market research, products and
services offered will be null and void. Market research will also
help understand what kind of product the customer and it is not
being offered by competitors. It helps the business understand

the strategies of competitors. The business will find ways of
outperforming competitors based on what the customers prefer.
3
FEASIBILITY TEST
Costs of starting the business
Profit projections
It is important to perform a feasibility test so to find out how
much the business will cost. This the point that determines
whether it is worth investing in the business. This where a
forecast will be made to see projections. How long will it take
the business to realize profits.
4
MARKET SCOPE
Customers explore new brands
Implement new technologies
Make informed decisions
Undertaking market scope is to find the rational consumers who
are keen on trying to explore new brands in the market. This
phase helps in implementing new techniques of how to to do
business. It will assist the company in making informed
decisions hence reducing customer loss. It enables the company
to meet customer demands effectively. Satisfied customers will
ensure that the business keep growing.

5
CUSTOMER ACCEPTANCE
The ultimate goal for every study is to answer key questions and
provide up-to-date and reliable information to support the
client’s strategic business planning.
Pricing strategies
The best way for a business to penetrate the market is if the
customers accept the products and services that are being
offered by the business. Here the business will set prices that
are favorable to the customers. Not too high to push away
consumers and not too low to avoid making losses.
6
DUNKIN’S STAFFING
Employees who share the visions of the business
Clearly state roles of each employee
Services will not perform themselves. A business needs
employees to attend to customers. A business needs qualified
employees who relate easily to customers and work faster to
meet the requests of customers. Good employees will the reason
customers keep coming to buy from the business. If the area is
full youths, the business needs youths who can easily
understand the demands of customers.

7
ROLL OUT
Identify your niche and make sure the uniqueness of your
product stands out.
Brand the product well in order to attract new customers as
well.
Perform a SWOT analysis and monitor your products’ life cycle.
After all factors have been considered and observed, it is time
to roll out the business. The best to win customers when the
business becomes operational is to brand the business. Unique
branding will draw customers away from competitors. The
business needs to do a SWOT analysis and monitor the lifecycle
of the products. The business needs to find a suitable location to
set up the business. This is where the business finds out if the
customers are satisfied with the services being offered.
8
Conclusion
offer unique services
Meet the demands of customers
Employ reasonable prices
In conclusion, for a business to be a success the level of

attracting customers should be high. The business must employ
better strategies that will run competitors out of business. The
best strategies is offering unique products, reasonable prices on
products. Employees should be qualified and easily understand
the preferences of customers.
9

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