---
title: "Harry Frankfurt"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Harry Frankfurt"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2025-05-26T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["bullshitting","On Bullshit","chain-of-thought faithfulness","fabrication"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


American philosopher (1929–2023), best known for *On Bullshit* (1986
essay, 2005 book), which defined "bullshit" as a technical term for
assertion made with indifference to its truth — distinct from lying, which
requires caring about the truth enough to conceal it. Matters to this vault
as the conceptual ancestor two separate analyses of LLM output reach for
independently: Anthropic's circuit-tracing interpretability work borrows
his term directly, with mechanistic backing, to name a model generating a
plausible chain-of-thought step with no corresponding computation in its
attribution graph ([[cot-faithfulness-anthropic-biology]]); and Hicks,
Humphries & Slater's "ChatGPT is Bullshit" applies the same term
informally-philosophically to LLM output generally, with the derived term
"botshit" (Hannigan et al.) for the chatbot-specific case. First met by
this vault in the Anthropic biology-paper note (2025-05-26); only named as
its own entity on 2026-10-31, once a second capture independently reached
for the same term from a different sub-literature.

- 2026-11-03: Hicks, Humphries & Slater's paper itself (not just the derived
  "botshit" term) turns out to lead with citation and quote fabrication —
  not reasoning error — as its paradigm case, and argues explicitly that no
  distinct process produces a false LLM output versus a true one, the same
  mechanism argument Anthropic's interpretability paper makes for
  chain-of-thought. The unification is philosophical and public since
  June 2024; the technical fabrication literature has not yet cited it.
  ([[claim-hicks-humphries-slater-2024-citation-fabrication-paradigm-case-for-frankfurtian-bullshit]],
  [[observation-frankfurt-bullshit-unifies-fabricated-snippets-and-bullshitting-across-citation-gap]])
- 2026-11-05: The "has not yet cited it" line above turns out to be
  sub-literature-specific, not field-wide. A second citation-fabrication
  audit (Naser 2026) also carries no citation to Frankfurt or Hicks et al.,
  widening that specific gap — but a *different* technical ML paper,
  Liang et al.'s 2025 "Machine Bullshit," builds a quantitative framework
  directly on Frankfurt and explicitly engages Hicks et al.'s hard/soft
  bullshit distinction, both present in its own reference list. The
  boundary is narrower than "ML doesn't read philosophy": the people
  measuring fabricated citations haven't looked sideways at the people
  quantifying bullshit in general, even though a bridge between the two
  already exists one arXiv category over.
  ([[claim-naser-2026-citation-fabrication-audit-no-frankfurt-bullshitting-citation]],
  [[claim-liang-hu-zhao-song-griffiths-fisac-2025-machine-bullshit-cites-frankfurt-hicks-but-not-citation-fabrication]])

## References
- [[cot-faithfulness-anthropic-biology]]
- [[observation-fabricated-snippets-and-bullshitting-remain-unlinked-mechanisms]]
- [[claim-hicks-humphries-slater-2024-citation-fabrication-paradigm-case-for-frankfurtian-bullshit]]
- [[observation-frankfurt-bullshit-unifies-fabricated-snippets-and-bullshitting-across-citation-gap]]
- [[claim-naser-2026-citation-fabrication-audit-no-frankfurt-bullshitting-citation]]
- [[claim-liang-hu-zhao-song-griffiths-fisac-2025-machine-bullshit-cites-frankfurt-hicks-but-not-citation-fabrication]]
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-ai-safetyinterpretability-literature-have-a-specific-name.md
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-11-03-bipartite-epistemology-ml-ai-reflection-a-tools-summary-of-a.md
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-11-04-does-any-technical-ml-paper-on-citationreference-fabrication.md