If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, surely we should expect at least as much philosophic fraud. But how can we detect philosophy's fraudsters? Here's a first attempt at some rules of thumb.

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This is a long post. So here's the short version: this post argues that an unknown but non-zero portion of philosophical work is likely to be fraud. That is to say, some philosophical work knowingly offers fake wisdom rather than genuine insight. I use Jacques Lacan as a possible example.

I'm not saying that Lacan or any other philosopher is definitively a bad actor. I'm merely arguing that philosophic fraud is statistically almost certain to exist, that some philosophers are much more likely than others to be fraudulent, and that we should work harder at finding the frauds.

I'd welcome arguments that disprove all this. But if this argument is right, we should be giving philosophical work tougher scrutiny. And crucially, we should be developing rules of thumb to help distinguish genuine philosophical insight from obfuscation and empty showmanship.

Key points on philosophic fraud

• Philosophic fraud is bad and should be opposed. That should happen in philosophy for the same reasons as in other fields. Importantly, fraud destroys trust.


• We should now expect such philosophic fraud to exist. In recent years we have spotted widespread fraud in science – most notably, in psychology and the social sciences. We know some people are bad actors, and we know they can fool other, very smart people – often with surprising ease.


• We should reconsider the significant taboo against discussing philosophic fraud. Fraud is more common in academia than we previously realised, so the arguments against discussing fraud in philosophy have weakened.


• Philosophic fraud would trick audiences into believing an idea has value. Unlike scientific fraudsters, who mostly fabricate data for personal gain, philosophic fraudsters would deliberately present empty or meaningless concepts as profound insights.


• Philosophic fraud would resist detection. Unlike the physical sciences, philosophy offers no useful standards to assess a fraudulent philosophical concept. The field’s reliance on abstract language and lack of empirical verification make it especially hard to prove intent to deceive.


• Fraudsters would have strong motives. No, philosophy doesn't offer the financial rewards of other fields. But the need for recognition, career advancement, and status gives philosophers incentives to create the appearance of conceptual breakthroughs, even if these breakthroughs are hollow.


• Accusations of philosophical fraud have a history. Despite a general taboo, some philosophers have been accused of fraud or charlatanism. Hegel, Heidegger, and more recently, Lacan and other postmodernists have all been targets.


• We can identify seven heuristics that point towards philosophic fraud. We should be suspicious when several of the following are used to create an impression of depth and significance:
  
  
  
  • obscurantism – hiding simple ideas beneath complex and unclear language
  
  
  • teasing language – hinting at deep truths but never delivering clear explanations
  
  
  • failing the summarization challenge – demonstrating that even smart followers can’t restate the ideas clearly
  
  
  • inconsistency in terminology – constantly shifting the meanings of key terms
  
  
  • bluffing – making confident claims in non-philosophic areas of which the philosopher has poor command
  
  
  • working in crisis territory – choosing a sub-discipline which is already reluctant to examine its truth-claims
  
  
  • shamanism – creating a "guru effect"influencing audiences, especially in person, through emotional or shaman-like power.
  
  
  
  


• Philosophic fraud would help to explain the communication puzzle in philosophy. The puzzle is this: why do so many philosophers, supposedly among the smartest people around, so often write so obscurely? Words are their business, yet a striking subset of them are almost impenetrable. While philosophical ideas can be inherently tough, it is also possible that, at least in some cases, obscurity is being deliberately used to mask a lack of genuine insight.

Not enough for you? Below is the argument in full.

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https://youtu.be/w1PmWy4aSaQ&t=834s

For at least 60 years, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan (1900-1981) has been widely considered a very important thinker. That's him above, giving a lecture in 1972, already a hero to many. Historian of psychoanalysis Élisabeth Roudinesco claimed in 2016: “The twentieth century was Freudian; the twenty-first is already Lacanian”. Lacan's status in philosophy is somewhat controversial but widely acknowledged; papers in philosophy's continental school quote him constantly, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy devotes more than 12,000 words to him.

Over the past 15 years I have come to think of him not just as some people's intellectual hero, but also as a suspect. Lacan may be the philosophical equivalent of Bernie Madoff or Alex Jones or perhaps Diederik Stapel. He seems an obvious candidate to have committed philosophic fraud.

In tort law, fraud is clearly and simply defined. Someone makes 1) a knowingly false representation, 2) knowing it is false, 3) intending to induce reliance on the statement, and 4) creating harm. Most frauds involve the offender fooling a victim and extracting money from them.

In philosophic fraud, points 1 and 2 have pretty easily-identified equivalents in tort law. The philosophic fraudster intends to deceive someone into thinking they are making useful statements, and knows they are not truly useful to that person's understanding of the word.

As for points 3 and 4, let's spell out early where the damage comes. In philosophic fraud, unlike its better-known non-philosophic equivalents, no money changes hands. Rather, there's a sort of epistemic transfer: in exchange for the audience's attention, the philosophic fraudster doles out fake wisdom, flashily but falsely labelled “INSIGHT”.

Such a philosophic fraudster is in one sense little different from financial fraudsters like Bernie Madoff, who doled out fake investment profits, intending to deceive and knowing he was not truly earning people investment returns. For many of us, our investments of belief matter at least as much as our investments of cash.

And the level of fraud exposed in the course of science's continuing replication crisis should cause us to question claims that any field of academic inquiry should escape scrutiny.

Yet the possibility of detecting philosophic fraud seems barely mentioned in academia.

The rest of this essay argues that this needs to change – and suggests a way forward.

The taboo on discussion of philosophic fraud ...

We need to proceed cautiously here. Fraud is a harsh and serious accusation, and can easily be misused; some reports claim that Descartes was widely condemned as a liar. Calling you a fraud only seems appropriate if you have intentionally deceived the world into believing you have a trove of insights, when you in fact possess nothing of the sort. But the oddly extreme result is that today's philosophers have a pretty much inviolable taboo against making claims of philosophic fraud. An example: the Australian philosopher David Stove wrote scarifying critiques of a great deal of philosophy. Yet Stove also argued in his book The Plato Cult that the rate of philosophic fraud must be very low. “Philosophers are hardly ever cynical manipulators of their readers’ minds,” he declared. “They do not produce delusions in others, without first being subject to them themselves.” This is the same forgiving attitude that led the US conservative commentator Roger Kimball to write of Hegel: “He said a lot of loopy things. He believed them all.” The important but unanswered question is, as so often in philosophical matters: how do you know? This attitude of philosophic charity is so deeply ingrained as to brook very little opposition. When I raise the issue of philosophic fraud with people who have studied philosophy for a substantial time, they pretty much almost jump straight to arguing that we cannot find any good reasons to call any philosophy fraud. Indeed, most will not even consider the question further. It seems almost foundational to many philosophers' views about the world. And this attitude doesn't really depend much on philosophers' philosophical stances. You might expect philosophical conservatives to believe in the existence of philosophers with bad motives. But as the examples above suggest, almost none do. On the rare occasions that philosophers do suggest a colleague may write deceptively, they are apt to use terms that I suspect are often euphemisms rather than nuance – terms like “wilful obscurity". Indeed, the more I have thought about and discussed my argument in this post, the more it has struck me that for many people, this is one of the two most important reasons why so few philosophers have ever considered the issue of fraud among philosophers.

Side note: The fraud taboo puzzle

At this point, I do want to take a minute to note that the philosophic fraud taboo does not even apply to certain philosophers inside the profession. Here are two:

• Marx asks: Is this philosophy actually a justification for economic power or class status?
• Nietzsche asks: Is this moral claim actually a disguised “will to power” or resentment?

The musings of these two giants of philosophy have in turn generated a whole philosophic interpretive method within critical theory, known as “the hermeneutics of suspicion”. (A "hermeneutics" is essentially a framework of interpretation, so the hermeneutics of suspicion is a framework which interprets things with suspicion about ideology or power.) This method often assumes that the surface text is intentionally untrue, and written to disguise ideology or power dynamics that the writer wants to keep hidden. Paul Ricœur, who spelt this technique out, gained honour within philosophy for his willingness to look under the surface of ideas. Yet the hermeneutics of suspicion seems often a method of accusing people of fraud. I mentioned above that fraud is a harsh and serious accusation; Ricœur and other believers in the hermeneutics of suspicion seem rather more relaxed about it. This sits oddly with a taboo on fraud claims about philosophers themselves.

Why the fraud taboo may no longer fit

That said, I do not want to follow the methods of Ricœur, or Marx, or Nietzsche. Claims of fraud are to be avoided unless and until you can assemble a decent case. The taboo against fraud claims exists for a powerful reason. Like Chesterton's Fence, it should be removed only after careful checking. Here's why. To call work "fraudulent" is essentially to make a judgment about the state of mind of its creator – who is probably going to be the accuser's intellectual opponent. Is it wise to introduce the idea of fraud to the discussion? Do we want to turn philosophy into one more field where accusations of bad motives hang in the air? Do we want to make philosophy more like ... well, blog comment threads? Or even worse, like Twitter? To all of these questions, the answer is generally "no". So at the very least, we should tread carefully. But I do not think that case has to satisfy a criminal standard of proof in order for us to just explore the issues. One of the key points I want to argue in this essay is that the strength of the taboo on claims of philosophic fraud may now be unsuitable to our current circumstances. Indeed, it may be preventing us from thinking usefully about certain philosophical notions. Yet regardless of how many people are perpetrating it, the odds seem to be that philosophic fraud is a real thing that happens, just as we now know that scientific fraud is. And as we'll see down below, philosophic fraud is almost certainly more common than scientific fraud. Which means that philosophic fraud could be a surprisingly widespread problem in philosophy. Many scientists have been reluctant to wash their dirty laundry in public, but at least some now have done so. And I think it's clear that confronting science's fraud problem – mostly by requiring stronger standards of proof – will ultimately strengthen science. You can argue that having philosophers confront fraud in their ranks would have some of the same benefits.

Philosophic fraud has high stakes

I can suggest three powerful benefits to establishing that particular works of philosophy are fraudulent, if in fact they are:

1. We are teaching a lot of teenagers and twentysomethings philosophy, everywhere from Newcastle to Nairobi to Nanchang. If some of what we are teaching these kids is in fact a pack of lies, then my strong view is this: as a matter of urgency we should stop teaching them those false things and teach them more true things instead. And if we are especially unsure of the epistemological status of parts of philosophy, we should issue that warning loudly.
2. While most people do not think very much about philosophy, you can argue it has an effect on how a huge number of people act in the world, partly because of the education process I mentioned above. Someone like Lacan did not aim for a coherent social theory. But it's at least arguable that the effect of, say, Lacan's ideas has been to help undermine the idea that it is useful or possible to have a morality grounded in shared social norms. I suspect it has occurred to some readers that this undermining of important ideas may be a problem. At the same time, it's quite hard to show definitively that Lacan's ideas are not right.
3. It may also be true that truthfulness about philosophy is becoming more important, not less. Public confidence in academia has been dropping like a stone in the past decade. The economist Kevin Bryan has reacted with a usefully provocative list titled Eight Rules to Regain Public Trust in Academia. Number seven, “Research fraud is unacceptable”, seems particularly important. It runs as follows.

“Fraud destroys trust. Misrepresentation of results, selective reporting, or methods designed to publish rather than to discover are also harmful. Proven fraud must bring immediate dismissal, as it violates the core purpose of academia.”

These reasons make philosophic fraud a pretty high-stakes issue.

Low testability makes philosophic fraud less detectable

Why is there no taboo on discussing scientific fraud? For one main reason: scientific ideas are constructed so as to make it clear how they can be evaluated; philosophical ideas are not. Scientific papers say, broadly: "Under these conditions, we examined these changes to these subjects, and got this result, suggesting that this is what's actually happening." It's the same essential chain of reasoning regardless of whether you're evaluating "power posing" or examining the employment of pharmacists or dropping feathers on the lunar surface or measuring the position of Mercury as it comes out from behind the sun. Re-run the experiment, and you should get the same result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDp1tiUsZw8 The big problem with philosophy is that it's often done without testable propositions, and often with quite unclear language. You often need to rely on the originators' good intentions right from the outset, before you even start the sometimes daunting task of evaluating whether the ideas make sense. Hence the longstanding taboo on discussing philosophic fraud. Yet in the past couple of decades we have established that rates of fraud in science – a far more testable field than philosophy – are fundamentally higher than we had previously thought. One implication is that the same may be true of philosophy. So there's at least an argument that the taboo on philosophic fraud is no longer sustainable. If we care about philosophy, we arguably need to think hard about how to strengthen our epistemic defences. Indeed, we probably need to do more work than science has done, since philosophy's defences are currently much weaker. Let's spend a few minutes cautiously seeing how far we can get.

What would philosophic fraud look like?

So how might we find out whether a philosopher – such as Jacques Lacan – is guilty or innocent of philosophic fraud? In many cases, it may be impossible to ever know for sure. But we can at least see a possible starting point: develop some rules of thumb – “heuristics”, in academic language – that can at least help us to roughly assess the probability that a piece of philosophical work is fraudulent. In scientific fraud, a researcher typically alters or makes up some of the evidence, then uses that false evidence to draw a fraudulent conclusion. Philosophic fraud must be a little different, because philosophy is made of concepts and words more than of facts. In philosophic fraud, it seems likely that we will end up condemning concepts themselves as fraudulent. Now, not all misbehaviour is fraud, by any means. Philosophers do plenty of bad things that seem fairly dishonest without being wholesale deception.

For instance, the US philosopher John Searle claimed French counterpart Michel Foucault told him:

“In France, you gotta have ten per cent incomprehensible. Otherwise people won't think it's deep. They won't think you're a profound thinker.”

(Searle also says that when he asked Pierre Bourdieu if he thought this was true, Bourdieu replied that it was much worse than ten per cent.) As so often, here I'm with that most clarity-focused of all modern philosophers, the great Karl Popper. He argued that for philosophers, clarity is a matter of professional ethics, so that obscurity is unethical. But neither Popper's claim nor Searle's aims to delineate fraud. Searle in particular says only that many French philosophers padded their good stuff with filler. Padding is not fraud, at least until it completely dominates the material. Wherever we might find it, any philosophic fraud would probably be distinct not just from the article-padding described by Foucault above, but also distinct from other forms of misconduct: from a simple lie; from Harry Frankfurt's philosophical concept of “bullshit”; and also from G.A. Cohen's concept of “deep bullshit”:

• A liar misrepresents, but often in service of some imagined greater truth.
• A bullshitter has no care for the truth, but just wants to be seen as saying something.
• A deep bullshitter may or may not care for truth, but makes statements of “unclarifiable unclarity”.

The philosophic fraudster, in contrast, would consciously deceive all the way down. They would be keen to assert that they speak the truth, while offering their new concepts in words which were not easily capable of being analysed for their truth-value, but which the fraudster knew did not, in fact, contain any substantial useful new truth. The philosophic fraudster would misrepresent about their own assessment of the value of their words and ideas. (The philosophic fraudster might well want their words to be true – a contrast with the bullshitter, who simply would not care. They might even come over time to hope or even believe that their words had some value, without being able to show what that value was. But the philosophic fraudster, like the outright liar, would know on some level that their words were deceptive as to those words' own value.)

The fraud-spotter's special challenges

But philosophic fraud-hunters face a few dilemmas. First we have the problem Antonios Sarhanis suggests in the comments below. “I don’t think Lacan deliberately created fraudulent philosophy,” he says. “I just think that like a lot of smart people, he wrote incoherent crankery.” As I say in my response, this could well be right; indeed, it prevented me from contemplating the possibility of philosophic fraud for a couple of decades. Now, I also keep asking myself: if you’re smart and philosophically-minded, how likely is that you never ask yourself whether you're just writing nonsense? Note that this is not the communications puzzle I address later in this essay. That asks: "Might a noted philosopher nevertheless be terrible at communicating their great ideas?" As a question, it pre-supposes that the ideas are good. Sarhanis is instead wondering about philosophers' self-awareness in the face of bad ideas. He is asking: "Might a noted philosopher have a bunch of bad and incoherent ideas, but never notice that they are bad and incoherent – and if they did, how would we know?" (A sort of corollary to this is that when the noted philosopher presents those ideas, not everyone will notice that they are bad and incoherent.) At this point, I do not know how to solve this problem. On the one hand, it seems to me a little unlikely that someone with this sort of lack of self-awareness could develop a big philosophical following. On the other hand, I suspect that you, like me, can think of cases in other fields where you suspect this has happened. For one thing, before you can utter a lie, you need to be aware of ... well, not necessarily the truth, but at least that certain claims are not-truths, or maybe just insufficiently-supported truths. There's arguably only a paper-thin gap between Cohen's deep bullshitting – “unclarifiable unclarity” – and lack of self-awareness, where you make a claim that you are aware not only is unclear, but also would fail to stand up to scrutiny. It is possible that even some people making such a claim might not be able to pick between these two as to which is their true state of mind. Here's a second dilemma for philosophic fraud-hunters: most fraud only gets caught when enough people start complaining about it. To maximise your chances of evading capture, you would want a fraud that could just look like the result of bad luck or bad judgement. And philosophic fraud satisfies this test perfectly. In Australia for many years, a popular fraud was to start a mining company, salt some dull assays with a little bit of actual gold, announce your gold-ridden find, sell shares to the public at the assay-inflated price, and then announce – gosh, bad luck! – that more thorough assays had turned up mere trace deposits. This had just the results that philosophic fraud would have: victims (in this case, shareholders) might complain, but they could rarely offer proof. Philosophic fraud would be similar to fraudulent asset-salting. Proof of a faked philosophical argument would be even harder to find than proof of a faked assay: in the absence of mind-reading, there is no philosophical gold standard, so to speak, for defining which philosophy is fraudulent junk. And philosophic fraud would be less susceptible to discovery, too: who among the victims would even voice publicly the possibility that they were being defrauded? If philosophic fraud were to exist, spotting it would be like catching these gold-mining frauds – no easy task, even when you have suspects. Finally, we run into a simple issue of labour supply. A dictum sometimes called Brandolini’s Law states: “The amount of energy needed to refute bulls—t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” The amount of energy needed to refute fraud seems even higher. Pinning down fraudsters requires a lot of work, especially in the presence of the fraud taboo noted above. And the task of pinning down fraudsters is currently assigned to ... exactly nobody. These issues help explain why claims of philosophic fraud are rare. But it is worth noting that such claims do happen from time to time.

A few (analytic) philosophers do claim fraud

Philosophers deride each other's ideas all the time. They rarely make claims about intent and honesty. As described in this example written up by leading statistician Andrew Gelman, academia in general has strong informal rules against calling behaviour "fraud" – taboos which have probably helped to keep most discussion of philosophic fraud off the table. But there have been some explicit fraud claims, especially on the analytic side of philosophy's analytic/continental divide. G.W.F. Hegel has been a frequent target. Arthur Schopenhauer at one point called Hegel “a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense”. Karl Popper reproduced Schopenhauer's fraud claim in the long chapter of The Open Society and its Enemies devoted to similar criticism of Hegel. (“Charlatan” seems to be a label of choice for claims of philosophic fraud.) Leaving Hegel, we come to Martin Heidegger, accused by his compatriot Rudolf Carnap of intentionally using “meaningless” terms and “pseudo-statements”. The post-war years have been more polite, at least in the public record. Fraud accusations are now murmured rather than printed. Many postmodern philosophers, such as deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, have been targets in informal conversations. They have rarely been accused of fraud on the record. But open accusation still does happen. In one of the more notable recent instances, philosophy professor Kit Fine (father of University of Melbourne philosophy professor Cordelia Fine) has declared that non-analytic philosophers as a class are frauds. Fine's mock-charitable admission that “I'm sure there are good Nazis” suggests he thinks the fraudsters are at the very least a sizeable majority of non-analytic philosophers. He adds:

“I mean, if one was kind to these people, you think they'd know no better. But I think you can actually almost demonstrate that there are cases when they do know better and they decide to engage in fraudulent intellectual activity.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1DbyJn03B0?si=GCL48OkuavaTGSd-&start=145 Well, let’s not rehash here the entire battle between philosophy's two most often-identified schools. This post starts work at the other end of the problem, as an exercise in fraud detection. If all the potential fraud we examine turns out to be among continental philosophers ... well, someone else can examine the analytics' possible offences.

Philosophers behaving badly

As well as knowing of motives for fraud, we also know that bad behaviour does exist amongst philosophers. This is kind of obvious: Philosophers are flawed human beings, just like everyone else. And we see it in philosophy's recent history. We know of at least two other leading post-war philosophers for whom ideas about truth co-existed with belief in terrible causes – Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger, one revealed over time to have been a Nazi collaborator and the other revealed to be an actual Nazi. (Both were vigorously defended by another post-war giant, Jacques Derrida, until the stack of evidence grew too high to write away.) De Man was a giant of postmodern philosophy whose name was bracketed with Derrida's ... until investigations revealed his assiduously covered-up pro-Nazi writings and history of lies and betrayals. He is now barely mentioned at all; philosophy has decided that if the man was bad, his ideas must have been bad too. This blackballing of De Man is, by the way, a really odd thing to have happened, especially within philosophy. If De Man's ideas were good, it should arguably not have mattered that he was a Nazi, any more than Einsteinian relativity would have been wrong if the great thinker had turned out to be sending half his wages straight to Heinrich Himmler every month. And philosophers of all people should be aware of this. Martin Heidegger is an even more revered philosopher ... but also, it turns out, a literal brownshirt. He joined the Nazi Party either to further his career or because he truly believed in national socialism – or it could have been a little of both. Either way, Heidegger's Nazism is so far receiving a more generous treatment within philosophy than has Paul De Man's. That may not last forever, but for the moment the two make an interesting contrast. (If Heidegger's case is an example of career success as motive, then it's worth remembering the three related conditions under which careerism most often flourishes: when we lack conviction that our work matters, when we may pay a price for good work, and when we may gain from signalling rather than actual contribution.) So we know that philosophers as a type can be as flawed as anyone else. And we also know that bad behaviour resembling fraud does exist amongst philosophers. We can look first at a slightly different form of deception: philosophical plagiarism. This is a deception that we know philosophers engage in; Wikipedia's list of scientific misconduct incidents includes several instances of plagiarism in philosophy. The field's best-known plagiarism spotter is probably Michael Dougherty (interview here). He expects to be rooting out plagiarism for a while yet. So this much is clear: we shouldn't presume that all philosophers behave flawlessly. Interestingly, Dougherty has noted repeatedly that scientific authorities are reluctant to name obvious plagiarism. They prefer euphemistic labels like “unacknowledged borrowings”. As Dougherty notes:

“It can involve an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of work, and an unreasonably uphill struggle to obtain retractions of philosophy publications, no matter how blatant the plagiarism discovered and how indisputable the documentation.”  

One potential implication of this is that philosophy may well move extremely slowly to deal with any suspected fraud problem. After all, compares with the challenge of proving fraud, plagiarism seems relatively straightforward. And yet philosophy has been reluctant to condemn what often seem like fairly obvious instances of plagiarism. So given that we can say philosophers might commit fraud, let's now examine the specific evidence that we should expect some of them to have actually committed fraud.

How would philosophic fraud get done?

Another threshold challenge here is to define philosophic fraud more tightly. What would a bogus philosophical paper look like, anyway? Here we can turn to fraudsters in other fields. In particular, we can consult the academic fraudster Diederik Stapel. Stapel, a Dutch professor of social psychology,  is useful here because he has written a full memoir of his fraud, titled Derailment. In that book he sets out how he fabricated and manipulated reams of data, usually numbers in surveys. He then handed this data out to others for analysis, as is typical in universities. The resulting flow of papers buoyed him up through the academic ranks. His fraud covered at least 55 of his own papers and 10 PhD dissertations. In a field full of statistics – social psychology – Stapel took shortcuts to apparent breakthroughs by changing numbers. In a field full of language, like philosophy, we can ask: might a fraudster do the same thing by playing with words? After all, it is sometimes alleged that words have an almost mystical power to affect philosophy's ideas. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought so. In his Philosophical Investigations, a paean to philosophy's problems with words, he wrote: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”. Wittgenstein's idea can become more evident to people as they spend more time at the intersection of language and ideas. I started to take it more seriously as my editing business developed. That business (Shorewalker DMS, thanks for asking) is literally about communicating complex ideas, both by writing material and also, increasingly, helping other people to do so. I spend a lot of time working with organisations finding out what they really want to say about complex topics. It's interesting to see, day after day, how words can be used to disguise a lack of thought, and the difference between clients with different premiums on truth-telling. In particular, one or two of the organisations I've come across over the years have used words (and illustrations and diagrams) to cover up their lack of much to say. These organisations have found ways of talking and writing at great length so as to make an impression of deep understanding on many people, while having little useful to add to the discussion. I try to avoid doing business with such organisations. But they represent an interesting lesson about the power of almost meaningless words. It's worth bearing in mind another Daniel Davies point: it does not take huge ingenuity to commit fraud. Most fraud schemes are not elaborately plotted criminal masterpieces. Some seem like accidents that fraudsters fall into. And after you've defrauded people once, you often find you have incentives to keep going. If philosophy does have fraud – even fraud you just fall into – we might expect to see it in areas where the language of philosophy has become particularly obscure and wordy.

Diagnosing fraud

At this point, we can make use of the sociologist Donald Cressey's Fraud Triangle, employed in many analyses of fraud. The Fraud Triangle rests on the idea that someone will more likely commit fraud when three conditions all apply:

• perceived pressure;
• a perceived opportunity to commit the fraud; and
• the ability to justify the fraudulent behaviour to yourself.

Philosophic fraud’s first requirement: perceived pressure

For starters, it might seem odd to suggest the idea of “philosophic fraud” would be worth it to anyone, given the economics of the activity. Philosophers work with abstract concepts; they don't make the millions of a Bernie Madoff or an Alex Jones. Right? Writing books like Lacan's famous Ecrits seems a perversely labor-intensive way to be a charlatan. Why is it even worth a philosopher's while to invent some bogus philosophical theory? Here's one idea ...

Philosophers have mixed motives

First, we should recognise that philosophers have mixed motives. Many want to advance human understanding. Indeed, it seems likely that most philosophers employed in the field would nominate some version of this as their leading motive for philosophical work – and not only for their own work but for that of other philosophers. Most philosophers seem publicly deeply attached to the notion that all philosophers are driven by a search for truth. (I suspect that to the extent that they exist, even fraudulent philosophers believe in the total domination of this seeking-after-truth model.) But it also seems likely that many philosophers want to be recognised within society as contributors, receiving either glory or economic reward. In practice the two are closely linked: receive enough acclaim for your philosophical contributions, and you'll end up with higher earnings too. Certainly people who have looked at this in respect of science often see it as an important motive. The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright says of scientists, in his Philosophical Studies paper “On fraud”: “A significant proportion of the activities of scientists can be explained by appeal to the fact that they seek to maximise their credit.” I’d argue that to the extent that Bright’s claim is true of scientists, it should be thought of as equally true of philosophers: maximising credit is a powerful motive. That would lead us to ask what strategies philosophers might usefully employ to maximise their credit – and whether misrepresenting their work might be an element in an effective credit maximisation strategy. My own view is that most philosophers underestimate the importance of the credit maximisation motive. I hope to expand on this point in later revisions. For the moment, note that this issue – underestimation of the importance to philosophers of credit maximisation – is the second of my two nominated most important reasons for the lack of philosophers considering the issue of philosophic fraud. (The first reason is that generalised taboo.) And note also that if the credit maximising motive exists among philosophers, it is a credible motive for a least a small measure of fraud.

Evidence from the real world of frauds

To really understand what is going on here, we can get some more help from our social psychology fraudster, Diederik Stapel ... well, if we take him at his word, anyway. (And hey, why on earth wouldn't we do that?) In a New York Times interview after his unmasking, Stapel suggests one credible source of pressure. He advises us to think of academic science as a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he is quoted as saying. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.” Part of Stapel's point is that academics are a lot more like you and me than you and me might think. Sure, they spend some of their time living the life of the mind. But just like us, philosophers mostly have families, full of people who have material needs, and they have material needs of their own as well. And like the rest of us, philosophers struggle to earn a decent living, buy a nice house and maybe a car, feel themselves modestly successful. To best fulfil these material needs from within academia, you need to do something very specific. You need to construct a Big Idea. And to do that, some people might conceivably start pushing the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Boundary-pushing can quietly become minor boundary-breaking. And when the boundary-breaking works, transgressors do more of it, becoming ever more invested in fraudulent behaviour, until eventually they're faking all over the place. (The topic has quite a rich sociological literature.) Interestingly, Zoe Ziani – a key player in the unmasking of social science researcher Francesa Gino – argues that much the same thing is true in the world of business studies:

“Business academia needs to reckon with this inconvenient truth: Committing fraud is, right now, a viable career strategy that can propel you at the top of the academic world.”

The biologist Trevor Fenning expressed this same idea equally bluntly in a 2003 letter to Nature:

“I asked a colleague who was familiar with the details of a recent case of scientific fraud why – given the risks – he thought the perpetrators had done it. He drolly observed that the real question is not why a few scientists commit fraud, but why more don’t do it. He went on to say that since the maximum penalty for getting caught (dismissal) was no worse than the routine penalty for not producing enough high-profile papers (no job), most junior scientists, at least, have nothing to lose by committing fraud.”

From this it seems clear how a philosopher could succumb to the same temptation that claims some scientists. As a career, philosophy waves all the same incentives to come up with a conceptual breakthrough, and suffers from the same shortage of real conceptual breakthroughs. And all that makes fake conceptual breakthroughs attractive, so long as they can be somehow disguised as authentic philosophy. (Stapel lists the incentives as including: “The need to score, ambition, laziness, nihilism, want of power, status anxiety, desire for solutions, unity, pressure to publish, arrogance, emotional detachment, loneliness, disappointment, ADD, addiction to answers”.)

Philosophic fraud's second requirement: opportunity

Once we accept philosophical fraud does have motives, the next side of the Fraud Triangle – opportunity – seems pretty easily established. It's barely a problem at all. In Derailment, Stapel records his first, seemingly very minor act of academic fraud:️

“I was alone in my fancy office at University of Groningen.… I opened the file that contained research data I had entered and changed an unexpected 2 into a 4 … I looked at the door. It was closed … I looked at the matrix with data and clicked my mouse to execute the relevant statistical analyses. When I saw the new results, the world had returned to being logical.”

The fraudulent data quickly helped him move up the academic ladder. And as Stapel's Derailment underlines, academics seem particularly trusting:

“Nobody ever checked my work. They trusted me.… I did everything myself, and next to me was a big jar of cookies. No mother, no lock, not even a lid.… Every day, I would be working and there would be this big jar of cookies, filled with sweets, within reach, right next to me — with nobody even near. All I had to do was take it.”

In his fine book on financial fraud, Lying For Money, the writer Daniel Davies points out something fundamental about fraud that is often missed: Trust creates a stage for fraud. Fraud thrives best in arenas where people trust one another as a matter of course. Davies places the presence of trust at the centre of his analysis of fraud. Summing up the points of which we can be reasonably confident: where we find general trust, imperfect checking, and any sort of stakes, we should expect to find some level of fraud.

Philosophic fraud's third requirement: justification

This third side of the Fraud Triangle may be the one that attracts the greatest scepticism about philosophical fraud. It was certainly a significant factor in my delaying thinking harder about the issue. The problem is this. Philosophers, in general, seek coherent explanations for why we do what we do. Is it really credible that these of all people would so comprehensively break the rules of behaviour in the process? If you want to attack the idea of philosophic fraud, I'd suggest you start here. And yet, as we will see all through this article, philosophers are not all angels. Even as a group, they do not in practice always act very philosophically. They are normal humans, and they carry the normal human defects. They fly into angry rants. They dodge their obligations. They threaten visiting lecturers with pokers – or, if you prefer, make up exaggerated stories about being thus threatened. There's one additional point to be made on justification. It's that many philosophers – probably at least a quarter – do not believe that objective moral rules exist. That is to say, these philosophers are moral sceptics or moral anti-realists. (Moral realism is often identified with religiosity, but a large number of agnostic and atheist philosophers – probably a plurality – also believe it.) A number of philosophical stances (postmodernism, for instance) seem less compatible with belief in objective moral rules. So it may be that some philosophical positions predispose people to shake off worries about making deceptive arguments. I honestly don't know what to do with this point, though it does seem to me underexamined in the literature. (If you've seen someone write about this, please let me know.) Despite these puzzles, all this confirms our starting point: philosophers are probably as ethically flawed as anyone else. Given the right push, many – like many of us – may find their values giving way to the needs of the situation.

A crucial question: how much fraud?

Once we know at least something about the shape of philosophic fraud, it seems useful to ask: should we expect to see much of it? This matters. If fraud affects one in a million philosophical arguments, I'm probably just engaging in a time-wasting exercise here. But if the right number is one in 20, then philosophy has an unaddressed problem. We can start with the observation that the sciences now appear to contain far more fraud and deception than we suspected as little as two decades ago. And social science, in many ways the scientific field with the closest relationship to philosophy, seems also to have the deepest problems: it has been battered by the "replication crisis", as more and more work has been checked and found to be dubious. As replication pioneers like Brian Nosek have established, psychology experimenters rerunning previous studies find up to half of the field's work doesn't replicate. And we see credible arguments that the man widely seen as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was engaged in – at the very least – a massive exercise in self-deception. Many of the errors revealed by science's reproducibility crisis turn on poor understanding of statistical methodology, including the problem of underpowering. But some smaller proportion of scientific work also contains numbers which have been altered to make the work look more impressive. One estimate is that this fraud constitutes about two per cent of all social science work, but estimates range at least up to five per cent. The revealing of this replication crisis stands as one of the most important breakthroughs in knowledge of the 21st century so far. It really is that important. This work has shown convincingly that social science needs to dramatically raise its epistemological standards. But you can argue that the same work also suggests something about intellectual processes in other fields which lack even science's slightly tarnished rigour. In scientific fields – even, at least in theory, fields like psychology – most of the results can, with enough effort, be checked. But philosophy is a field inherently harder to check. In most cases, no numerical results are ever produced. We get only words. That, you can argue, might make fraud a more attractive path than it is even in psychology. There is, in other words, no reason why we should not expect more than five per cent of philosophy to be fraudulent. That seems like a lot. The more I've thought about this, the more I've come to think it might be surprising if a lot of philosophers were not taking shortcuts. If scientists can get away with it at that rate, and they have far tougher constraints, philosophers can clearly get away with it much more easily. As Nosek himself has pointed out, the replication crisis may have surfaced strongly first in social psychology simply because social psychologists spend a lot of time thinking about motivations and rewards.

The sharp end: how can we spot specific frauds?

This brings us finally to the sharp end of the problem: what can we do to spot specific intent in individuals? None of the normal markers of fraudulent intent are available. Philosophers' work does not inherently contain working which is true or false; it relies instead on the power of language, and almost never comes to widely supported conclusions. It seems pretty well armoured against proof of bad intent. Kit Fine, that philosophy professor pictured above describing all non-analytic philosophers as frauds, has described this problem with admirable clarity:

“Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored.”

For some reason, these days no-one really expects of philosophy that it will be “of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life”. In such an atmosphere, fraud can more easily thrive. And the odds of this happening clearly rise as the language of philosophy grows more obscure. If someone was writing slabs of philosophy using the linguistic equivalent of a random number generator, it's no longer entirely clear that we'd know. So how might we nevertheless establish that a philosopher actually intended to make up a bogus theory? The typical real-world fraud looks like one of these famous cases:

• When you're prosecuting a financial fraudster like US Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernie Madoff, fraudulent intent is clear. The guy took thousands of people's money under false pretences – in his case, the pretences that he had a successful record of consistently profitable investing, and that he was investing his victims' money profitably. Rather than investing, he siphoned a lot of it off for himself and his family, and lost a lot of the rest.
• Now take US broadcaster Alex Jones. You might call Jones an epistemological fraudster: he promoted ideas about reality that he knew to be false. One of those ideas was that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked. The parents of some Sandy Hook victims were able to win a court judgment against him, albeit in a civil rather than a criminal case.  He lost in court largely because several of Jones' associates testified that he wilfully ignored evidence that went against his very damaging broadcast claims, and that he knew that such claims would be extremely profitable. They were witnesses to Jones' intent.
• We've already mentioned social psychologist Diederik Stapel. He looms slightly smaller in the popular imagination, but nevertheless ranks among the kings of academic fraud. After he initiated dozens of frauds, students (!) eventually noticed that his data was too neat. Stapel was sacked from his university, though he was never sued or prosecuted.

Fraud in philosophy, however, creates greater problems than any of these types of case. Consider how the fraudsters above got found out:

• Madoff's scheme fell apart when the market cratered in 2008 and too many investors asked for their money.
• Jones was done in by parents enraged at his exploitation of their grief, and associates who testified that he ignored evidence.
• Stapel was caught by data anomalies and because the failure rate of his studies was suspiciously low – in fact, zero.

But a field like philosophy usually works with abstractions rather than real money or real data or real people. So how do you go about catching a philosophy fraud? Short of mind-reading, is there anything you can do to eliminate the possibility that the accused has deluded themself along with everyone else? Grant that some philosopher is saying things which he knows are probably lies or at least bullshit, in the strict Frankfurterian meaning of that word. How do you even start to make the case for actual fraud? This is particularly true in the case of someone like Lacan, who rests much of his outlook on the shaky edifice erected by that founder of psychoanalysis mentioned above, Sigmund Freud. Few leaders in psychology now take Freud all that seriously; he's fast becoming the Ptolemy of his field. But how much Freud actually lied, as opposed to deceiving himself, is itself an open question. How do we deal with someone claiming to build on Freud's work? We might call this philosophy's fraud identification problem. And solving it will always take pretty powerful evidence. We're going to need evidence about what was going on inside someone's head – the guilty intent (or mens rea, as lawyers say in their fancy moments) that is required in serious criminal cases such as murder. Can such evidence ever be found? I'm not yet by any means certain. And I am certain less philosophically qualified than many to pass judgment on the issue. But we do find people guilty of murder from time to time without a confession. It's not impossible. Just as in the case of intent to murder, we need a "preponderance of evidence". Which brings us back to Jacques Lacan.

Lacan as possible fraudster

Your first response to the specific idea of Lacan as fraudster may well be that this seems like tripe. You may or may not know much about Lacan, but you certainly know that many very smart people rank him as a great thinker: there are those 12,000 words in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Surely the SEP authors would be able to spot the fraud, if there was one? This was my default position for at least a couple of decades. If I exposed myself to more of Lacan, I figured, I'd come to see the deep insight in what he was saying. I stayed in this position for a while partly because I initially found it an unpleasantly slow experience to try actually reading what Lacan wrote. You would work through some dense paragraph by him, and wonder in what sense it could be made to make sense. You would pause on that paragraph, trying to decode the meanings of the neologisms and tease out the ambiguities, and end up still wildly unsure of what he actually meant. Compare this with one of Albert Einstein's four 1905 ("annus mirabilis") papers, considered some of the greatest advances in the history of knowledge. You might not understand exactly what Einstein means by several terms on the first page of On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, for instance. But you can look them up in the space of a few minutes and find out just what they mean. And as a bonus, after an hour you understand something new and important that looks pretty well proved; it isn't just some piece of unlikely speculation. Actually, this is true even if you don't understand fully what Einstein means, because he's building on other important ideas in physics, and it's useful just to understand a bit more about those ideas. (At the very least, you come out understanding more about the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment, a pivotal event in physics.) And to help you understand all this, you can read great explainers, like Stephen Hawking, who have labored to make these ideas even more accessible. So the payoff to reading Einstein for an hour, particularly with Wikipedia at your fingertips, is hugely positive. The payoff to reading Lacan has been, for me at least, always negative; I come away feeling groggy and stupid. Of course, the obvious response to this is that I really am stupid, at least about the subjects Lacan discusses. I urge you not to discount this possibility. We're all stupid about some stuff, whether it's understanding the nature of reality, or relativity, or being able to grow tomatoes well. It's absolutely 100% possible that I am missing the deep meaning in what Lacan is saying. And that needn't even be down to lack of brainpower. There's a credible case that our thoughts are mostly shaped by our experiences. Perhaps I just haven't had experiences that require me to find that meaning. So I am sure that I could be wrong about Lacan, and that the video above might just be catching him on a bad day, and that the other things I've read by him could be simply not his best work, and that he could be really a very powerful thinker. (I take embarrassed solace in the reports that friends of Lacan like Maurice Merleau-Ponty couldn't make much sense of his philosophy either.) And it is also possible that while Lacan is not saying much, he is still saying it in such a way as to spark a useful self-reflection within some listeners. You sometimes see this in the works of commentators who come up with a list of different ways in which something Lacan said might be taken, or interesting reflections which take some Lacanian utterance as a starting-point. Someone might have a lot of useful thoughts while reading the Ecrits, even if those thoughts are their own rather than Lacan's, and even though those thoughts might equally have been triggered by other readings. Indeed, it is possibility to have significant thoughts triggered by all sorts of things, and we don't really know what that list of things looks like. People want meaning, and have evolved to find it, and they find it everywhere – including in places where it doesn't exist.

Analysing Lacan's statements

For those reasons set out above, I dip into Jacques Lacan mostly in short bursts, unable to take very much of him at once. (Yes, I do worry that this is tilting my judgments about his work.) But let's take a look at him as a possible specific example of philosophic fraud, and see whether we get very far. At the top of this post is film of a Lacan lecture at The Catholic University of Louvain in 1972, followed by an interview he gave the next day. This video is unusual firstly because, Lacan almost never let himself be recorded. (Read into that what you will.) And in watching this video, you do get a rare insight into his 1970s rockstar status among many intellectuals: he delivers not just with power but with a real sense of drama, as well as a nice sense of humour. (The video is also peculiar for a mid-lecture interruption, which Lacan handles with impressive patience.) But Lacan's address has a second interesting aspect, too. Try listening to what Lacan had to say, and writing down a summary as you go. At least for me, it was an instructive experience. Two examples pretty much at random: At 13:54.

"We cannot fail to observe that the thing which holds human beings together as well is something related to language. I call 'discourse' that something which within language fixes, crystallises and uses the resources of language – of course there are many other resources – and they use this so that the social bond between beings functions."

In other words, people socialise by talking. And at 38:36.

"The individual is so dependent on what he has expected from the world, especially on all the things which have been transmitted to him through that language, the language spoken by his mother. And it is through this something that he has received such significant, dominant messages. The desire of which the individual as the consequence begins to shape and mark his whole destiny ..."

Which is to say, with the hyperbole removed: "Our mother's language is one force that shapes us". Pull such passages apart, and we can start to consider the possibility that most of Lacan's rhetorical effort, written and spoken, is going into making individual phrases carry much more significance than they should be asked to bear. Lacan's approach can powerfully affect listeners. It is common for people to respond to Lacan by calling his lectures and writings "fascinating" and even "therapeutic". In discussing just this lecture, one Lacan admirer told me that "his lectures are quite easy to listen even though some would admit they didn't understand a thing he was actually saying". But when you strip away the pumped-up significance, the entire address seems to me a remarkable example of talk without much meaning. It is notable almost entirely for the terrific élan and total commitment of its delivery. Time and again, I hear Lacan touching on an idea, marking it as deeply significant, and then flitting away without explaining how he came to realise its deep significance, or suggesting how to measure that deep significance, or ... saying anything much, really. Parts of the lecture also seem to verge what the late Daniel Dennett called “deepities"” – statements with two meanings, one of them trivially true and the other profound-sounding but thoroughly wrong. Dennett's favourite example was “Love is just a word”. Listen to Lacan's statement at 14:56: “Death belongs to the realm of faith”; it's either completely wrong – you have probably had experiences that show you death happens in fact – or it has the almost trivially true meaning that our knowledge of our death affects how we live our lives. And this lecture video seems just an example of the wider Lacan phenomenon. A great deal of Lacan's writing that I have looked at – admittedly a limited sample – yields to such an approach, literally crumbling under the pressure of analysis. Once I approach Lacan as someone adding a lot of inappropriate significance to very simple thoughts, he becomes surprisingly easy to interpret. That's not to say that such interpretations are right. But they yield such consistent results that I have come to suspect Lacan may really not be saying that much in his writings.

Lacan the man

When you admit at least the possibility that one or two philosophers were frauds who just mastered the art of making the trivially true seem complex and insightful, you start to notice additional reasons to suspect Lacan. He has been credibly described as being ... well, not saintly. He kept two separate families, hiding one from the other. At various time he is said to have slept with patients, assaulted them, and charged more and more money for shorter and shorter sessions. Biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco also documented his habit of borrowing rare and valuable books from friends and then “losing" them. So should we suspect that Lacan was, at least in large part, a philosophic fraud, deceiving with intent? Even critics such as Dylan Evans – author of the Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, one-time apostate and more recently again a Lacan believer – have avoided the accusation. Before his recent recantation, Evans concluded in his essay “From Lacan to Darwin” that Lacan was simply “sadly mistaken, and perhaps even tragically deluded”. US linguistics pioneer and all-purpose intellectual Noam Chomsky has embraced the fraud accusation. Chomsky told one interviewer in 2012:

“Quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't see anything there that should be influential.”

Heidegger, who reportedly met Lacan in 1955,  seems to have doubted him for other reasons. He reportedly found Lacan's Ecrits unreadable and his personality unstable. He wrote in a 1967 letter to the Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist Merard Boss: “... I am enclosing a letter from Lacan. It seems to me that the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist ...” Philosophers Maarten Boudry and Filip Buekens took another approach to Lacan and his motives in a 2014 paper in Theoria, “The Dark Side of the Loon: Explaining the Temptations of Obscurantism”. Here they argued that Lacan, regardless of motives, obscures his meaning. Lacan's followers then create “epistemic defence mechanisms”, they argue – and one way the followers do it is by arguing that the nature of the unconscious mind requires complex and obscure arguments. (Boudry also has another interesting 2014 paper on Lacan, “The Art of Darkness”.) Boudry and Buekens argue that as a normal part of the bargain between author and reader, the reader often temporarily suspends scepticism. (This is essentially the principal of charity applied to reading about ideas.) If the reader reads and does not understand, they generally assume they have probably misunderstood, and so many will re-read the material and/or read read more. But as Boudry and Buekens point out, the unscrupulous author of some deliberately obscure and ultimately worthless tract can lure their reader into a trap – an interesting form of economics’ sunk-cost problem. After a certain point, Boudry and Buekens argue, the charitable and dogged reader faces a decision: give up the interpretive effort, without ever having gained insight, or double down on believing in the author's insights. Some readers end up “hanging on in quiet desperation”. Say Boudry and Buekens:

“We diagnose this as a case of psychological loss aversion, in particular, the aversion to acknowledging that there was no hidden meaning after all, or that whatever meaning found was projected onto the text by the reader herself.”

There may still be little written on fraud amongst philosophers, but there is an apparently fast-growing literature on obscurantism in philosophy. I was both surprised and relieved to discover it.

A side note: the philosophical communications puzzle

It's worth noting that Lacan is far from the only suspect in our fraud-spotting exercise. We know he's not, if only through the obvious fact that someone like De Man, acclaimed by many of his colleagues, turned out to be a cover-up fascist. But I began to suspect certain other philosophers more intensely after noticing what might be called the communications puzzle in modern philosophy. It isn't just that, as Boudry and others point out, obscurantism is common in philosophy. There's a broader problem here: leading philosophers are supposed to be, if not the epitome of "smart", then at least epitome-adjacent. This leaves us with the obvious puzzle, with the following steps:

• Many philosophers invest a lot of time to convince other people that their ideas are in some sense “right” – whatever, according to their own preferences, they think “right” is. In a sense, any philosophical paper says not only “here's what I think” but also “and I'm right”.
• So philosophers have strong reasons to write clearly. The little-known US philosopher Rosamond Kent Sprague points this out in a 1949 paper which exemplifies clarity's virtues just as brilliantly and succinctly as it explains them – “Must Philosophers Be Obscure?”. (If you click one link in this whole post, that link just above should be the one.)

“Philosophy, because it is, after all, attempting to communicate something through the medium of language, should be as concerned with style as any of the literary arts. It would not be too harsh to suggest that philosophers, being of all men (sic) the most consistent and serious seekers after truth, should be the most assiduous in striving for clarity and fitness of expression.”

• • Clarity in writing has a special virtue in intellectual endeavours: it is by far the best way to signal to others that you have taken the time to think through your own thoughts to the point where it is worth the effort for those others to invest in understanding them.
• Smart philosophers should also have the means to persuade: my experience is that smart people in all sorts of fields, from physics to software to economics, are disproportionately excellent communicators.
• And yet many recent philosophers – really, a disproportionate number – have had profound problems expressing themselves with real clarity even to other philosophers. Hegel is probably the paradigmatic example here, but Lacan isn't far behind.

The more I think about this, the more it strikes me as weird. Maybe a disproportionate number of philosophers share some unfortunate linguistic disability. What could it be? Applying the principle of charity, we can see a few possible explanations. Yet none of these seem really convincing. Subject difficulty. Maybe philosophy just gets more complex than we can express in normal language. Indeed, this seems the most popular explanation amongst philosophers themselves. As Whitehead put it:

“Philosophy is the criticism of abstractions which govern special modes of thought ... Language halts behind intuition. The difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident. Our understanding outruns the ordinary usages of words. Philosophy is akin to poetry. Philosophy is the endeavour to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet.”

Rosamond Kent Sprague points out a couple of gaping holes in this rationalisation.

1. We rarely see philosophers declaring that they have identified some great idea that they cannot put into words. (To which I would add that they could surely describe such an idea at least loosely, while also describing any problems they have in description – at which point we would probably have enough to work with. Nor is this problem necessarily special to philosophers; my guess is that Einstein confronted such problems in writing his 1905 papers.)
2. And anyway, it's not clear that such ideas exist: where simple exposition will not do, we can use techniques such as metaphor. Plato, for instance, tells the Allegory of the Cave.

Pressure of time. For instance, Bryan Magee argues that Kant blended clear structure and obscure sentences in Critique of Pure Reason because he was rushing to finish it before his death. My problem here is that Kant is no model of clarity even at those times (admittedly uncommon) when he is in robust good health. Dislike of writing. The linguist Valerie Hobbs wrote a paper, “Looking Again at Clarity in Philosophy: Writing as a Shaper and Sharpener of Thought”, which suggested that some philosophers may simply look down on mere writing: “I have even encountered the view within philosophy that writing is distasteful, ‘an unfortunate necessity’, a distorted version of a purer truth that exists in nonverbal form.” To this I would respond that:

• Writing is the main tool of communication that philosophers posses, so they'd better learn to use it until YouTube becomes an accepted channel for submitting doctoral dissertations.
• Writing is distasteful for lots of non-philosophers, the current author included. It is hard, among other reasons, because ordered thinking is hard. And yet we manage.

In contrast, many philosophers seem to have done just fine at communicating their ideas. Think of Socrates/Plato. And Thomas More. And Bertrand Russell. And Karl Popper and Martha Nussbaum and Daniel Dennett and Peter Singer and David Lewis and Derek Parfit. Does anyone want to accuse Parfit of having simple ideas? Even weirder is the fact that most professional philosophers teach university students – and teaching should help professionals to refine their communication of ideas. As the philosopher Nigel Warburton has put it:

“My own experience has been that I’ve understood philosophical ideas far better once I tried to explain them to someone else. Teaching bright students, preferably students who aren’t afraid to ask difficult (or obvious) questions, is one of the best ways to get straight about an idea.”

But note that this creates a deeper puzzle. The list of obscure philosophers is long, but it includes people like Immanuel Kant. It seems unlikely that he's a philosophic fraudster; too many people have gotten too much value out of him. Not all obscurity can be fraud. We need some other way to delineate fraud clearly from non-fraud.

Seven possible tells for philosophic fraud

We now have a deep problem. Statistically, it seems likely that we have fraud in philosophy. The most likely locations are those places where philosophy employs an unjustified obscurity of language. But obscure language alone is insufficient to prove fraud. What's going on seems to be hard to prove for sure from outside people's heads. We need mind-reading, and we don't have it. This essay won't fully resolve this problem. A philosopher might be obscure, inconsistent, or wrong not because they intend fraud but because they are struggling with difficult ideas. (The classic candidates for this excuse are Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger.) We lack any reliable mechanism to distinguish between necessary complexity – that is, necessary to deal with complex phenomena – and performative complexity, which simply hides a lack of substance. Even if we can detect symptoms of fraud in some work or body of work, they might still turn out to be the result of other problems than fraud. "Bad philosophy" is going to look a lot like "fraudulent philosophy." So we cannot detect philosophy that has definitely been carried out with intent to deceive. We cannot create an intellectual toolkit to reliably spot frauds. That said, we might still realistically aspire to own a set of tools which can show us the ideas more likely to be frauds. The tools here would be partial indicators, heuristics, rules of thumb. They would prove nothing definitively. They would be hints. If most of them were present in someone's work, we might usefully grow more suspicious. This section tries to create a first version of that toolkit, with seven possible partial indicators of fraud. (Note that in putting forward this toolkit, I reference Jacques Lacan's techniques, methods  and expression of ideas at several points. However, I aim to avoid critiquing any of Lacan's actual ideas.)

Indicator 1: Ideas made obscure

As noted above, many philosophers write bewilderingly obscure prose. Indeed, to some analytic philosophers – apparently all in the analytic camp – obscurity is a grievous sin. As the famously analytic John Searle once put it, “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself”. Variations are attributed to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Lord Rutherford, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett and, perhaps most famously, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Now, as I've said elsewhere in this essay, obscurity does not prove fraud. None of these indicators do. But if you wanted to commit philosophic fraud, obscurity might seem a good foundation. So it has to be considered a sign of possible fraud. The exercise I went through with Lacan's utterances earlier in this article seems a good example. Because he is so unclear, most people cannot easily and quickly judge whether he is saying something worthwhile. Indeed, to best understand many of his sentences, you need to go through a process unfamiliar to many readers and difficult for most: parsing out and boiling down his complicated utterances into clearer language. Only after all that work do you find that many of Lacan's sentences contain pretty much self-evident and often dull truths, wildly decorated with excess verbiage. Lacan seems to have been very much aware that his work was difficult to understand. Indeed, he described that difficulty as intentional, warning students to “be careful of understanding too quickly”. What's unclear is why he made it so uniformly difficult. Boudry and Buekens might class this as a case of an author urging his readers to adopt those “epistemic defence mechanisms”. I learned the technique of boiling down complicated utterances by reading that model of clarity, Karl Popper. He uses it to great (and dryly comical) effect when he questions Adorno's reasoning process in one of the essays from Popper's underrated collection The Myth of the Framework. Popper sets out an entire philosophy of clarity in a wonderful letter, not intended for public view but published after his death as “Against Big Words”.

“Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or ‘to society’) to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do - the cardinal sin - is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.”

A noted current-day philosopher, Michael Huemer, is equally blunt in his essay “Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy” (there's that divide again):

“Philosophical work has a cognitive purpose. The purpose is to improve the reader’s knowledge and understanding of something. The purpose is not, e.g., to confuse people, to impress people with your vocabulary, to enjoy the contemplation of complex sentence structures, or to induce people to shut up and stop questioning you.”

My own view might be closest to that of philosopher (and Popper admirer) Bryan Magee in his essay “Sense and Nonsense”:

“Never write unless you have something to say. Then devote all your abilities to making it as clear as you can. And always have the intellectual integrity and courage to qualify, if not withhold altogether, your admiration for the work of anyone, however clever, who does otherwise.”

The philosopher Nicholas Joll has taken a useful next step by proposing a philosophic standard of “default clarity”. It would consist of clearly-explained terms, rigour, precision, and accessibility. He sets it out in a terrific essay, “How Should Philosophy Be Clear? Loaded Clarity, Default Clarity, and Adorno”. A philosopher might have reasons to put clarity aside, he argues, but they should feel obliged to explain why. And crucially, “the burden of proof lies on those who would” discard clarity. As Joll adds: “Philosophy is exclusive enough without marshalling its style against would-be readers ... philosophy owes accessibility in a way that, for instance, natural science arguably does not.” But appealing as it may seem, Joll's standard remains merely a little-known default. It is not accepted as a philosophic norm for today's philosophers, let alone those of the past few hundred years. Convoluted philosophic expression is with us still. I suspect linguistic difficulty will remain among the most difficult of the fraud indicators. What one person will argue could easily be better expressed, others will argue cannot be simplified further. Thankfully, we have other possible tells for fraud.

Indicator 2: Teasing obscurity

Obscurity may involve more than just hiding simple claims or explanations inside elaborate prose, though. At times the obscurity may disguise the lack of any claims or explanations at all. It's not an original observation that many postmodernist philosophers in particular adopted a very specific teasing mode: they ask a blizzard of questions, while seeming to leave the big truth always just around the corner. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum famously skewered the feminist philosopher Judith Butler for this hide-the-ball style in her famous New Republic essay “The Professor of Parody”. Nussbaum's piece, an end-to-end takedown of obscure writing, includes a magnificent passage that helped direct my thinking towards this problem years ago now. Nussbaum starts with an example from Butler:

“Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social 'being'?”

Nussbaum slices this up mercilessly:

“Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that ‘direction for thinking’, what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so. “In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.”

If this is true at times of Butler, it seems at least as true of Lacan. As fellow French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu put it, much of Lacan's discourse promises “fundamental truths to be revealed . . . but always at some further point”.

Indicator 3: Failing Chomsky's summarisation challenge

To me, the sharpest pointer to fraud may be whether smart people – often followers of the Great But Obscure Philosophical Thinker – can summarise in clear language what the Great But Obscure Philosophical Thinker is saying. Very high numbers of people can do this for Einstein on physics, even though he tackles hugely complex subjects. With some philosophical thinkers, too, it is eminently doable. With a few philosophers, though, it's well nigh impossible. Peter Singer, for instance – as clear a writer as you will find in philosophy today – seems to have been sometimes completely defeated by Hegel's forbidding prose thickets. Lacan has the same problem; good clear summaries of his thought seem pretty much non-existent. As part of his long battle against the language of French postmodern thinkers, Noam Chomsky makes exactly this demand for summarisation in his 1995 essay On Postmodernism:

“As for the ‘deconstruction’ that is carried out ... I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc.”

Indeed, this restatement test seems to me the closest we can get to a useful empirical test for philosophic fraud. I have come to think of it as Chomsky's Summarisation Challenge.

Indicator 4: Constantly shifting meanings

A related problem with many philosophy texts is obvious once you learn to spot it: in a way that is not true of science, the words – and particularly the abstract terms – keep shifting their meanings. Einstein uses "magnet" the same way every time he mentions the term in his On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Not so in some philosophy papers, or in papers from other humanities fields either. Too often you try to nail down a particular single meaning of a term, and it bends and breaks at the first touch of your hammer. The brilliant left-wing essayist Nathan Robinson skewered this problem in a wonderful essay called "Academic Language and the Problem of Meaninglessness". In one particularly telling example Robinson quotes a passage from "Towards a Relational Phenomenology of Violence", an article in the journal Human Studies. He uses as an example this extract:

“The discussion of violence in terms of a relational phenomenon or interphenomenon requires emphasis on two matters in particular: firstly, that the lived sense of violence cannot be extracted from just one perspective or viewed against the background of an unshakeable ‘‘reciprocity of perspectives’’ (Schutz), a foundational (e.g., cosmological) order, a teleological order (epitomized by reason’s historical tendency to self-realization), or a procedural (e.g., legal) order… Secondly, the discussion of violence as a relational phenomenon is testament to the fact that we have grown used to understand violence as an exception to our intrinsic sociality (or, at the very least, sociability) and communicative competence."

Notes Robinson, tellingly:

“Just that word 'relational' then, leads us to a dozen more words with unclear meanings; now we must figure out how teleology, reciprocity, extraction, sociality (and the distinction between sociality and sociability), and communicative competence. “Now, the usual defense here is that to people within the scholar’s subfield, these words do mean something clear. But this is false. Try asking them. See if they give you the same definitions, and if those definitions are ever particularly clear, or always include yet more abstractions ... “Vagueness allows an escape from responsibility. I can never be 'wrong' about anything, because I can always claim to have been misinterpreted. (This is how Slavoj Zizek always defends himself.) If you ask me my prediction for what will happen in 2018, and I say 'the state of California will break off and fall into the ocean,' it is fairly easy for my proposition to be either proven or disproven. But if I say 'the people of California will develop a greater sense of their own intersubjectivity,' almost nothing that happens can clearly disprove my assertion, because it could mean many things."

(If you want to read a whole book on this and similar themes, try Michael Billig's wildly underrated and entertaining Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.)

Indicator 5: Talking outside the field

Another pointer may be the way that a philosopher presents when talking about a specialised topic that his listener knows well, but which is itself a non-philosophical field – and hence is an areas where words are not the only measures of truth. A famous turn-of-the-century philosophical controversy erupted in just such an area. It was the issue of whether philosophy was taking unjustified shortcuts in its treatment of science itself. The physicist Alan Sokal and his physicist-philosopher colleague Jean Bricmont published two rather damning volumes: Fashionable Nonsense (1998) and Beyond The Hoax (2008). These books set out what the authors saw as errors and possible misrepresentations made by broadly "postmodern" scholars whose work ventured into the physical sciences. The authors' list of offenders included Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard and our old friend Jacques Lacan. Sokal and Bricmont argued that in many instances, the philosophers seemed not to know much about their subjects – and yet, strikingly, they continued on, their language rarely hinting at self-doubt. Here's an excerpt from Lacan's 1966 lecture, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatever”, where he tries to analogise mathematical topology to mental problems, as follows:

“This diagram (the Möbius strip) can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease."

Write Sokal and Bricmont in Beyond the Hoax: "Lacan gives no argument supporting the relevance of mathematical topology to human psychology; he merely asserts it." And while debate continues amongst philosophers, it remains difficult to find mathematical topologists who believe Lacan was using the field's ideas in meaningful ways, here or anywhere else. (If anyone knows of such a topologist, the current author is genuinely interested to contact them.) Meanwhile, a number of topologists have claimed that Lacan is clearly just taking topological terms and throwing them into his text. Perhaps Lacan's long brush with topology was in part a case of the psychoanalyst not realising how much he did not know. But Sokal and Bricmont make a credible case that this was not a lack of self-awareness but a willingness to bluff away like mad about physics, assuming that most of his audience would not know enough to gainsay him. If Lacan was willing to do this for physics, what would have held him back from doing it on a broader scale?

Indicator 6: Choosing a field in crisis

There's also this minor potential pointer: to be a successful fraud, it probably helps if you're spending a large part of your career in a related field which is already reluctant to examine its truth-claims. Lacan fits this criterion too. He operated in the field of psychoanalysis, which was first undermined in the 20th century by a range of sceptics, from the anti-totalitarian Popper to surgeon (and originator of the "herd instinct" concept) Wilfred Trotter. After that, from the late 1960s on, came a wave of psychological thinkers, led by emerging feminists, who treated penis envy and castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex and the rest of it more and more like bunk. (An excellent guide to all this history is Seamus O'Mahony's recently-published book The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic.) The remaining psychoanalysts mostly seem to lack the self-confidence to start breaking down Lacan's prose (although ex-Lacanian apostates continue to emerge).

Indicator 7: Shamanism

I include this seventh indicator reluctantly, because it seems difficult to define shamanistic behaviour. But Lacan as a presenter clearly had a powerful effect on his audience. See François George's comments referenced above, or maybe just play that video at the top of the page. As Lacan's friend(!) Claude Lévi-Strauss put it:

"What was striking was this kind of radiance, this power, this control over the audience that emanated both from Lacan's physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans working in exotic societies, and I found there a kind of equivalent of shamanistic power. I frankly admit that, listening to him myself, I didn't understand deep down. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand. One of the reflections I had on this occasion concerned the very notion of understanding: hadn't it evolved with the passage of generations? When these people think they understand, do they mean exactly the same thing as me when I say I understand? My feeling was that it was not only by what he said that he acted on the audience, but also by something else, extraordinarily difficult to define, imponderable—his person, his presence, the timbre of his voice, the art with which he handled it. Behind what I called understanding, and which would have remained intact in a written text, a quantity of other elements intervened."

This sort of follower-cultivation seems a good start for a fraudster.

The limits of deteection

I want to emphasise again that we can never truly prove fraud in philosophy. Our philosophical crime detection tools are too blunt. Unlike police, we cannot gather fingerprints and DNA evidence. We certainly cannot reliably get inside philosophers' heads. We probably can't even ever reach the criminal law standard of “truth beyond a reasonable doubt”. But it seems to me possible that armed with enough indicators, we might get beyond the standard of civil liability – “truth on the balance of probabilities” – and perhaps as far as “truth to a reasonable degree of satisfaction”. At the very least, we might construct a rough ranking of our philosophical confidence in different ideas. None of this removes the risk of error. But we tolerate that risk in civil and to an extent even in criminal law. We should think about tolerating it in respect of philosophic fraud.

What's going on with philosophic fraud

Now that all this has been laid out, I have a few final thoughts on what's happening in philosophic fraud – thoughts that, for the moment, don't quite fit elsewhere in this essay. My best guess is that the truth about philosophical fraud will often resemble the experience of Diederik Stapel with his fraud in psychology. That is, some small minority of people will have found a way of speaking on topics they know a little about – a way of speaking which brings them admiration in the lecture halls and monthly paychecks from the university. And so they are just sticking to what works and hoping that no-one notices. This is not an unusual pattern. For instance, many performers in the entertainment industry follow it, consciously or unconsciously refining their act over years until they know how to push people's buttons just the right way. The same thing seems to happen in fraud: Bernie Madoff, for instance, started off with a minor infraction that he hoped would hide his problems until he had time to make them right, and that he correctly guessed no-one would notice, and got better at covering up as he went along. Over time the fraud then grew bigger and bigger, and he papered it over by using new investment money to pay out exiting investors. It was what he knew, and for a long while it worked. I'm struck by how strangely reluctant people are to conclude that philosophers might fall prey to the same impulses as Madoff, albeit with the aim of covering up the hollowness of their ideas rather than their ledgers. People should at least consider the possibility. Heidegger and De Man were willing to sign up on the side of a genocidal ideology. So what are the chances that some other philosophers would sign up for a life of lying to 20-year-olds and bullshitting a bit at conferences? Life is often hard; most people would like to take short cuts; when they see that they can take some, many will take more, even if there's a bit of dishonesty involved. Just like Madoff – except that intellectual debts never get too big to hide. We do have accounts from the field which suggest this is happening. One comes from the philosopher and writer François George, who attended a 1970s Lacan seminar. As recounted by the philosopher of language François Récanati, George found the Lacanian seminar a ritual of master and disciples. He also found that when prompted, he too could speak in a meaningless but impressive Lacanian manner. George describes the seminar as an event where no real understanding ever took place, but the participants experienced an “imagined" understanding:

“... (T)hey had simply witnessed an exchange of signals, quite comparable to animal communication. How can one not understand each other when all one does is exchange passwords and signs of recognition? And how can one not understand that 'understanding' is a decoy, an effect of the imagination, when the whole question is to appear adorned with the same feathers in the courtship ritual?”

Interestingly, people are a little more willing to question bona fides in the field of religion. Consider the writings of Joseph Smith: they have had an enormous impact on many people of both morals and intellect, including one recent and rather spectacularly upstanding Republican candidate for the US presidency, Mitt Romney. Yet most people reject Joseph Smith's claims, in part because we have some evidence that Smith may also have been a con man. We have even better evidence for fraud on the part of the founder of Scientology. Yet philosophy somehow gets a pass on the fraud question, despite two of its recent leading lights being actual Nazis. Why?

Conclusion: We don't know what's going on with philosophic fraud

We really do need to find out what's going on with philosophic fraud. If philosophy has a substantial number of deceptive ideas – say, five per cent of the field's major works – then we should be working hard to identify these ideas, in just the same way that, say, social scientists are working to weed out bad results there. At a bare minimum, if Lacan, for instance, is a philosophic fraud, we should:

1. stop believing his ideas are as likely to be worth looking at as any others;
2. start pointing this out when other people introduce them into discussions; and
3. stop teaching them to students without warnings.

Indeed, even if there are just quite a lot of reasons for thinking Lacan might be a fraudster, we should probably stop teaching his ideas so enthusiastically to students. (Note what I'm not saying here. I'm not saying I want people like Lacan banned just because they send up several red flags for fraud. I absolutely do not want Lacan banned – not that this would really be possible to today's world anyway. I do want people to start considering a bit more carefully whether it's advisable to assess the risk that some thinkers are frauds, and to be more cautious about making them part of the canon and including them in so many philosophy courses.) Fraud by continental philosophers should be of particular concern to continental philosophers themselves, since continental philosophy relies more on unclear language for its power. Fields in which fraud is common and detectable typically develop defence mechanisms; philosophy – and particularly continental philosophy – has not developed these defences at all. If philosophy really does have a substantial number of knowingly deceptive ideas, then one important next question is this: why do more philosophers not see them? For that matter, why do so many followers and indeed elaborators of these ideas so adeptly deceive themselves? Some of the elaborators may well genuinely believe they are making further intellectual breakthroughs. Yet in reality, all of them are wasting their time – indeed, in many cases, big pieces of their lives. (My best answer to this question so far is that philosophers don't see deception for the same reason that most of us can't figure out a good magic trick: they lack experience in looking for deception, and they lack it because the norms of the field implicitly discourage doing it.) And what does it mean for philosophy that it has been so reluctant to dig into the question of philosophic fraud? Can modern philosophy really consider itself a repository of important wisdom while it happily avoids looking for deliberate deception inside the field itself? The final question, which I've only just begun to think about, is this: if five per cent of the ideas in a major field of intellectual endeavor have actually been placed there with intent to deceive, and rarely called out, how does that affect the way ideas themselves are treated by the rest of the world? Could that be connected with the dwindling of public interest in philosophical issues? Bottom line? Philosophers need to understand that from time to time, they're almost certainly being suckered. They should find a way to stop being such dedicated marks.

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Acknowledgements My thanks to ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking and Gemini 3.0 Pro for a series of useful comments. All errors remain mine. Major updates This essay has been updated more than 100 times since its publication; it's in some ways a different essay now, though the central points remain. Among the changes:

• 28/11/2024 update added a seventh fraud tell – shamanism, as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
• 18/1/2025 update aimed to clarify that I am by no means sure Lacan was a philosophic fraud; I'm not sure I would even go so far as to say Lacan was probably a philosophic fraud.
• 24/4/2025 update added Andrew Gelman's discussion of the difficulties of formally alleging academic fraud.
• 30/5/2025 update aimed to clean up some of the narrative and define concepts more clearly.
• 8/6/2025 update added key messages to the start of this very long post, to enhance its ... clarity.
• 28/11/2025 update expanded the discussion of the fraud taboo.
• 12/2025-1/2026 updates expanded the discussion of motives for philosophers to commit fraud.

Comments: As usual, yes, I'm an idiot about a lot of things. I really will be grateful if you can point out in the comments specifically where my idiocy lies, and detail the huge mistake(s) I'm making. Hire my editorial advisory firm: Shorewalker DMS, https://shorewalker.net.