Some philosophy is probably fraud; let’s try to find it

If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, we might well expect that we have a great deal of philosophic fraud as well. But in philosophy, how can we detect the fraudsters? Here’s a first attempt.

For at least 60 years, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been widely considered a very important thinker. That’s him above, giving a 1972 lecture, already a hero to many. Historian of psychoanalysis Élisabeth Roudinesco claimed in 2016: “The twentieth century was Freudian; the twenty-first is already Lacanian”.

Over the past 15 years I have come to think of him not as a hero, but as a suspect. Lacan may well be the philosophical equivalent of Bernie Madoff or Alex Jones or perhaps Diederik Stapel. He might well have committed philosophic fraud.

Fraud? Is that too severe?

Fraud seems at least arguably an appropriate term for deceiving the world into believing you have a trove of insights when you in fact possess nothing of the sort. In exchange for the audience’s attention, the philosophic fraudster doles out fake wisdom, flashily but falsely labelled “Insight”. The philosophic fraudster intends to deceive and knows he is not truly illuminating? How different then is such a person from 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, investments of belief are at least as important as investments of cash.

And the fraud exposed in the course of science’s current 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.

Maybe that needs to change. If so, Jacques Lacan seems a good suspect to examine.

Before we start, a caution

We need one caution here. If the term “fraud” is appropriate, there seems nevertheless to be a taboo against making the claim. On the rare occasions that philosophers do suggest a colleague may write to deceive, they are apt to use euphemisms like “wilful obscurity”.

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.)

But this claim, like many others, falls short of an outright fraud accusation. It only amounts that to claiming many French philosophers bulked up their good stuff with some filler. Padding is not fraud, at least until it dominates the material.

And that philosophical taboo on the brutally condemnatory term “fraud” might be sensible. Is it wise to introduce it into the discussion? Do we want to turn philosophy into one more field where accusations of bad motives get hang in the air? Do we want to make philosophy more like … well, blog comment threads? Or even worse, like Twitter?

At the very least, we should tread carefully.

Yet regardless of  how many people are perpetrating it, the odds seem to be that philosophic fraud is a real thing that happens. Some scientists were initially reluctant to wash their dirty laundry in public, but you can argue that confronting the replication crisis will ultimately strengthen science. So with philosophy.

The trick would be finding out which specific philosophers are committing the fraud.

Let’s spend a few minutes cautiously seeing how far we can get.

What would philosophic fraud look like?

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.

Wherever we might find it, any philosophic fraud would probably be distinct from a simple lie, from Harry Frankfurt’s philosophical concept of “bullshit”, and also from G.A. Cohen’s concept of “deep bullshit”. The liar leads their audience away from the truth, while asserting that they are speaking the truth; the bullshitter has no care for the truth, but just wants to be seen as saying something; the deep bullshitter may or may not care for truth, but makes statements of “unclarifiable unclarity”. The philosophic fraudster would consciously deceive; 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 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 their own value.

But here’s a dilemma: 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.

Philosophy 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.

Starting point: (analytic) philosophers do claim fraud

Philosophers deride each other’s ideas all the time. Fewer have felt that they could call out fraud in their own ranks. But there have been some, 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.) Then there’s the German logical positivist Rudolf Carnap, who accused his compatriot Martin Heidegger of intentionally using “meaningless” terms and “pseudo-statements”. And many postmodern philosophers, such as deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, have been targets in informal conversations, even if they have rarely been accused of fraud on the record.

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 barely charitable admission “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.”

But let’s not rehash here the old battle between philosophic schools. This post starts from the other end of the problem, as a more straightforward 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.

Philosophic fraud’s first problem: motive

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 …

The social psychology fraudster Diederik Stapel can tell us how a particular fraudster came to deceive people – well, if we take him at his word, anyway. In a New York Times interview after his unmasking, Stapel suggested that academic science was becoming 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 might think. They may spent some of their time living the life of the mind, but they mostly have families, which have material needs. They struggle to earn a decent living, buy a nice house and maybe a car, feel themselves modestly successful. To do that in philosophy, you need to construct a big idea. And to do that, some people might conceivably start pushing the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Boundary-pushing quietly becomes 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.

In Stapel’s own memoir, Derailment, he 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.”

It’s surely possible that much the same thing could happen to a philosopher. Philosophy has the same big incentives to come up with a conceptual breakthrough, and 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”.)

In his fine book on financial fraud, Lying For Money, the writer Daniel Davies some key points about 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.
• It does not take huge ingenuity to commit fraud, so most fraud schemes are not elaborately plotted criminal masterpieces.
• Many fraudsters fall into the behaviour rather than consciously choosing it.
• Once you’ve defrauded people once, you have to continue doing it, to keep up the illusion of proprietary.

As Stapel’s Derailment underlines, trust is a hallmark of science:

“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.”

And philosophy, of course, also fits this high-trust description well – so much so, in fact, that outright accusations of philosophical fraud have for some time been seen as almost disqualifying behaviour. (To be fair, you can see why that norm has grown up. As I mentioned above, no-one wants philosophy to become Twitter. But that norm has its downside, too: sometimes, it seems likely, people are setting out concepts they know are not right, and people are taking them seriously.)

To confirm that bad behaviour can exist amongst philosophers, we can first look at a slightly different form of deception: philosophical plagiarism. This is a deception that we know philosophers engage in. The field’s best-known plagiarism spotter is probably Michael Dougherty; there’s an 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.

For additional proof that philosophers can be motivated to do bad things, we can examine 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 bad causes – Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger, both revealed over time to have been Nazis. De Man was a giant of postmodern philosophy whose name was bracketed with Derrida’s … until investigations revealed his hidden 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. Heidegger was an even more revered philosopher … but also, it turned out, a literal brownshirt who joined the Nazi Party either to further his career or because he truly believed in national socialism. Heidegger’s Nazism is so far receiving a more generous treatment within philosophy than has De Man’s. That may not last forever.

Philosophers as a type are, it seems, probably as flawed as anyone else.

The second problem: how would philosophic fraud get done?

OK, so in theory a philosopher might want to put one over on the world. But what would that even mean? What would a bogus philosophical paper look like, anyway?

Again here we can look to Diederik Stapel. In a field of statistics (social psychology) he took shortcuts to apparent breakthroughs by changing numbers. In a field full of language, like philosophy, 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”.

I started to take this idea 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.

If philosophy does have fraud, we might expect to see it in areas where the language of philosophy has become particularly obscure and wordy.

Problem three: 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?

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. Social science, in many ways the scientific field with the closest relationship to philosophy, also has the worst 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.

And this is in a field where most of the numbers can, with enough effort, be checked. Philosophy is, again, a field inherently harder to check – which 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 fourth problem of philosophic fraud: specific intent

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 – yes, that bloke who described 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.
• Diederik Stapel, who looms slightly smaller in the popular imagination, nevertheless ranks among the kings of academic fraud. A Dutch professor of social psychology, Stapel fabricated and manipulated reams of data and then handed it out to others for analysis, rising through the academic ranks as he did so. His fraud covered at least 55 of his own papers and 10 PhD dissertations. Eventually, students noted 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 that case?

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. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy devotes more than 12,000 words to him. Surely they 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.) 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, simply because I haven’t had experiences that require me to find that meaning. 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 solace in the reports that Lacan’s friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty couldn’t make much sense of his philosophy either.)

And it is also possible that while he 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 they were their thoughts rather than Lacan’s, and even though they 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.

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. It’s an interesting experience.

An example, 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.”

Or in other words: People socialise by talking.

Another example, 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.

Indeed, parts of the lecture 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 – 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 some other reasons for examining 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 money for shorter and shorter sessions. Biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco also documented his habit of borrowing rare and valuable books from friends and them “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, apostate author of the Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, have shied away from the accusation. 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 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 actual fraud amongst philosophers, but there is an actual (and apparently fast-growing) literature on obscurantism in philosophy. I was both surprised and relieved to discover it.

The communications mystery

The question then is: is Lacan 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 mystery 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: philosophers are supposed to be the epitome of “smart”.

This is an issue, because many smart people spend a lot of time trying to convince other people that their ideas are in some sense “right'” – whatever, according to their own preferences, they think “right” is. They have motive to persuade. They generally 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. Among philosophers, Socrates and Thomas More seem to have done just fine. 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.

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:

• Maybe philosophy just gets more complex than we can express in normal language. 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.”

• Maybe some simply feel the pressure of time. For instance, Bryan Magee argued that Kant blended clear structure and obscure sentences in Critique of Pure Reason because he was rushing to finish it before his death.
• 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.”

One problem for those who deny philosophic fraud is this: they must depict a large number of philosophers as not smart enough to write well – a commonplace skill – but still smart enough to consistently spot fraud – a much rarer skill.

So maybe philosophy’s linguistic problems are sometimes something else.

One alternative is all too rarely voiced: in philosophy, some people – at least a small minority – might 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. Many performers do this, 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 to cover up the hollowness of their ideas. People should at least consider the possibility. Heidegger and his now little-mentioned Dutch colleague Paul De Man were willing to sign up on the side of genocide. 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 the debts never get too big to hide.

We do have accounts of this phenomenon. 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?

Seven possible tells for philosophic fraud

So if fraud may be going on across philosophy, with whatever frequency, how might we spot that fraud – not just bad philosophy, but philosophy carried out with intent to deceive and disregard for meaning?

In this essay I focus on that group of ideas called “postmodernism”, and in particular on Lacan. But it is worth remembering that postmodernism is not the only set of ideas which may harbour some fraud. Hegel’s work, already mentioned, is far from the only candidate. And people will almost certainly invent more such ideas in the years ahead. It would be useful to have an intellectual toolkit which can spot frauds.

So we might usefully think about likely signs of fraud-in-progress – or, as they say in poker, tells. None of these provides proof of faud, but all hint at it. If most of these are present in someone’s work, it seems like a good time to get suspicious.

The simple made obscure

It’s hardly new to point out that many philosophers write bewilderingly obscure prose. Indeed, to many analytic philosophers, that’s a hallmark of continental philosophy. But obscurity is not proven fraud. On the other had, if you wanted to commit philosophic fraud, it might seem a good foundation. So it has to be considered a sign of possible fraud.

The exercise I went through with Lacan earlier in this article – boiling down complicated utterances to find that they are full of pretty much self-evident truths wildly decorated with excess verbiage – seems a good example. Lacan actually warned that the reader would need time to understand what he is saying. “Be careful of understanding too quickly”, he famously claimed. Boudry and Buekens might class this as a case of an author urging his readers to adopt those “epistemic defence mechanisms”.

I learned this technique of boiling down complicated utterances from Karl Popper. He used the technique to great (and dryly comical) effect when he questioned Adorno’s reasoning in one of the essays from Popper’s underrated collection The Myth of the Framework.

The philosopher Nicholas Joll has gone a step further 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 “the burden of proof lies on those who would”. As he 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.”

Joll is obviously not fond of continental philosophy – that divide again. And 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. Complexity is with us still.

And complexity remains perhaps the most difficult of the fraud indicators. What one person could easily be better expressed, others will argue cannot be simplified further. Thankfully, we have other possible tells for fraud.

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 essay “The Professor of Parody”. Nussbaum’s piece, an end-to-end masterclass in taking down obscure writing, includes a magnificent passage that helped direct my thinking on 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 is having none of it:

“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 Didier Anzieu put it, much of Lacan’s discourse promises “fundamental truths to be revealed . . . but always at some further point”.

The summarisation challenge

To me, the biggest giveaway 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 defeated by Hegel. 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.” 

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 under 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.)

Talking outside the field

Another giveaway may be how 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 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 he is clearly just taking topological terms and throwing them into his text.

Sokal and Bricmont make a credible case that Lacan was willing 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?

Choosing a field of embarassment

There’s also this minor potential giveaway: 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, some of them 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).

Shamanism

I include this 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. As his 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.”

These sorts of devoted followers are a good start for a fraudster.

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 really does have 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 likely to be worth looking at;
2. start pointing this out when other people introduce them into discussions; and
3. stop teaching them to students.

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 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 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.

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 ignores the fraud going on 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?

Philosophers should try harder not to be hopeless suckers.

Major updates: 28/11/2024 update added a seventh fraud tell – shamanism, as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

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.

About the author: David Walker is the principal of Shorewalker DMS, an editorial advisory firm. Shorewalker DMS specialises in helping organisations make their reports clearer , more complete and more persuasive. See our work and hire us at https://shorewalker.net.

Twitter: @shorewalker1

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