Is this abstract intentionally ironic or not? Bullshit in this include “social structural factors”,“part of a speech community”,”practice of bullshitting” “bullshitting backfires”. Is there any principle that “any critique of language is self referential”?

> Is this abstract intentionally ironic or not? Bullshit in this include “social structural factors”,“part of a speech community”,”practice of bullshitting” “bullshitting backfires”.

They are all very real.

The first three are standard aspects of a linguistic/speech community.

The fourth, as described, is specific to BS communities. That said, the phenomenon of linguistic artifacts falling in and out of speech communities is a thing, and this is sort of what he is talking about (maybe if viewed at a higher level of abstraction).

I’ve done research on speech communities, and I’ve also seen ”professional BS speech communities in action. It’s a sight to see.

From the article itself,

value prop, first moved advantage, proactive technology, paralellization. Leading edge-solutions.

These are also pretty common terms in business/technology. The fact that someone cut proposition to prop may be a bit pretentious but not bullshit. The first moved looks like it is a first mover advantage and indicates that whoever was intimidated by these terms was probably not part of the “community”.( I don’t know what to think of a linguist who writes “leading edge-solution”… and “paralellization”?)These terms are not just common but also easily understood in my opinion, even outside the specific domain and less pretentious than “practice of bullshitting” when all you want to say is “bullshitting”.

Who knows, maybe I am a bullshitter too and just in denial…

Felt the same when reading these examples. I am afraid we just got used to it.

I am afraid it is true to some extent… but then again this article made me feel a bit better about my condition:

I will argue that bullshitting is triggered by a speech community with many conceptual entrepreneurs, significant amounts of noisy ignorance and permissive uncertainty. These conditions are likely to spark the language game of bullshitting

You could not make it up, writing an article about bullshit and arguing about “conceptual entrepreneurs”, “noisy ignorance”, “permissive uncertainty”, “language game”. This made my day.

I think you may want to consult the article for a definition of "bullshit". The article describes it as (this definition is curated by me, the article has more descriptions): discourse which is created, circulated and consumed with little respect for or relationship to reality, and crafted to wilfully mislead and to serve the bullshitter’s purposes.

I'm pretty sure the terms in the abstract are well defined recognized terms in this area of study.

There's a big difference between jargon, which may be opaque to someone outside the field, but is genuinely communicating something important to someone within it, and buzzwords, which are largely bullshit designed to sound like important jargon.

My jargon is your buzzword and the other way around. Qualification of importance and information content is subjective and contextual. Will one side or the other choose who the bullshitter is, or will both sides realise everyone is bullshitting to some extent as a social signalling tool. I gave a few quotes above from the author that would be inspiring for many a buzzword slingers.

"Leveraging synergies to create strategic multiphasic solutions" is 100% buzzword. There's no real information being conveyed there.

"Investigating the social structural factors underlying the speech community helps us to understand the practice of bullshitting" contains jargon, but is actually telling you something. (Probably. I don't 100% understand the jargon involved, but inferring from related things I do understand, this should probably be a coherent sentence. Regardless, the words being used can convey actual information.)

Just because you can't understand something doesn't mean it's bullshit. It being bullshit means there was nothing to understand in the first place. It's conveying no meaningful information, just trying to make you think the person who said it knows what they're talking about.

If you want to try to redefine "bullshit" to mean "stuff I can't understand", then you're welcome to do so, but it's going to be about as useful as Humpty Dumpty declaring that "glory" means "a nice knock-down argument".

“Leveraging synergies to create strategic multiphasic solutions” a bit extreme I concur, no zero information content nevertheless. I can see that the solutions will be delivered in phases but with a strategic intent. Need more clarity on the link between synergies and phasing but that does not make it bullshit or absolve it from being bullshit either.

Could be someone telling that he will align their team’s schedule with another team’s and therefore will split delivery in multiple phases. Could be someone throwing words in excuse for their failure to deliver a strategic project. Could be some random person saying this to demonstrate what bullshit is.

There is no scenario there where information is not conveyed and that does not have anything to do with bullshitting in the end anyway. Bullshitting is not about the vocabulary but about its use as a means to conceal something by saturating the channel of communication. There is an intentionality assumption as the key defining criterion. Also the challenge that while information in a communication is “well” defined, concealment makes many assumptions about the social context of expectations for information flow.

> ... to get things done in that community...

But how does anyone get anything done in that community? It's all just words that don't mean anything; how do you cause any action that is more than just words?

Or is "getting things done" just producing words, and getting others to produce words in response?