Harry Frankfurt

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

References

• cot-faithfulness-anthropic-biology
• observation-fabricated-snippets-and-bullshitting-remain-unlinked-mechanisms
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-ai-safetyinterpretability-literature-have-a-specific-name.md