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


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

## 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