It should be, but it isn’t:
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
From Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” The fact is that a lot of simple, vivid, expressive political language is stupid and dishonest. Sarah Palin on the campaign trail last October:
You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
Could you get any simpler? But apparently genetics research often involves fruit flies. If you want to help humanity, a good thing to do is give some competent scientists the money to play with bugs. Don’t ask me any more about the subject, because I don’t know. Neither does Gov. Palin, of course. But she didn’t have to hide her ignorance from herself by using cloudy language. When you’re dealing with technical subjects, ignorance often presents itself as common sense; it needs no language to hide behind. And most public subjects are technical, from global warming to the procedures for drafting and passing a bill. If you assume that you’re right, or if you don’t care, you can tell far-fetched lies in simple language and never break a sweat.
Orwell’s targets were euphemism and latinate obfuscation (“liquidate” for kill, and so on), and there’s no doubt they’ve done harm. But I think he was being a bit intellectual about it all. He was working out a theory about how people could lose their intellectual honesty step by step, until finally they could not even choose their words for themselves; 1984 and newspeak mark the furthest development of his ideas. But people can just refuse to think; they can assume all those facts and figures are a lot of argle-bargle. Or they can figure their principles are good and the main thing is to advance their side, regardless of truthfulness on individual issues. Or they may not care either way and go with whoever gives them the biggest paychecks.
Yeah; Orwell kind of wants us to think good writers can't lie. When, really, good writers are really better at writing in some sense.
That particular fruit fry study was actually about pests affecting olive orchards which are of some economic importance in California.
Technically, Palin's statement was bullshit–a speech act about which the speaker doesn't care whether its true or false that's intended to affect the listener's opinion on an unrelated issue. I probably could phrase that better, but you probably get the idea. In this case Palin doesn't care if the fruit fly research is of any value because the statement isn't about that.
There's a competing definition of bullshit as florid language covering over meaninglessness or stupidity prefigured by Orwell's essay, but, yeah, they're two different things.
That's the Frankfurt thing, right? I never read the whole piece, so all I can say is I like the idea but in my experience "bullshit" is used simply to say a statement is wildly and flagrantly false, with no reflection on whether the person who made the bullshit statement believes in it or not. But maybe Frankfurt just wanted a handy term for the concept he wanted to get across, or maybe he has some good reason "bullshit" should apply only the way in which he uses it.
Frankfurt (and the philosophers who refined and elaborated on his work) created a precise technical term for a concept that needed one from the more broadly applied vernacular. There's already a good term for flagrant lies: "flagrant lies"
It's useful to be able to distinguish that sort of bullshit from lies. Take your example of political rhetoric in global warming. The falsehoods there aren't flagrant because the science is too complicated for most folks to understand. And sometimes the skeptics say things that are technically true (but misinterpreted or irrelevant). Doesn't make it any less bullshit.
Yeah, it sounds like Frankfurt just needed a term to slap on the concept he had in mind. The problem is that the term was already doing duty as the label for "wild and flagrant untruth." And so it does now, even if Frankfurt and his colleagues find it useful among themselves to insist on their narrower and more precise definition.
Notice that I say "untruth" and not "lies." A lie is a statement that the speaker knows to be false. In my experience"bullshit" is not used to imply anything about state of mind. The Mac definition: "stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense." That matches the way I've heard the term used by everyone but yourself and Prof Frankfurt, so I'm willing to go by the definition.
Obviously, if I ever join a conversation of philosophers, my sense of the word may need to be adjusted if I want to get in the swim of things. But you've got me ready to make the shift as necessary.
Certainly you should use the word to mean whatever the people you talk to understand it to mean.
The important thing here, I think, is the concept and not the term. It comes up a lot in science communication, particularly politicized science; your original post pointed out a few examples. With the concept in mind it's easier to recognize it and analyze the subtext without getting bogged down on the details of whether a particular point happens to true or not.