Dogs and proposal-writing

Humphrey reads Harry G. Frankfurt's delightful book

The night air is now heavy with the smokey, earthly scent of late-summer flowers, and Humphrey is delighted to be back in Toronto to enjoy them. His guardian has been monopolizing the computer, not giving him a chance to catch up on his blogging.

“What are you doing?” He asked her.

“Remember that research grant proposal….?” She began.

Humphrey tuned out. Oh yes, he thought, that stupid grant proposal, the one which the guardian and Dr. C. spent two whole all-nighters on this summer; the one that spoiled the chances of trips to meet Guido the Donkey at his Essex County farm. Humphrey remembered the grant proposal well.

“But I thought you and Dr. C. won that?”

“Yes,” she responded, “we did.”

“So why are you fussing with that? You won it, so you are done, right?”

“Well, now we have to actually do the research.”

Humphrey thought to himself, dogs can never write grant proposals, and not because typing is a b**ch with no opposable digits (no pun intended). No, it’s because dogs cannot engage in bullsh**.  As philosopher Diogenes the Cynic argued and Humphrey described in an earlier blog post, dogs are honest and authentic beings (and therefore should be emulated).

The routine refusal to speak with regard to the truth, philosopher Harry Frankfurt aptly observed in his book on the subject, is bullsh** because “evasion of normativity—correctness being, after all, a standard external to one’s personal desires—produces a kind of ordure, a dissemination of garbage, the scattering of sh**” (Mark Kingwell in his July 2011 Harper’s article).  In this way, bullsh** is far more threatening, and evil, than plain old lying. As Frankfurt points out, the bullsh**ter “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullsh** is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

The fact of the matter is, Humphrey learned from looking at all these grant proposals, is that they are rife with bullsh**. They sort of have to be, since they cater to what the judging panels want, and also reflect (in many cases) the researcher’s aspirations within the constraints of the funding.