Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [74]
Despite the difficulties involved with each approach, we are left with the intuition that in many cases we do have knowledge. In fact, even people like the Bluths often know things, yet clearly the project of figuring out just what knowledge is, and what kinds of things can be known, is still far from done. If only the series had not been canceled, maybe these issues could have finally been resolved.
NOTES
1. Of course by “trick” I mean “illusion,” since a trick is something a whore does for money . . . or cocaine!
2. Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963), pp. 121–123.
3. In fact, there is a debate about whether there can be Gettier-style examples that do not involve any inference. Although this might not seem important, the crux of some responses to the Gettier problem relies on the existence of an inference.
4. This case is a paraphrased version of the Gettier-style case that appears in Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), pp. 771–791.
5. For a defense of this type of approach, see Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
6. For what could be interpreted as an approach of this type, see Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).
7. For a view of this type, see Alvin Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), pp. 357–372.
Chapter 14
BUNKERS AND BALLS
Arrested Development, Underdetermination, and the Theory-ladenness of Observation
Michael Da Silva
Choosing Between Wayne Jarvis and Barry Zuckerkorn
In the first season of Arrested Development, the Bluth family is forced to continue using Barry Zuckerkorn as their lawyer, much to Michael’s consternation. Michael would rather have the highly professional services of Wayne Jarvis, who ultimately instead prosecutes the case against George Sr. But in at least one area Jarvis doesn’t measure up to Zuckerkorn. Jarvis doesn’t know balls.
Wayne Jarvis: Michael, this is a close-up satellite photograph of the Iraqi countryside. See this little series of hills around that stream? Those are bunkers. We believe those bunkers contain weapons of mass destruction. We also believe that your father was building on that land to hide them.
The Bluth family fears, and Wayne Jarvis is certain, that George Sr. helped hide the weapons by building bunkers. The U.S. government agrees and begins to mobilize troops, including Buster Bluth, to escalate the war in Iraq. It’s only at the end of the episode that the family’s ambiguously homosexual (bisexual?) lawyer, Barry Zuckerkorn, rightly points out that the landscapes in the photographs are actually testicles.
Wayne Jarvis: Michael, when we started talking to you, we didn’t have anything. But now . . . we got something. And you’re going to do time for it.
Barry Zuckerkorn: Those are the pictures? Those are balls . . . This close they always look like landscapes. Those are balls.
Thus, the episode “Sad Sack” raises the question: Do we see only what we expect to see?
Following the work of Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), many philosophers in the twentieth century accepted that theories “underdetermine” facts, or that there are rival and competing views on what a given image may be or what a given piece of data may mean. No theory can exclude its rivals by appeal to the world alone. The problem is that there are lots of different ways to describe the world, all of which are compatible with what we see in the world. In the bunker-balls photo, for example, there’s nothing in the photograph itself to tell a viewer whether he or she is looking at bunkers in Iraq or an analrapist’s testicles.
Rather than test a theory against data, people often use the theory to explain the data. Philosophers call this the “theory-ladenness of observation”: The very theories we advocate can determine what we see. What