Arrested Development and Philosophy (15 page)

Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo at the ancient Greek site of Delphi is one of the best bits of advice ever offered: “Know thyself.” Gob is an abysmal failure when it comes to following this advice. His lack of self-knowledge explains his inability to learn from his mistakes and may also go a long way in explaining his misguided hope that a singular event—making the family yacht disappear, or attempting to bury himself in his father’s coffin, only to emerge alive a week later (“Good Grief!”)—will be his salvation, or will at least get him the cover of
Poof
magazine. Sadly, Gob does not recognize his own impotence, a common tendency among incompetent people.
5
Thus, the only illusion Gob consistently succeeds at creating is an illusion about his own competence.

Gob not only lacks the professional virtues of a magician; he exhibits full-out contempt for professionalism of any kind. Gob’s various professional shortcomings—a misguided faith in his own abilities, rashness, a lack of professional diligence, elaborate scheming and showmanship substituting for talent—are all evident in his greatest professional flop, the “Sword of Destiny” trick. Seeking to impress the more famous magician Tony Wonder, Gob plans an illusion in which he is to be stabbed in the belly with a sword. Showing his typical impulsiveness, he buys an ancient Chinese sword—the real deal, not a trick sword—from a shady storefront healer. Having been banned from the Magician’s Alliance, Gob persuades his brother Buster to pretend to be the head illusionist while Gob serves as his assistant. But Gob ends up slicing off his brother’s artificial hand, thrilling the audience and impressing Tony Wonder enough that he offers to have the pair on his next DVD. Though feebly protesting “It’s not the real illusion!” Gob concludes that appearing on the “DVD is the destiny the sword has chosen” for him, and in a meeting with Tony Wonder, Gob reveals that he, not Buster, is the real illusionist and will be performing the
real
“Sword of Destiny” trick in a subsequent performance. In the course of that performance, Gob’s own fingers are sliced, only to be reattached later in a purposely botched surgery.

Impulsive bravado, an unflappable belief that he is fated to greatness, the substitution of theatrics for careful preparation, an intense yearning to belong to a professional community, a nearly lethal level of carelessness: The “Sword of Destiny” is Gob’s magic career in a nutshell.

The Magical World of Gob

Aristotle’s account of professional excellence helps us pinpoint the source of Gob’s failed career. Gob appreciates the aims of his profession and holds those aims in high esteem. He clearly sees magic as his calling, but he’s the antithesis of the competent modern illusionist. Vain, lazy, gullible, and prone to foolish dreams, he stands in stark contrast to the modest, hardworking, skeptical, and self-critical illusionist. On one hand, a competent magician has a decidedly unmagical worldview. Gob, on the other hand, embodies the magical worldview, and it is this worldview that makes professional success so elusive for him. In Gob’s eyes, success in magic comes not from mastering a sophisticated scientifically informed craft but from an elusive, mystical quality of heart that he believes he has. In “Missing Kitty,” George Michael briefly serves as Gob’s assistant. He later dismisses George Michael, saying “You don’t have the magic in you,” pointing to George Michael’s heart. “You never did. You don’t have it here.”

But “having it in here” isn’t enough. In “Top Banana,” Gob’s brother Michael asks Gob to mail a letter so that Gob will feel important and included in the family business. In an “act of defiance,” Gob attempts to throw the letter into the ocean, only to have the wind repeatedly blow it back in his face. Could there be a more pathetic image of Gob as a failed illusionist, vainly but persistently trying to “take Mother Nature and turn it upside down?”

Of all of Gob’s “huge mistakes,” opting for a magic career may thus be the most ironic. As Aristotle helps us to see, Gob’s professional failings are ultimately failings of
character
. He fails not because of bad luck or external circumstances, but because of durable features of his personality—laziness, inattention to detail, lack of humility, and so on—that show up most markedly in his professional efforts. Gob simply does not have the traits or attitudes required for success as a magician—or, arguably, for any profession.

NOTES

1.
Robin Leach, “David Copperfield Finds the Fountain of Youth,” Vegas Pop, posted February 21, 2007,
http://www.vegaspopular.com/2007/02/21/david-copperfield-found-the-fountain-of-youth-photos-exclusive/
.

2.
James Randi,
Conjuring
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), and Jim Steinmeyer,
Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003).

3.
Glory Road
, (1963).

4.
Nicomachean Ethics
, Book III, Chapter 1, 1103a32.

5.
Gob is a prime example of the “Dunning-Kruger effect,” wherein individuals who are incompetent wildly overestimate their competence and cannot recognize competence in other people either. The classic article describing this effect is Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
77 (1999): 1121–1134.

Chapter 13

IS JUSTIFIED TRUE
BLUTH
BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?

Brett Coppenger and Kristopher Phillips

The Bluths know lots of things. George Michael knows that he loves his cousin Maeby. Gob and the members of The Magician’s Alliance know the secrets that explain their tricks.
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Buster knows a great deal about agrarian business in the eighteenth century, but doesn’t know whether or not we should be concerned about an uprising. And if you were to ask Michael whether or not he was dreaming (or more likely, having a nightmare), he would sadly, but adamantly, maintain that he knew he was awake and that his experiences were all real.

Epistemologists (philosophers interested in figuring out what knowledge is) have attempted to find the necessary (required) and jointly sufficient conditions (those conditions that together are enough) for knowledge. By examining the previous examples of Bluth knowledge, we can illustrate the necessary and sufficient conditions of the “traditional account” of knowledge.

I Didn’t Even Know That There Was a Cabin . . . He Wasn’t Taking Me To . . .

For starters, George Michael, Gob, Buster, and Michael all believe something—of course, they don’t all believe the
same
thing. George Michael believes that he loves his cousin, Gob has all kinds of beliefs about how magic tricks are performed, even if he’s not very good at performing them himself, and so on. So belief is necessary (required) in order to have knowledge. But is belief enough? If you believe something, does that mean you know it?

Consider Tobias’s belief that he is an exceptional actor. Tobias is utterly convinced that he’s first-rate artiste (not to mention that he was a first-rate analrapist), despite his utter failure at landing any sort of role as an actor. Perhaps we can place some of the blame on Carl Weathers, but epistemologists are not in the business of finding out who is at fault, we’re worried about
knowledge
!

The problem with Tobias’s belief is that it’s unjustified. Tobias believes that he’s a great actor, but he holds this belief despite a preponderance of counter-evidence. It’s hard to imagine why Tobias thinks he can act. Mere belief, while necessary for knowledge, is not sufficient—we need something more. A belief must be
justified
if it’s to count as knowledge. A paradigm case of unjustified belief might be a belief based on a magic eight ball. If, for instance, Lindsay came to believe that she was not a Bluth simply because she asked a Magic Eight Ball “Am I a Bluth?” and the Magic Eight Ball responded, “All signs point to no,” we would still say the belief is unjustified, even if it turns out to be true.

Surely though, if someone believes something and they are justified, then they would know it, right? Maybe not; consider Michael’s automobile accident from the episode “My Mother the Car.” After regaining consciousness, Michael came to believe that he’d tried to hit his brother Gob with his father’s car. Michael is justified in his belief, since his mother told him that he was responsible and his injuries were consistent with his mother’s explanation of what happened. But, does Michael
know
he tried to hit his brother with the car?

Once again, there’s still something missing. The problem with Michael’s belief is not that it failed to be justified, but instead, that the belief turned out to be false. Lucille misled Michael into thinking he was at fault, when in fact she had intended to run down her first born, and then with her super-human strength switched places with Michael. Of course, earlier that day, Michael had witnessed his mother struggling with the weight of some “groceries,” further suggesting to Michael that what actually happened was impossible. We all know, though, that the “groceries” were actually gold bars disguised as protein bars—in an attempt to help prevent George Sr. from being strangled in the shower . . . or worse, but let’s get back to Michael.

Clearly then, not only must one have a belief and have justification for that belief, but the belief must also be
true
. And with this we’ve finally arrived at the traditional account of knowledge where knowledge is defined in terms of justified-true-belief (we’ll call it JTB). On this account, JTB is necessary and sufficient for knowledge; if someone knows something, it follows that her belief is justified and true. If someone has a belief that is justified and true, then she has knowledge.

With the traditional account in mind, let’s return to our original examples. If George Michael knows that he loves his cousin Maeby, then he must not only believe it, but also have justification for believing it (in this case all he needs is awareness of his own emotions). And, of course, his belief must also be true. Similarly, to say that Buster knows a great deal about agrarian business in the eighteenth century is to say that Buster has beliefs about eighteenth-century agrarian business (something having to do with how best to avoid an uprising perhaps?), that those beliefs are justified (Buster’s extensive academic background would likely provide him with the relevant sort of justification), and that his beliefs were true.

The traditional account seems to achieve our goal, but in recent decades it has met with serious scrutiny and almost universal rejection.

As You May or May Not Know [JTB] and I Have Hit a Bit of a Rough Patch . . .

Just as we used examples to show that mere belief (Tobias’s acting) or justified belief (Michael’s accident) are not sufficient for knowledge, the philosopher Edmund Gettier developed famous examples that are intended to show that JTB is
itself
not sufficient for knowledge. If Gettier is right, then the traditional account of knowledge would fail to provide necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge. The following two cases come from Gettier himself:
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In each of these Gettier cases it is granted that there is a justified belief, (1) and (4), respectively. It is then shown that the justified-belief can be used to entail (have as a required consequence) another claim, (2) and (5), respectively. The difficulty comes when we realize that we can have a justified-
false
-belief, which entails some other belief, and by sheer chance, the other belief turns out to be true; as with (3) and (6). Gettier concludes that, in both Case 1 and Case 2, we would have JTB but not knowledge.

While both of these Gettier cases rely on an explicit inference from one premise to another, philosophers have created Gettier-
style
cases so that there seems to be no inferential step at all.
3
Consider another famous Gettier
style
case from Alvin Goldman:
4

In what
must
have been an attempt to maintain relevance in the philosophical literature, the writers of
Arrested Development
incorporated Gettier-style cases into the show. Consider the following three examples:

First You Dump All Over It, Now You Want to Know How It’s [Solved] . . .

While many epistemologists have been skeptical of the original Gettier cases, the success of the
Arrested Development
Gettier-
style
cases forces additional refinement to the traditional account of knowledge. Although there is, in general, agreement amongst contemporary epistemologists about the failure of the traditional account of knowledge to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge in light of the Gettier problem, it would be a stretch to say that there is much, if any, agreement about how best to solve the problem.

With this lack of consensus in mind, we can characterize three different approaches to resolving the Gettier problem. First, we might reject the project of offering an analysis of knowledge altogether, and by doing so dissolve the motivation for considering Gettier-
style
cases. Second, we might refine how justification is understood so that Gettier-
style
cases are blocked. Third, we might try to find a fourth condition that, when taken along with JTB, provides what we’re looking for in an analysis of knowledge.

Philosophers who adopt the first approach argue that Gettier-
style
cases show us that the project of analyzing knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions was doomed from the start.
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We might even argue that every epistemologist is committed to taking some epistemic concept as unanalyzable, and perhaps there are reasons for us to think that knowledge should play that role. Of course, such a view is at odds with many of our intuitions about what knowledge is. After all, it seemed obvious that at the start of this chapter we could take belief to be a necessary constituent of knowledge. If we can get one constituent that seems to be obviously required for knowledge, then it would be awfully weird if, in reality, we couldn’t offer any analysis.

Perhaps, then, we should reconsider what these Gettier-
style
cases taught us. Maybe, the problem is that our notion of justification needs refinement. We can go about this in a number of ways. One proposed solution to the Gettier problem is to raise the degree of justification required for knowledge. On this view, the justification required for knowledge is certainty (or evidence that implies the impossibility that the belief is false). As a result, Gettier-
style
cases are avoided because knowledge requires certainty, and each of the Gettier cases seems to rely on the possibility of false belief, where the belief just happens to be true. Yet, such an answer to the Gettier problem would have devastating consequences when it comes to the
extent
of our knowledge. Surely, there are many things we know, but aren’t certain of. Indeed most of the examples that we took at the outset of this chapter (George Michael’s love for Maeby, Buster’s extensive and useless academic “knowledge”) would fail if this were the requirement. Alternatively, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) suggested that we maintain fallible justification, but require that knowledge cannot come by way of false premises.
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On such a view JTB is necessary and sufficient for knowledge, but a belief is only justified if it is not inferred by a faulty line of reasoning. On this type of view, the Gettier cases fail to be counterexamples since they involve the bad kind of inferences. Such a solution, however, requires locating the illicit inference in Gettier—and that’s no easy task.