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13 KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, AND THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN SCHIZOPOLIS AND SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE David Rodríguez-Ruiz In sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Schizopolis (1996), the main characters are put in situations where they are deprived of crucial information or simply deceived by others, and they need to find out the truth about their circumstances in order to take control of their lives. Despite the main characters’ sharing the same need for knowledge, there are striking contrasts in the way they get access to the information they need to know: for some characters knowledge is difficult to obtain, for others knowledge seems impossible, and for still others knowledge comes too easy. In slv Ann Bishop Mullany (Andie MacDowell), for example, believes that her husband is cheating on her—“conjecture and intuition,” he says—and she has to find out the truth by making sense of a small number of clues: her husband’s stories, a few telephone calls, and a pearl earring she finds on the rug. Schizopolis’s Fletcher Munson (Steven Soderbergh), however, discovers firsthand that his wife is having an affair when, by some unexplained phenomenon, he gets to live the life of the man who happens to be his wife’s lover. The situations presented in both films—whose screenplays were written by Soderbergh himself—also show a series of contrasts between adequate and inadequate ways of justifying one’s beliefs, between valid arguments and subtle fallacies, sound advice and psychological manipulation, people who lie all the time and people who are utterly frank. From the third-person perspective, that is, as spectators, we are allowed to see who is lying and who is telling the truth. At certain moments, Soderbergh even lets us take an unconventional look beyond the daily rituals of his characters. From the 14 David Rodríguez-Ruiz characters’ perspectives, on the other hand, acquiring knowledge sometimes requires efforts that exceed their abilities or means. This variety of vantage points, contrasts, and circumstances in which the characters search for knowledge provides valuable tools for discussing some of the central questions of epistemology. What does it take to know something? What kinds of evidence and justification are required in order to separate conjectures and intuitions from real knowledge? What is knowledge? Do we have a privileged access to some truths (perhaps about ourselves and our immediate reality)? Are there grounds for skepticism that we can never rule out? Soderbergh’s early films not only raise these challenging epistemological questions but also put them in everyday contexts that make them especially relevant. In later films, such as Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2000), and The Good German (2006), Soderbergh presents individuals who need to fight against biased and corrupt institutions so that important truths can be revealed and justice is achieved. The value of honesty and truth and the dangers of becoming victims of misinformation and meaningless rhetoric are recurring themes of Soderbergh’s films. This concern with the value of truth and the empowering nature of knowledge invites questions about what counts as knowledge and how we acquire it in the first place. This chapter examines Soderbergh’s approach to two extreme stances that epistemologists usually try to avoid, namely, radical skepticism and dogmatism. The epistemological views that emerge from both Schizopolis and slv provide a complex yet commonsensical picture according to which knowledge is neither as easy to obtain as dogmatists believe nor as unreachable as skeptics would argue. Another interesting aspect of Soderbergh’s films is how some seemingly inconsequential scenes, especially in Schizopolis, can be seen as examples of “thought experiments.” Thought experiments, or the contemplation of imagined situations and possible cases, are some of the oldest tools used by philosophers and among their most favored. Many of Plato’s dialogues, for example, address imagined situations like the following: if there were a ring with the power of making one invisible, would people willingly do the right thing even if they could wear such a ring and get away with anything? As we can tell from this example, one of the reasons thought experiments have been so widely used is that there are many cases in which performing an actual experiment would be either impossible or unnecessary—in the latter case because we are dealing with conceptual issues. Daniel Dennett, to take a more recent example, asks us to imagine a brainless body that picks up information from its surroundings and transmits it via radio signals to [3.145.47.253...

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