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Examples Of Skepticism In The Truman Show

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The Truman Show introduces us to a man named Truman who is living a fake life, a life in which everything around him has been scripted out by a director of a television show. He was adopted at birth and raised inside a television studio that was made to resemble the real world. However, Truman is unaware that he has been the star of a television show since birth and thanks to free will, he continues to live life as a normal person. Meanwhile, the director, Christof attempts to control every aspect of Truman’s life as if to lead him to take certain actions and to think a certain way.
Like so many other philosophical issues, the problem of skepticism can be traced back as far as the ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, it was Descartes who placed this …show more content…

Given the logical possibility that such a creature exists, how can we be certain that our beliefs about the world are not radically mistaken? How, Descartes asked, can we be certain that we are all not utterly deceived? The Truman Show presents a similar skeptical problem, but in the most convincing of ways. Christof is clearly the evil genius that Descartes described, but whereas Descartes’ fatal demon is a creature of pure fantasy, the character of Christof and the conspiracy that he orchestrates seem dangerously real. In Descartes’ Second Meditation he says, “I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false, I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me”. In the Truman show, Truman finds himself believing that the world around him is the real world, however he is being deceived. Would Truman have been better off believing Descartes’ words? Descartes attempts to question how he is supposed to understand the world around him as real. Through thinking and questioning, Descartes knows himself, and his mind to be real. However, he still has an uncertainty about the world around him. Descartes concludes the Second Meditations by posing that, “because it is

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