Anyone who watches Jeopardy!, whether it’s on a regular basis or as a fair-weather fan, goes through a range of emotions as the show progresses. There is a seething undercurrent of disappointment that Alex Trebek, who’s hosted Jeopardy! since 1984, shaved off his mustache in 2001 (facial hair enthusiasts flew their goatees at halfstaff on that day). The rest of us feel frustration, disbelief, amazement, and probably a little bit of jealousy towards the contestants who seem to know everything about everything! After all, how many of us can rattle off facts ranging from different countries’ national holidays to 1940s trivia, to words that start with “Kh”, all in the span of mere seconds?
The twenty-eight Trebek seasons of Jeopardy! have seen their fair share of amazing contestants. Seventy-four-time Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings holds the all-time record for the most wins and winnings with over three million dollars in regular competition—not including Jeopardy! specials such as millionaire’s rounds, tournaments of champions, celebrity or college editions. “Moneyballer” Roger Craig used a computer program to analyze and study patterns in questions and now holds the record for the most money won in a single game. Then there’s Watson, a room-sized IBM question-answering machine that demonstrated advances in artificial intelligence: Watson could understand questions posed in natural language and answer them (I, too, welcome our new computer overlords!).
Jeopardy!’s staying power and pop-culture influence (Saturday Night Live’s take on Celebrity Jeopardy! is a hilarious case-in-point) cannot be denied. However, its very successful answer-question format is challenged by postal worker, resident barfly, and self-proclaimed know-it-all Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) in one of my favorite episodes of Cheers appropriately entitled “What Is Cliff Clavin?”
In an appearance on Jeopardy! Cliff calls in to question the fundamental single-question answer foundation of Jeopardy! with his humorous yet “incorrect” response, “Who are three people who’ve never been in my kitchen?,” to the clue “Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz, and Lucille LeSueur.” The “correct” response was “What are the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Joan Crawford?” I think we can all thank them for changing their names!
Is Cliff’s insistence that his response is correct a desperate plea from a sore loser? Probably. No one likes to be wrong, especially when we’re on television and have marketed ourselves to friends as the purveyor of annoyingly useless and barely reliable trivia, the way Cliff has. Adding insult to injury, Cliff’s success during the first two rounds of Jeopardy! left him with $22,000 all of which he wagers and loses on his “incorrect” answer. The winner was crowned with a measly $400. This has given rise to what’s known on Jeopardy! as Clavin’s Rule: When in first place, you should never wager enough to endanger a “lock” or “runaway” game, no matter how tempting the category might be.
On the other hand, could Cliff be channeling postmodern philosophy in an attempt to challenge the very nature of Jeopardy! itself? Probably not. However, Cliff’s hilariously “incorrect” answer raises some philosophical issues regarding both modern and postmodern theories of knowledge.
I believe that not only was Cliff’s answer wrong, it was ridiculously wrong and he lost fair and square. Unlike Jeopardy! contestants, we don’t have to worry about buzzing in and forming a question in fifteen seconds or less. Therefore, we have the luxury of exploring a major philosophical concept—knowledge (aka epistemology)—and how it relates to two competing schools of philosophical thought: modernism and postmodernism.
Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) explores the formation and scope of knowledge. Modernism, from a philosophical standpoint, is the tendency in contemporary culture and society to accept only “objective” truth. Modernism is rooted in the scientific, technological, artistic, and philosophical transformation of society during the 1890s and early 1900s. Postmodernism can be understood as a result, reaction, aftermath, denial, or rejection of modernism. Postmodern philosophy is a school of thought which proposes that reality is more complex and dynamic than suggested by the objectivity of modernism, because reality is socially constructed and therefore subject to change.
While epistemology is concerned with distinguishing genuine from bogus knowledge, who or what determines what counts as “genuine” knowledge and truth, and whether that knowledge is truly objective, is at the heart of the modern-postmodern debate. Cliff’s “wrong” response challenges Jeopardy!’s notion that there is one and only one question for each answer given, just as postmodern philosophy challenges modernist assumptions. Therefore, Cliff could find himself in the company of postmodern philosophers such as Ernest Becker, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, who have sought to challenge modernist assumptions regarding knowledge and societal norms by deconstructing socially and culturally constructed symbols, macro- and micro-level differences, and self-perpetuating power structures, respectively.
Before we can explore how knowledge is approached from both modern and postmodern perspectives, we need to have a basic understanding of what knowledge is. Epistemologists (yes, that’s a real word and you’ll probably see it on Final Jeopardy! one day) take several different approaches to knowledge. In general, and in this chapter, the kind of knowledge usually discussed is propositional knowledge, or knowledge that—something that can be expressed in a statement or sentence that describes a fact or a state of affairs. “Humans are mammals,” “2 + 2 = 4,” and “Disneyland is in California” are all examples of propositional knowledge.
Other types of knowledge are knowledge how and acquaintance-knowledge. For example, in the area of mathematics a Jeopardy! contestant needs only to know that πr2 describes the area of a circle. He or she does not necessarily have to know how it describes the area of circle. In a mathematic class, however, not only is your knowledge that being tested, you also need to know how to multiply πr2.
These two types of knowledge are, in turn, both different from acquaintance-knowledge, which focuses on the recognition of things, even if we don’t necessarily know them or how they function. This includes knowing a person (He was the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom under Queen Victoria1), a place (These are underwater sink holes commonly found in Belize, the Bahamas, and Australia2), a thing (This breed of dog was raised by lamas and kept as good luck charms and monastery watch dogs3), or an activity (This sport, in which players slide “stones” across ice towards a target area, has been in the Winter Olympics since 19984)
Legend has it that the idea for Jeopardy! was inspired by Merv Griffin’s wife, who lamented that there had not been a really good trivia show on television since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Typically, quiz shows relied on a standard question-answer format—the host asked the question and the contestants tried to answer them correctly. Jeopardy!’s answer-question format turns that idea around and requires contestants to put propositional knowledge into the form of a question.
So in Jeopardy! we’re not dealing so much with knowledge propositions. Instead we’re dealing with knowledge interrogatives—a fact or state of affairs that can be expressed as a question. Thus the statement “The President of the United States lives in the White House” can be Jeopardy!-ized into the proposition “He lives in the White House” that leads to the knowledge interrogative “Who is the President of the United States?”; similarly, “The distance around a spherical object” leads to “What is circumference?”
In this way Jeopardy! becomes a great exercise in demonstrating what we know. It forces us to process and demonstrate knowledge that in a different way from what we’re used to. It also illustrates all three types of knowledge in that we have to know what a question is (knowledge that), how to form a question (knowledge how), and when a particular question is appropriate (acquaintance-knowledge).
We can also distinguish between different types of propositional knowledge depending on where that knowledge comes from. On the one hand, non-empirical knowledge is usually referred to as a priori—meaning that knowledge is independent or prior to any experience that requires the use of reason. On the other hand, empirical or a posteriori knowledge is gained only after, or posterior to, experiences and the use of reason.
But where does knowledge come from? Why is some knowledge more important than other knowledge? What does it mean to know something? What’s the difference between someone who knows something and someone who doesn’t?
For centuries, philosophers have been grappling with what knowledge is, where it comes from, and how we use it. Even Plato struggled with the issue in several of his dialogues, including Meno, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus. In both Meno and Phaedrus, Socrates explains how the immortal soul has already learned everything prior to inhabiting the human body. All knowledge, therefore, is inborn and the best path towards recollection of this knowledge is through rhetoric and—wait for it—Socratic questioning (funny how that works).
We need to remember that knowledge is a specific kind of mental state that exists only in thinking animals. Knowledge and our ability to use it, especially to plan ahead and self-reflect, are seen as particularly important characteristics that make humans unique among the animal kingdom. Unthinking things can’t know anything. And while knowledge that propositions can be used to describe aspirations, desires, and intentions, they do not necessarily constitute knowledge. Knowledge itself is a kind of belief. If one has no beliefs about something, one cannot have any knowledge of it.
In Theaetetus, Socrates examines several theories concerning what knowledge is and develops a definition of knowledge as justified true belief—in order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the relevant truth in the proposition but also have a good reason for doing so. In other words, I can believe something that may or may not be true but I can’t know if it’s true or not unless I have a justification for doing so.
This adds some weight to Cliff’s argument that his answer is correct. Not only does he believe that Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz, and Lucille LeSueur have never been in his kitchen, there may be some justification because he claims to know that they have not been in his kitchen! At least we can assume he knows because it is, after all, his kitchen. In fact, at the conclusion of the Jeopardy! taping Cliff proceeds to rattle off the names of other people who he believes to have never been in his kitchen.
However, just because we believe something is a truth does not ensure that it is really true. Human history is full of examples in which “true believers” affirm a particular belief regardless of whether evidence suggests that said belief is a “true” representation of the issue in question. Switch on your TV to the talking heads of various cable news networks and you’ll see plenty of examples of beliefs devoid of truth or, even worse, passing for truths. Just imagine trying to keep score in a game where all of the contestants knew they were correct because they believed they were correct.
So knowledge requires belief, but not all beliefs constitute knowledge. While some of our beliefs are true, others are false. As we seek knowledge, we’re essentially trying to increase our volume of true and valid beliefs that we posses, while minimizing the false ones. This is one of the greatest challenges faced by teachers in classrooms around the world—not only creating belief but also exchanging students’ false beliefs with those that are true.
There are lots of reasons why we create beliefs. Cultural anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker cites the need to create order in a chaotic universe, seek a match between one’s mind and the world, and create a positive image of oneself and others, as the primary motivations.5 But when we seek knowledge, we’re trying to get things right! This creates problems for us because our beliefs and the truth about the world around us don’t always match. Truth, is a condition of knowledge. But how do we determine if something is true?
Because of luck, a belief can be unjustified yet true; and because of human fallibility, a belief can be justified yet false. Slowly but surely Socratic notions of knowledge as belief were picked apart as scientific theories, experiments, and discoveries replaced subjective beliefs with objective truths throughout the Enlightenment era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While scientists were picking apart beliefs to get to truth physically, heavy-hitting philosophers such as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant were picking them apart metaphysically.
Descartes stressed that subjective reality is better known than objective reality. However, he felt that objective knowledge of one’s reality was just as basic as the subjective reality we each experience. To him, knowledge started with the immediate knowledge of one’s subjective states and proceeds to the objective knowledge of one’s own existence as a thinking thing: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)—we infer our own existence from the subjective reality of our own thinking. All objective knowledge, according to Descartes, rests on this immediate knowledge of one’s own existence as a thinking thing. Accordingly, all Jeopardy! categories would be unique to you and based on something that you’ve personally experienced.
In Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, he expresses concerns over subjective lines of thinking. He uses the phrase Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself) to designate pure objectivity as being independent of the features of any subjective perception of it. The scientific method, which we’ll all remember from high-school science classes, was becoming codified at the time; it was an attempt to systematically understand the nature of things as they appear to us. This involved accurate and precise measurements that allegedly enabled scientists to reach objective judgments—judgments having a high probability of expressing truth regarding a reality. For instance, two people giving differing reports about the weather (chilly versus pleasant) illustrates the variation in judgments and is an indicator of subjectivity. Measurements of temperature (20°C) are often taken to indicate a level of objectivity. Philosophers usually refer to this as intersubjective agreement.
Does intersubjective agreement prove objective truth? No. Just because two or three people agree that it’s cold outside doesn’t preclude the possibility that someone else might find it pleasant. What if there was intersubjective agreement among a large number of subjects? This line of reasoning appears promising, except that it’s more like the “truthiness” Stephen Colbert and countless political pundits have made infamous. Along these lines, Cliff’s response could be judged a correct response if one of the other two contestants (a simple majority) verified that those three particular individuals had never been in Cliff’s kitchen.
Modernity’s goal, in terms of knowledge, is to utilize science and technology to obtain and understand the most objective knowledge possible. We accomplish this by finding more and more ways to remove ourselves from the things we study. This has driven scientific advances in technology to measure things more accurately and reliably even at the nano-, pico-, and femto- levels to better understand the reality in which we live. Technology has given us the ability to peer into the farthest reaches of space, explore the inner workings of our DNA, and explain physical, chemical, and biological phenomena. According to Kant, the quest for objective knowledge is really the search for the perfect universal intersubjective agreement. But is such a thing possible?
At times, it certainly seems that way. The late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries have come to be known as the age of modernity—a reality in which science and technology, including the use of mass communication and transportation, has reshaped human perceptions. In this reality, science has sought to distinguish itself from the narrative knowledge of place-based tribal wisdom communicated through myths, legends, and experience (knowledge how) by emphasizing information as a mean rather than an end.
As we’ve moved to a more scientific and technologically driven society, we rely less on subjective judgments and more on objective measurements that can be tested, retested, falsified, and proved. With knowledge available at our fingertips anywhere in the world 24/7, the world has gotten appreciably smaller and we, as a species, have gotten more culturally similar. While Jeopardy! itself could have been viewed as exclusively American in the 1960s and early-1970s, it is now distributed internationally and airs across the world. Adaptations of Jeopardy! are aired in almost thirty different countries and their champions are occasionally invited to compete in international Jeopardy! tournaments in the United States. While their own hosts may lack Alex Trebek’s trademark wit and charm, you’re just as likely to hear them offer up a “Potpourri” of trivia in Israel and the Arab World, Estonia, and Argentina.
Here’s the rub—human beings are subjective creatures. The inherent flaw with modernism is an assumption of objectivity. Modernism assumes that objective knowledge is the only correct knowledge regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual preference (just to name a few) and the reality or realities in which you live. Objective knowledge assumes that what’s true for one group is true for all groups. If your reality doesn’t match the universal intersubjective agreement that society has come to, then your conception of reality is just as wrong as your likely responses on Jeopardy! because your understanding of the issue at hand differs from the accepted “objective” truth.
Insisting that only objective knowledge is genuine denies individual, group, and societal interpretations. Ernest Becker realized the importance of subjectivity in the human need to find meaning in a chaotic universe. How an individual defines, interprets and reacts to a symbol depends on the cultural significance of that symbol. Becker proposed that we measure our self-worth by our ability to live up to cultural standards. The challenge, he notes, is that different cultures have different standards of measurement.
Colors, images, animals, plants, and geographic locations might be significant to different cultures but for different reasons. The raven, for example, is a bird that can be viewed through several different cultural lenses: it’s the creator and life-giver to Native Americans; a servant of Odin in Norse mythology; and an avatar of Bran the Blessed to the Celts. Postmodernism believes that reducing knowledge to separate non-intersecting categories (like those on a Jeopardy! board) dissolves the coherence of knowledge and causes it to lose its meaning entirely.
The loss of meaning in modernity results from preventing the interacting and intersecting of epistemology with two other broad concepts: axiology (how we relate to and derive value from knowledge personally, culturally, and existentially) and ontology (the nature of being, existence, and reality). Modernism’s reliance on objective knowledge, therefore, becomes a source of power, which Alex Trebek wields with an iron fist.
Historian and postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, who is most often credited with tackling power from the angle of knowledge as systems of thought that become controlling, socially legitimated, and institutional, notes that power is not something that some posses while others don’t. Instead power, particularly knowledge, should be seen as a tactical and resourceful narrative that dominates our lives. We live it, rather than have it.6
I don’t see Jeopardy!-type knowledge per se becoming a system of discourse that will eventually dominate us socially and culturally. Just imagine trying to order a coffee at Starbucks in the form of a question! However, Cliff’s assertion that there exist different questions for the same answers sheds light on the lack of objectivity inherent in modernism’s “objective” knowledge. In this way, Alex Trebek (as host) and the Jeopardy! judges become gatekeepers of knowledge and determine which knowledge is legitimate and which is to be excluded.
Let’s say the Final Jeopardy! category is “History,” and we’re given the answer “Battles during this war from 1861 to 1865 took place exclusively on Southern US soil.” The most obvious response would probably be “What is the American Civil War?” After all, that’s what was written in our history textbooks (gatekeepers of knowledge). However, this is not the only term used for this particular war. Perhaps one of the Jeopardy! contestants is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and responds with “What is the Second American Revolution?”, or “What is the War of Northern Aggression?”, or “What is the War for Southern Independence?” Maybe one of the contestants insists on responding with “What is the War of Rebellion?” or “What is the War of Secession?” Additionally, one of the contestants could be the descendant of freed slaves and responds with “What is the Freedom War?” to celebrate the effect the war had on ending slavery in the United States.
Taken to a Cliff Clavinesque extreme, one could respond with “What is a war that did not involve Portugal?” or “What is a war in which I haven’t fought?” Are all of these responses correct? Are any of them correct? Are none of them correct? Who decides?
On Jeopardy! the official judges determine the correct and incorrect answers. But what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the larger society is not as cut and dry as it would be during the Final Jeopardy! round. This is because the conventional expectation of history, and other subjects for that matter, is that they’re something linear—a chronology of inevitable facts that tell a story that makes sense. This type of modernist perspective is false. Reality is much more complicated and is filled with underlayers of what is kept suppressed, oppressed, and unconscious in and throughout history.
Foucault’s fellow French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze supports this vision of intersubjective agreement in which difference (and both real and existential disagreement) is subordinated by identity, opposition, and resemblance.7 Our understanding of history, knowledge and ourselves is born out of a reflection from the imaginary. These imaginary reflections are both conscious and unconscious and can be sources of both real and existential dread when one compares the imaginary to reality. The power that Jeopardy! exerts on Cliff and other ridiculously wrong contestants does not reside in the dollar values of each category or in the wealth Jeopardy! champions accumulate. According to Foucault, Jeopardy!’s power is in its ability to control the narrative and therefore the reality that exists on each and every episode of the show.
By insisting that reality, and therefore knowledge, involves a network of differences, gradients, and overlaps, both Foucault and Deleuze upset the codes and assumptions of modernist order and their structures of exclusion that legitimate societal identities. According to Foucault and Deleuze, such differences should be appreciated for their own sake rather than criticized or viewed as “wrong” by society. They reveal that there is no “knowledge,” only an interactive and intersecting series of legitimate vs. excluded knowledges.
This is all well and good in the “real” world. But Jeopardy!’s judges and, by extension, its host decide what is legitimate knowledge in the reality of the Jeopardy! universe. Not only do the judges determine the knowledge that contestants must know to win, they also determine the exact knowledge interrogatives they will need to use to express said knowledge. They make the rules. They guard the gates. They hold all of the keys.
While knowledges may result in the same answers, the questions we use to get there sprout from different realities in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, language, time period and even individual experiences (just to name a few). Postmodern identity is characterized by an emphasis on inner voice and the search for authentic knowledge in which an individual can find a way of being that is somehow true to themselves. All roads may lead to a “truth” (with a lower-case “t”), but not everyone takes the same roads. This reality places individual differences in a more positive light, looks positively on both inter- and intra-group differences, and creates a framework through which we can appreciate each other’s inherent qualities.
Cliff’s challenge to Jeopardy!’s answer-single question format opens the door to the acceptance that different knowledges and knowledge systems are just as valid as “accepted” knowledge. This is what makes him a true champion. And while I find it highly unlikely that the Jeopardy! producers will schedule a Postmodern Tournament of Champions in the foreseeable future, I’ll keep my hand on the buzzer just in case.
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1 Who is Sir Robert Peel?
2 What are blue holes?
3 What is a Tibetan Terrier?
4 What is curling?
5 The Birth and Death of Meaning, second edition, The Free Press, 1971.
6 The Archaeology of Knowledge, Vintage, 2010.
7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, 1994.