Mission: Impossible III begins, strangely enough, at what seems to be the end. Ethan Hunt is tied up and held captive by an unnamed bad guy. This bad guy tells Ethan that unless he gives up the location of the mysterious-sounding Rabbit’s Foot, a tied-up and gagged woman (with whom the audience is led to believe Ethan has a romantic relationship) will be killed. When Ethan either can’t or won’t reveal this information to the bad guy, the woman is shot, and the film cuts back several weeks earlier, to a party being held by Ethan and the murdered woman. The remainder of the film is haunted by this first scene, and we (the audience) spend most of this time trying to figure out how the ordinary and everyday circumstances in which the characters originally find themselves will lead them to the tragic moment with which the film begins. In that respect, Mission: Impossible III is structured as a mystery. We know that Ethan will wind up captured by the bad guy, but we don’t know how—given his retirement to civilian life—his capture will occur. And much of the fun of Mission: Impossible III comes from trying to figure out this mystery.
Looking at the projects on which J. J. Abrams has worked, it seems clear that he is quite intrigued by mysteries of all kinds. In many of his movies, including Mission: Impossible III and Cloverfield, and especially in his TV work—Alias, Lost, and Fringe—resolving a mystery is an important task both for his characters and for the audience. What is that thing terrorizing New York? What are the true motives of Sydney Bristow’s secretive agency? Why is there a polar bear on the island? For the characters, resolving these mysteries is often a matter of life and death. For the audience, the overwhelming desire to figure things out keeps our attention glued to the screen and makes us come back week after week to discover another clue.
Because of their centrality to his works, studying the mysteries in J. J. Abrams’s TV shows and movies offers us a good opportunity to philosophically understand precisely what a mystery is and what will count as a satisfactory resolution to a mystery. This question is of no small importance to our ordinary lives. Though the mysteries we encounter in everyday life are a bit more mundane than the ones facing Jack and the castaways in Lost, we are confronted with mysteries both big and small all the time. We may feel suddenly sick and wonder what precisely is ailing us and what we should do to feel better. Or perhaps a friend has suddenly started acting coldly to me—why? Was it something I did?
Our task in this chapter will be to figure out precisely what a mystery is and what sorts of resolutions to mysteries one could reasonably expect to find. This also has been a task of a great many scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers throughout history, from both the East and West.1 First, we will distinguish mysteries from questions. This distinction is necessary because an unanswered question will initially appear to be the cause of something appearing mysterious. We will show that a mystery is not reducible to an unanswered question, or even a set of unanswered questions. This result is quite important, as it will reveal that you cannot expect a mystery about some topic to necessarily be resolved by merely answering previously unanswered questions about that topic. People who complained that shows like Lost or Fringe never answered any questions are not entirely correct—those shows actually answered a great many questions, but they did so without ever resolving the mystery underlying those questions. With this revelation established, we will turn toward the question of what precisely does make something mysterious, if not an unanswered question, and how the resolution of a mystery will look different than the answering of a question.
The first thing we need to determine is precisely what we mean by a mystery and how a mystery differs from a question, if at all.
Let us start with questions. Mission: Impossible III begins, as we have discussed, with the big bad guy named Davian asking Ethan Hunt about the location of the Rabbit’s Foot. Clearly he is asking Ethan a question. We should take some time to pinpoint certain aspects of precisely what Davian is doing when he asks this question. Davian wants to know some piece of information that he doesn’t already know. We will call what he desires a proposition—a simple declarative statement that reveals some property about some subject being discussed.2 In this particular case, the subject is the Rabbit’s Foot, and the property Davian wants to know about the Rabbit’s Foot is its location. The question that Davian asks Ethan Hunt is a request for Ethan to share this proposition, to tell Davian the location of the Rabbit’s Foot. Since Davian asks Ethan in particular this question, it must be the case that he believes that Ethan is in possession of this proposition (i.e., the answer to his question). He doesn’t ask the gagged woman sitting near Ethan where the Rabbit’s Foot is located, nor does he ask any of his evil henchmen. Each person either knows or does not know the proposition that Davian desires. We can tell that he believes that Ethan does know the proposition detailing the location of the Rabbit’s Foot from the fact that he asks Ethan about its location.
Questions of this kind admit of relatively straightforward answers. “Where did I leave my car keys?” asked by itself, is a question and can be answered satisfactorily by “I left my car keys on the counter.” “How does a person kill bacteria?” can be answered satisfactorily with the proposition “Bacteria can be killed with antibiotics.” And so on. A person has answered a particular question about some topic only if the proposition that they give is true. Simply stated, a proposition is true if the subject of the proposition actually in fact possesses the property assigned to it in the proposition. “The car keys are on the counter” is a true proposition if and only if the car keys really are on the counter.3 If the car keys are actually inside of a drawer, then the proposition “The car keys are on the counter” is false. Similarly, if antibiotics didn’t in fact kill bacteria, the proposition “Bacteria are killed by antibiotics” would be false. A true proposition that reveals the asked-about property of a subject is a satisfactory answer to a question. If Ethan had tried lying about the location of the Rabbit’s Foot, his lie would not be a satisfactory answer to the question, regardless of whether or not Davian believed it.
The answer to a question is usually quite simple and definite. That is not to say that it is easy to answer every question—it may have taken scientists a long time and much effort to discover that antibiotics kill bacteria, and we might search for hours for missing car keys. Rather, the answer itself is simple—it always takes the form of a true proposition, or perhaps in certain more complicated cases several true propositions. The answer to “How do I get to your house?” might require several propositions: “First, turn left on Church Street. Then turn right on 2nd Avenue . . .” But this extra layer of complication does not make the answer any less definitive once it is discovered. Once one discovers the true proposition or propositions that answer the question, the question is pretty much exhausted and is no longer of any importance. There is no further reason for us to continue searching for an answer to a question once we have discovered the answer, because the question came about because we lacked a proposition. Once that proposition was discovered, the question is no longer relevant. Once we find the car keys, we no longer need to wonder about their location. And we certainly don’t need to keep looking further for them! Any other question that we may go on to ask about car keys after they have been found—such as “Why did I leave the car keys in the drawer?”—is asking about something completely different and unrelated to the location of the car keys and demands a different and largely unrelated proposition as an answer. After answering a particular question, we can move on to the next concern in our day. That one particular question goes away.
Now that we have briefly discussed some of the key features of questions—mainly, that each question has at least one true proposition that answers the question and that exhausts our concern with the question—we need to determine whether or not a mystery is the same thing as a question. At first blush, the two seem identical. After all, every mystery can be expressed as a question. As an example of a mysterious happening, let’s consider the discovery of the Hatch in season 1 of Lost. Throughout most of that season, many people (both in the audience and in the cast) expressed this mystery in the form of a question, “What is inside the Hatch?” And fans spent many hours hypothesizing potential answers to this question, all of which are propositions. Maybe the sickness is contained within the Hatch. Or maybe some evil entity is trapped inside of it. Or perhaps a Scotsman is down there pushing a button every one hundred and eight minutes to save the world. Superficially, mysteries and questions seem to basically be the same thing.
However, this superficial first impression is misleading. Does the question “What is inside the Hatch?” adequately and exhaustively capture the mysteriousness of the original discovery of the Hatch in season 1? Remember that the sense of resolution that accompanies the answer to a question is the defining characteristic of questions—that once a question has been adequately resolved and satisfactorily answered, the question is no longer relevant and it makes no sense to keep looking for the answer any further. If this question about the Hatch is the same thing as the mysteriousness of the Hatch, if questions and mysteries are exactly the same thing and the only reason the Hatch appears mysterious is because we lack possession of certain true propositions about it, then once the audience discovers the answer to the question “What is inside the Hatch?” the mysteriousness of the Hatch should go away. In the beginning of season 2, once the audience did in fact learn the answer to “What is inside the Hatch?”—once the audience learned a whole, complete series of true propositions addressing what was inside the Hatch, such as, “A Scotsman pushing a button every one hundred and eight minutes is inside the Hatch,” “A bunch of food is inside the Hatch,” “An electromagnetic anomaly is inside the Hatch,” and so on—did the mysteriousness of the Hatch simultaneously go away along with these answers? Not at all. These answers in no way made the Hatch appear less mysterious—indeed, many of the answers made the Hatch seem even more mysterious! And the audience expressed this continued sense of mystery with new questions: “How does pushing a button save the world?” “Where do those large pallets of food come from?” and “What is that weird electromagnetic anomaly?” Far from exhausting the mystery, answering the question that the audience originally used to express the mystery only seemed to make the Hatch more mysterious.
We have seen that, although a sense of mystery about something can be expressed as a question, this question does not satisfactorily exhaust that sense of mystery and that a mystery seems deeper and more enduring than the questions we use to express it. Let us dig deeper and try to figure out more precisely how questions and mysteries relate to one another. One of the characters in the episode “Across the Sea” claims, “Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.” We have seen that this claim was quite true about the mystery of the Hatch. Answering the first question that we used to express this mystery certainly led to a whole series of other questions, all efforts at expressing the mysteriousness associated with the Hatch. It is important to note that these new questions aren’t just reformulations of the original question and to see that the original question, “What is inside the Hatch?” was perfectly and satisfactorily answered. That question was asking for a list of things inside the Hatch, a list that we have acquired. “How does pushing the button save the world?” is in no way asking the same thing as “What is inside the Hatch?” and cannot be answered by simply giving either a list of more things inside the Hatch or a more precise account of the things already listed. With that in mind, we should ask precisely how these new questions relate to the original question that the audience used to express their sense of mystery about the Hatch. Answering this question might help clear up the mystery about mysteries.
One possible resolution of this difficulty could be that a mystery is not necessarily identical with just one question and with one set of missing propositions about some topic, but with a whole cluster of questions and missing propositions. If this theory is correct, answering one question about a mysterious topic would not necessarily eradicate the sense of mystery about that topic, because a series of other questions could still remain unanswered. In terms of our example of Lost’s mysterious Hatch, this explanation would say that the mystery of the Hatch does not stem from just the initial question about it that the audience used to express the mystery but rather from a whole series or cluster of related questions about the Hatch, not all of which had been answered once the audience discovered what was inside. At a given time, one of these questions, say “What is inside the Hatch?” appears to be more important or relevant than the rest, and for this reason the audience expresses the mystery using this question. But there are other propositions about the Hatch that the audience still lacks, such as who built the Hatch or why the numbers are written on it, and so the Hatch remains mysterious even after what is inside the Hatch is discovered.
This theory is certainly an improvement over our initial hypothesis, that a mystery and a question are the same thing. It quite correctly recognizes that often a mystery can be expressed with multiple different questions, all of which are related to each other in some way. However, it still falls short of being an adequate account of mysteries, for two different reasons. We will see that it cannot account for why, in the course of exploring a mystery, new questions that were completely unknown at the beginning of the exploration frequently emerge. This first flaw will highlight a larger difficulty. The mysteries as a cluster of questions theory cannot account for the relation between the disparate and self-contained questions and missing propositions associated with the mystery, even among the ones that are known from the beginning of the investigation.
Initially we noted that the answer to the question “What is inside the Hatch?” gave rise to a whole series of other questions, questions like “How does pushing a button save the world?” “Where do those large pallets of food come from?” and “What is that weird electromagnetic anomaly?” Now, it cannot be the case that all of these questions, all of these missing propositions, were originally present, along with “What is inside the Hatch?” and “Why are the numbers written on the Hatch?” when the Hatch first appeared mysterious to the audience. The audience didn’t know that there were strange buttons, food pallets, or electromagnetic anomalies within the Hatch, after all, and you can’t formulate questions about things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Certainly, the audience did in fact lack the answers to all of these questions, but this lack did not contribute to the original sense of mystery about the Hatch. If that is so, why then do these new questions get wrapped up in that original sense of mystery once the audience discovers them?
A quite plausible answer is that the sense of mystery surrounding a particular topic is tied intimately to missing propositions about that topic. The original set of questions about the Hatch, for instance, concerned the initial set of unknown propositions about the Hatch. But through exploring the mystery, new missing propositions about a given topic are revealed. These new missing propositions therefore join the overall cluster of missing propositions and give rise to new questions about the topic. Thus, once the audience discovered that an electromagnetic anomaly was within the Hatch, what this anomaly is joins all of the other still-unanswered questions in making the Hatch seem mysterious.
What this account cannot explain, however, is why some of the unanswered questions about the Hatch add to the sense of mystery surrounding the Hatch and some do not. At any given moment, there are countless numbers of propositions that a person lacks. For instance, the audience does not know the ingredient list for the Dharma Initiative brand ranch dressing. They don’t know precisely all the parts that make up the Dharma computer, and most of the audience probably do not know the mechanics by which that computer is able to turn on. The audience doesn’t know any of these propositions and uncountable more propositions besides them. Why does the absence of these propositions seem entirely nonmysterious, and why do these propositions do nothing to enhance the sense of mystery surrounding the Hatch? More importantly, why do some of the missing propositions, such as how pushing the button saves the world, add to the sense of mystery surrounding the Hatch while the overwhelmingly uncountable mass of missing propositions barely even seems worthy of asking a question about?
Indeed, we can even ask this same question about the initial sense of mystery that surrounded the Hatch at the point of its initial discovery. Why is it that not knowing what’s inside the Hatch makes it seem mysterious, while not knowing the chemical compounds that make up the Hatch door does not? Why is not knowing why the numbers are written on the outside of the Hatch mysterious, but not knowing why the numbers were imprinted in the particular typeface that they were not mysterious at all? All of these propositions about the Hatch are unknown, but only a relatively tiny number of these missing propositions make the Hatch seem mysterious. Given the current theory we have been considering about the relation between mysteries and questions—that something seems mysterious insofar as there remains an unknown proposition about it—any missing set of propositions about a topic should make that topic seem mysterious. But if that were strictly true, then everything in the world would appear mysterious, because no one could ever be in possession of all of the true propositions about anything. Only certain missing propositions make a topic appear mysterious. But our current theory cannot account for what distinguishes some propositions from others in this way.
Nor can we save this theory by adding the proviso that only relevant or important propositions make something seem mysterious when they are unknown. One very important and relevant missing proposition about the Hatch is how the castaways can use it to aid them in their fight against the Others. This question is particularly important and relevant at the end of season 1, when the Others are supposedly about to raid the castaways’ camp, and Jack wants to know if the Hatch could be used as a place where the castaways could hide. But Jack doesn’t find the Hatch at all mysterious, even though he lacks this relevant piece of information about it. His concern is purely practical. This point is demonstrated clearly by the fact that when Jack answers this question—people cannot hide within the Hatch, and so it cannot be used by the castaways in their fight with Others (at least at that time)—Jack loses all interest in the Hatch. He doesn’t then wonder what is inside the Hatch, or who built it, or anything of the other mysterious unknowns surrounding it, all of which seem unimportant and irrelevant to him in the face of the danger posed by the Others. Just because some important question about a topic is unknown does not make it seem mysterious, and many mysteries concern questions that do not seem immediately practically relevant.
For lack of a better way of putting it, some things just seem weird and some do not. It’s weird or strange or unusual that an unopenable Hatch is in the middle of the jungle. It’s weird that there is a strange electromagnetic anomaly within that Hatch, and it is quite odd that pushing a button every one hundred and eight minutes saves the world. It is this weirdness that seems to make certain questions about particular topics appear mysterious and the usualness of other questions that does not make them appear very mysterious. Not knowing the precise ingredient lists for packaged food items is not unusual, but finding a whole bunch of packaged food on a deserted island is quite unusual and invites questions about where it came from and why it is there. Going forward, our task will be to determine more technically and precisely what we mean by “weirdness” and “unusualness” and to determine how these factors relate to both questions and mysteries.
The Abrams-produced Cloverfield begins with scenes of ordinary life. One of the movie’s protagonists, Rob, has won a job in Japan, and his friends are holding a going-away party for him. Nothing in these scenes is particularly weird or unusual, and the only thing even remotely mysterious in them is why there is tension between Rob and one of his (seemingly) platonic female friends. And this tension seems mysterious only because of the disconnect between these scenes and earlier footage of the happy pair engaged in an erotic relationship in the past, one that none of Rob’s friends seems to know about. The movie doesn’t take on a stronger aura of mystery until later, when a supposed earthquake and power outage are followed by the head of the Statue of Liberty bouncing into downtown New York City.
The difference between the early and later parts of the movie is striking. In the earlier, everyday scenes, both the characters and the audience quite comfortably know how to navigate the world. Every object that is encountered is fulfilling its expected role, and every person is acting as would be expected. Even the somewhat mysterious lovers’ quarrel isn’t that odd, as romantic pairs break up and experience tension fairly frequently. The only thing that makes it seem at all mysterious and odd is that usually the couple’s friends would know about such couplings. This comfort with the scenario and the world that starts the movie is of course radically upset by the eventual arrival of the monster. Suddenly, both the characters and the audience are confronted with creatures whose behavior no one can anticipate or predict. A striking consequence of this interjection of the uncanny is that the monster, and the little monsters that fall off of it, suddenly make everything else in the movie, things and people that were previously familiar and fulfilling expected roles, suddenly become unpredictable and, in some cases, frightening. What was at first a world that everyone knew how to navigate suddenly has become upset, and neither the audience nor the characters can rely on the world obeying its ordinary rules.
Ordinarily speaking, our world appears to us coherently. It is always the case that we possess uncountable propositions about the world. However, we don’t just possess this assortment of facts as a disconnected list of true things, with every fact standing alone by itself unrelated to all the others.4 A person knows where her keys are located; let us say that they are inside the drawer of her desk. But the proposition “The keys are located in the drawer of her desk” only actually tells this woman where the keys are in a practical way because she knows a series of other related propositions, such as “The desk is located in the corner of my apartment.” But knowing the location of her desk in this way requires knowing where the desk is in relation to everything else in the apartment, knowing that the bookshelf is to its left, a dresser is to its right, and so on. She must also know what the desk looks like, which means distinguishing its features from the features of both other desks and everything else in the apartment. She must also know how to open up desk drawers, a skill that, at first blush, cannot even be reduced to a proposition. Without being in possession of this whole interconnected web of skills and propositions, the woman cannot be said to know where her keys are. Practically speaking, just knowing that keys are located in a desk drawer does not help you acquire those keys unless you also know where that desk drawer is and how to access it.
Now, we must not assume that a person is consciously aware of all these propositions all the time. Indeed, part of what it means for something to be familiar to us is that, in the course of actually doing things in our everyday life, we do not have to consciously think about the familiar thing or how it relates to the other familiar things around us, or even how to use it. When a woman needs her keys, she simply walks to her desk and opens a drawer. She doesn’t need to think about how to do either of those things or about where the drawer is located, what it looks like, and so on. However, if the same woman is asked to grab someone else’s keys out of the drawer of a desk in an apartment that she is not familiar with, then she will have to be much more consciously aware of what she is doing. She may even need to ask her friend where the desk is, or what it looks like, or whether or not there are any tricks to opening it.
Questions, we have seen, always come about in response to a missing proposition. The woman who is asked by a friend to grab his keys out of the desk drawer is not lacking the proposition that says where the keys are located; she already knows that the keys are located in the desk drawer. She does, however, lack a whole series of related propositions that would be necessary for her to successfully acquire the keys, practically speaking—mainly, she doesn’t know where the desk drawer is located. For this reason, she will need to ask where the drawer is located before she will be able to acquire the keys. She does, however, know what a desk drawer looks like, and she probably is familiar with how to open a desk drawer. So she will not need to ask about either what the desk drawer looks like or how to open it. She does not need to ask about either of these topics because our ordinary world, the web of our propositions and skills, is coherent. She may not know exactly what her friend’s desk looks like, but in the course of her life she has encountered other desks and can reliably trust that all desks look somewhat similar and share certain distinctive features. We ordinarily ask questions about a missing proposition only when the absence of that proposition stops us from practically being able to do something. Let us call this the proposition becoming conspicuous. The woman in our example cannot grab the keys because she doesn’t know where the desk is, so she is forced to ask about it. She also doesn’t know exactly what the desk looks like, but since the absence of this proposition will most likely not prohibit her from finding the keys, she doesn’t need to ask about it. However, if in the course of looking for the keys knowing what the desk looks like does become conspicuous—if perhaps the desk is of an extremely unusual design or looks more like a table than a desk—the woman may ultimately come to need to ask about it.
In the example as we have considered it thus far, the woman may ask her friend several different questions without anything about the keys or the desk seeming particularly mysterious. Nothing is weird about not knowing where desks or keys are located or with trying to find them. It fits quite nicely into our coherent understanding of the world that people might on occasion lose keys and need help finding things. But what if the woman, in the course of searching for the keys, encountered something that did not fit into her coherent understanding of the world? Let us assume that, once she finally finds the desk, it is hanging sideways on the wall instead of being on the floor. We could quite plausibly expect such a desk to suddenly appear quite mysterious. For our story, we shall assume that the woman will choose to express this mystery with the question “Why is there a desk hanging on the wall?”
The first thing to note is that the manner in which the desk becomes mysterious is different from the manner in which the initial question about it was first prompted. The question “Where is the desk?” arose because, in the course of trying to accomplish the practical task of getting the keys out of a drawer within the desk, the woman became conspicuously aware that she did not know the answer to this question, an answer that she needs if she is to accomplish her task. As an analogy, consider trying to put a puzzle together, but one of the pieces is missing from the box. Think of the picture that you are trying to make in the puzzle as analogous to the task that the woman is trying to accomplish. You become aware of the absence of this last piece only when, in the end, the absence keeps you from completing the picture. Asking a question is analogous to searching for that last missing piece. It is triggered by the absence of a proposition.
But consider the mysteriously hanging desk. The circumstances in which the woman discovers the desk would appear mysterious regardless of whether or not the desk’s unusual location made it harder to accomplish her task. Indeed, the question by which she expresses the mysteriousness of the desk, “Why is the desk hanging on the wall?” is not itself a practical question, not one that will help her get the keys from the desk if it were successfully answered. The desk does not appear mysterious because of the absence of a proposition. It instead appears mysterious because of the presence of a proposition that doesn’t fit in with the coherent web of propositions on the basis of which the woman has thus far navigated the world. To return to our analogy of the puzzle, suppose that you find a puzzle piece that simply doesn’t fit together with any of the other pieces. Desks don’t hang off of walls, they rest on the floor. Unopenable Hatches don’t appear in the middle of the jungle. The head of the Statue of Liberty is attached to the body of the Statue of Liberty; it doesn’t roll through the center of New York. The discovery that any of these propositions is true cannot be readily made to cohere with the remainder of the web of propositions surrounding tables or Hatches or downtown New York. This is even true of mundane and nonsupernatural mysteries, like those found in crime procedurals. The crime scene where all of the facts fit together perfectly with one another, where it is fairly obvious why and how the crime was committed and the only thing left to figure out is the identity of the killer, is not terribly mysterious. But when the facts of the case don’t obviously fit together—where someone was killed but the doors and windows are all found locked from the inside—then the case suddenly becomes quite the compelling mystery. It is the incoherence of the known propositions about a situation that is responsible for anything appearing mysterious.
We must test this hypothesis against two more difficulties. First, if mysteries do not emerge because of absent propositions, but rather emerge from the discovery of incoherent propositions, why do people express the mysteriousness of something in terms of a question, or indeed many questions? Second, in what manner does a mystery ever get resolved, if at least in principle every question about a mystery that gets answered could lead to another question?
Human beings are quite stubbornly attached to the familiar coherency of their world, to their web of propositions. We genuinely believe that our understanding of how things work is, if not perfect, close enough to the truth—that just one fact, or object, that doesn’t fit in with all the rest is not enough to make us start over again from scratch. Thus, when we discover a proposition that does not cohere with all the others, our first impulse is not to scrap the prior coherency of the whole but rather to assume that the particular incoherent proposition is in some way flawed because it will not cohere with everything else. There must be some unknown reason why the proposition appears to not cohere with the rest of the world. Discovering this reason will reveal that the proposition really did cohere with all the others all along but only appeared not to because we lacked all the relevant information. There must be a reason why the desk is hanging from the wall, and if the woman could figure out what it is, her discovery of the hanging desk would make perfect sense. And there must be a reason why the head of the Statue of Liberty is in the middle of downtown New York. Of course, in the case of Cloverfield, the answer that the audience discovers to this first question, that a monster knocked it off, is just as, if not more, incoherent with our expectations about the makeup of the world than the original inexplicable proposition. Since coherence has not been restored, the mystery has not been resolved, and so the audience must try to formulate new questions in an effort to rediscover the coherence of the whole web of propositions.
No answer to any question, then, can ever be said to “answer” a mystery. A mystery doesn’t need an answer, but to be resolved it needs all of the various propositions discovered in a situation to make sense with one another and to cohere with previous experiences and expectations about the world. However, this coherence is not itself one of the propositions about a situation, just like the picture that is made from all the pieces of a puzzle is not itself one of the pieces but rather something formed when all of the pieces are arranged in the correct way. Answering questions about a mysterious topic, like Lost’s Hatch, might help provide bits and pieces of the puzzle, pieces without which no coherent understanding of the Hatch is possible.
It was not answers to the mysteries of Lost or Cloverfield, or even the mysterious Rabbit’s Foot in Mission: Impossible III, that the audience wanted, but rather for all of the facts revealed in those movies to form a coherent and understandable whole that made the sense of mystery surrounding those topics get entirely resolved. Unfortunately for those desires, another aspect of Abrams’s works—besides featuring mysterious circumstances—is that he is far more interested creatively in preserving this sense of mystery than in clearly resolving it for his audience.
1. For example, see Bertrand Russell, “The Value of Philosophy,” in The Problems of Philosophy (1912; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 153–61.
2. For more about propositions, questions, mysteries, and the appropriate way to think about these things, see, for example, Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008).
3. Epistemology is the sub-branch of Western philosophy that deals with knowledge, justification for our beliefs, and truth (among other topics). In epistemological circles, this position is known as the correspondence theory of truth; see the papers in, for example, Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd, eds., Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4. This hints at the position known in epistemological circles as the coherence theory of truth; see, for example, Paul Thagard, “Coherence, Truth and the Development of Scientific Knowledge,” Philosophy of Science 74 (2007): 26–47.