Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about Bigfoot, the creature and the legend, and how we should think about eyewitness testimony.
Speaker: Okay, so today's episode, we're talking about Bigfoot, Sasquatch, that hairy guy in the forest.
Speaker: I personally am elated to be doing this episode.
Speaker: Unlike our last episode, which I did not want to do, this episode is one I've been looking forward to for literally weeks since we started planning the podcast.
Speaker: We have a lot of talks about Bigfoot.
Speaker: I am a huge fan of Bigfoot.
Speaker: In fact, our car, the front of our car, is actually adorned with a decorative Bigfoot license plate.
Speaker: So I think we're both fans of Bigfoot.
Speaker: I think as you will see as the episode progresses, Megan is a bigger fan of Bigfoot than I am.
Speaker: But I will note that I was the one that got the license plate for Christmas, not Megan.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: So I'll say I am a – I don't want to say I'm a believer in Bigfoot, but I'm a hopeful – I'm hopeful.
Speaker: And I'm not only hopeful.
Speaker: I think I find Bigfoot plausible, more plausible than I think you do, Frank.
Speaker: Yeah, so just putting our cars on the table.
Speaker: I also want to believe in Bigfoot.
Speaker: I am pro-Bigfoot.
Speaker: I got the license plate, but I guess I will say I'm a little more skeptical than Megan.
Speaker: So we'll see if Megan can convince me to change my mind a little bit.
Speaker: He's more of a scully and I'm more of a molder in terms of Bigfoot belief.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So, Frank, who is Bigfoot?
Speaker: You can tell us a little bit about the man of the hour.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's a lot to say.
Speaker: So I'm going to try not to say too much.
Speaker: But just pointing this out here, Bigfoot, it seems like a proper noun.
Speaker: It sounds like Bigfoot is one guy.
Speaker: But actually, Bigfoot is supposed to be a species.
Speaker: So there's many different kinds of Bigfoot, many different Bigfoots.
Speaker: Big feet.
Speaker: So presumably, according to the believers, Bigfoot is some scientifically unrecognized species.
Speaker: hominids, some kind of thing that's halfway between, you know, a gorilla or chimpanzee and a human.
Speaker: So Bigfoot walks upright.
Speaker: He's super duper hairy.
Speaker: He's supposed to be really tall.
Speaker: And yeah, there's a lot of alleged sightings of Bigfoot in the United States.
Speaker: Pacific Northwest, supposed to be a lot of Bigfoots up there.
Speaker: Ohio River Valley, our neck of the woods too.
Speaker: So wasn't there a recent sighting of Bigfoot in Mississippi, Megan?
Speaker: There sure was.
Speaker: This was a huge moment for me a few weeks ago.
Speaker: Some newly released, I guess the footage isn't new.
Speaker: The footage is a couple years old, but it was just released.
Speaker: Some guy two and a half hours from us in Mississippi was boar hunting, I believe, and just happened to have a chance encounter with our guy.
Speaker: Yeah, so he's seen a lot in the United States.
Speaker: You can look at maps for cells.
Speaker: He's clustered in various areas, but there's supposed to be a lot of sightings.
Speaker: And worth noting, a lot of people know this already, is that there's supposed to be a Bigfoot-type creature in Asia called the Yeti, also a Bigfoot-type creature in Australia called the Yaoi.
Speaker: Bigfoot believers will sometimes say there's an Eastern Bigfoot and a Western Bigfoot, so maybe the Bigfoot in California is different than the Bigfoot on the East Coast.
Speaker: So yeah, this is who Bigfoot's supposed to be.
Speaker: He is some kind of hominid.
Speaker: So he's supposed to be related to human beings.
Speaker: He's in the same kind of taxonomic group as the gorillas, the chimpanzees, and us and the orangutans.
Speaker: He's supposed to be some kind of scientifically unrecognized species.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I guess in terms of culturally who Bigfoot is, he's usually classed along with other sorts of proposed creatures that are normally called cryptids.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I add the subjects of study in the field of the very legitimate field of cryptozoology.
Speaker: Other kinds of cryptids include one of my favorites, the Mothman from West Virginia, the Loch Ness Monster from Scotland, the Chupacabra, which I guess is from the American Southwest, and other sorts of creatures like that.
Speaker: Now, obviously, cryptids run the gamut in terms of how plausible each one of them are, right?
Speaker: So the Mothman, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Mothman, he's supposed to be this extremely large cross between a human and some kind of winged insect type thing, but human size.
Speaker: But the thing is about Mothman is that he, in theory, has these kind of supernatural abilities, right?
Speaker: So what he's known for is supposedly predicting a major disaster in West Virginia in the 1980s, which was the collapse of some bridge.
Speaker: I forgot the name of it.
Speaker: But then you have creatures like Bigfoot or Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster, which are purely animals.
Speaker: or creatures.
Speaker: They're not supposed to be supernatural or strange in any way, except that, of course, it would be strange if, like, a plesiosaur were still alive in Scotland.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a really small lake.
Speaker: I don't know how a dinosaur could live in that.
Speaker: Yeah, so for me, I'm putting Bigfoot at, like, the far end of the scale in terms of how plausible it is that they're actually there.
Speaker: I think Bigfoot's got, like, the best case going for him.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess we can elaborate on that a little bit.
Speaker: So philosophers and philosophers of science talk a lot about simplicity, parsimony.
Speaker: So when the Bigfoot advocates posit Bigfoot to explain the Bigfoot sightings, of which there's thousands in the United States,
Speaker: They are introducing a new entity.
Speaker: So if you're the skeptic, you might say, well, this is not a very parsimonious explanation.
Speaker: They're positing this wholly new entity, this scientifically unrecognized entity, to explain these phenomena when you can really maybe explain these phenomena in other ways.
Speaker: But it's worth noting that Bigfoot is not a different, not really a fundamentally different kind of entity.
Speaker: So Mothman is something supernatural, maybe something alien, really like a totally different kind of creature that we haven't seen before.
Speaker: But advocates of Bigfoot will say, hey, you know, we're not advocating something like totally, totally new.
Speaker: We're saying that there's just this hominid species that is just hanging out in North America.
Speaker: It's a new entity that
Speaker: but it's not like a radically new kind of entity.
Speaker: So philosophers like to distinguish between quantitative parsimony, that is, positing few entities, and qualitative parsimony, that is, positing new kinds of things.
Speaker: Of course, Bigfoot is a new species, but he's not like a fundamentally new sort of entity.
Speaker: So maybe it's not radically unparsimonious.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, talking about parsimony, we want theories to explain things as simply as possible while still explaining things.
Speaker: So, something that we need to be able to explain, at least for me, the main thing that I want explained by whatever theory of Bigfoot we end up coming down on...
Speaker: Bigfoot is the people who see Bigfoot.
Speaker: The people who see Bigfoot and we can, you know, meet these fine folks in many different documentaries.
Speaker: Yeah, we've watched a lot of Bigfoot documentaries.
Speaker: Basically, if you've made a Bigfoot documentary, if you have either seen it or we would love to see it.
Speaker: So please let us know.
Speaker: I need to mention this one Bigfoot documentary that I think was on Hulu.
Speaker: It seemed like it was going to be a Bigfoot.
Speaker: I forget the name, but it looked like it was a Bigfoot.
Speaker: But really, it ended up being about like what was like a drug cartel that was growing marijuana in the woods in California or something.
Speaker: And they used the Bigfoot thing to scare people off.
Speaker: It kind of like kind of took a weird way from their marijuana plants.
Speaker: And also as a way of explaining why.
Speaker: People were being murdered.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So that was a weird documentary.
Speaker: It was really good, though.
Speaker: I recommend it.
Speaker: So we've got a lot of people sharing their stories about meeting Bigfoot, encountering Bigfoot, meeting Bigfoot makes it sound like you had a business meeting with him or something, but encountering Bigfoot.
Speaker: And not all of them, but many of them seem extremely sincere, like really just normal people who are just, you know, going about their business outside, you know,
Speaker: watering their cows giving their cows water but i guess cows probably just drink from the lake they're you know they're doing household chores or whatever just going about their day not expecting to see bigfoot uh and then they do and they go and share their story with the world and often there are actually bad consequences for them for doing this maybe they lose their job or they lose a lot of credibility in whatever line of work they're in
Speaker: But they share their story and it doesn't seem like they have much to gain from it.
Speaker: They don't seem like they're just trying to get their 15 minutes of fame on television.
Speaker: And there's tons and tons of stories like this.
Speaker: So whatever theory we have of Bigfoot, I feel like it does need to explain this.
Speaker: Yeah, so I guess the cynic comes in and says, look, the skeptic says, I can't explain all these stories.
Speaker: These people are lying.
Speaker: They just want their 15 minutes of fame.
Speaker: You know, people like to be listened to.
Speaker: They just want someone to pay attention to them.
Speaker: Or maybe these people are just stupid, right?
Speaker: That's what the cynic might say, right?
Speaker: I like the idea of the cynical person just being like, you know, this guy thinks he saw Bigfoot, but actually he's just stupid.
Speaker: So I don't actually think that.
Speaker: I think I think I don't think these people are, you know, I think they believe they saw Bigfoot.
Speaker: I don't think they're lying or anything like that, at least not most of the time.
Speaker: So, yeah, this is the salt of the earth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The skeptic, what they're going to say, the retort is always going to be right.
Speaker: There is no evidence for Bigfoot.
Speaker: So why isn't there any evidence for Bigfoot?
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: You know, there have been famous photos or videos of Bigfoot.
Speaker: I think perhaps the most famous one was this one-minute video in 1967, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.
Speaker: So this was in Northern California.
Speaker: They...
Speaker: took a one minute video of Bigfoot.
Speaker: There's this famous still from the video of the Bigfoot.
Speaker: It's a female Bigfoot.
Speaker: It's really, really tall.
Speaker: It's mid-gait and it's kind of staring at the camera, half staring at the camera.
Speaker: So people analyze this film and this photo of Bigfoot to death.
Speaker: Some people think that the Bigfoot is obviously just a person in a suit and
Speaker: Some people think, no, no, no, look at the pelt.
Speaker: It's so realistic.
Speaker: You know, you can't you can't fake that.
Speaker: Look at the muscles on there.
Speaker: Look at the gate.
Speaker: It's not a human gate.
Speaker: And yeah, it's true.
Speaker: Skeptics have tried to recreate this this big this this Bigfoot film with by making their own Bigfoot suits.
Speaker: And they haven't exactly been successful.
Speaker: I've looked at some.
Speaker: Some alleged recreate some recreations of this and they don't look as good as this photo.
Speaker: It is true.
Speaker: This photo looks pretty good.
Speaker: And so even Bigfoot skeptics will say, hey, look, this this is not an obvious fake.
Speaker: This famous still from this 1967 video.
Speaker: So things like that seem like really inconclusive.
Speaker: We should see some evidence of footprints or, you know, DNA or vocalizations that are recorded, but we don't really see anything conclusive along those lines.
Speaker: Okay, so skeptics are skeptical because there's a lack of evidence.
Speaker: And I guess by evidence, they mean like physical evidence, like, you know, good pictures or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, like Bigfoot believers have said, here's some Bigfoot DNA, and they sent this to the scientists, and the scientists have sequenced this.
Speaker: There's actually a journal article very recently that did this, and the DNA they sent turned out to just be the DNA of bears.
Speaker: Actually, it helped with bear research, but it wasn't Bigfoot DNA.
Speaker: It wasn't the DNA of some unknown species.
Speaker: So in every case they've done this, it was a bear.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And every case, sometimes it's like an elk or something.
Speaker: But in most cases, it was a bear.
Speaker: And we listened to a documentary where it was like an unknown mammal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I looked that up.
Speaker: And, you know, in at least the most recent journal oracle about this stuff, they sequenced the DNA.
Speaker: It was published in a reputable journal.
Speaker: And it was not the DNA of any unknown species.
Speaker: Now we know Bigfoot's related to bears.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's what I think Bigfoot is.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So let's just say, all right, yeah, maybe there is a lack of physical evidence, you know, maybe not great pictures.
Speaker: Although I will say in terms of like how, you know, we don't have great pictures or great video or whatever.
Speaker: It is sometimes very hard to get good pictures and a good video of an elusive thing.
Speaker: When I'm trying to get a video of my baby doing something cute, every single time she will immediately stop doing that thing when I turn the camera on.
Speaker: So that makes me feel a little bit for the people who encounter Bigfoot and are not able to get a great video.
Speaker: But anyway, I digress.
Speaker: We have actually loads of evidence.
Speaker: It's just not empirical evidence.
Speaker: I mean, it is empirical evidence, but it's not maybe it's not something you can analyze in the lab.
Speaker: And that evidence is all of the really rad, nice, genuine people who have, in fact, seen Bigfoot.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You want to say the testimony is evidence, right?
Speaker: That's that's the claim.
Speaker: A testimony in the amount that we have it, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think any testimony is some evidence, but it seems like we should really consider strong evidence when we have this kind of testimony.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker: This raises a number of issues in the epistemology of testimony.
Speaker: So as epistemologists have pointed out, we rely a lot on testimony for the things we believe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Very few people can be like Descartes and just start from first principles and reason out on their own to all the beliefs they have.
Speaker: We should say right here for listeners who are unfamiliar with the philosopher René Descartes, one of the things that he tries to do, he's this 16th century philosopher from France, and one of the things he tried to do was prove the existence of everything from a single indubitable principle.
Speaker: Yeah, namely that he himself exists.
Speaker: I exist.
Speaker: That was, I think, therefore I am.
Speaker: And then I'm going to try to reason out everything else that I need to know.
Speaker: The external world exists, that science is on good footing, and Descartes widely agreed that he failed.
Speaker: It's really hard to do, do this Cartesian project.
Speaker: of only believing things that you yourself have verified.
Speaker: And the reason why that is is that there's so much out there to know.
Speaker: Knowledge is increasingly specialized, increasingly vast.
Speaker: Even experts in their own field sometimes don't know what's going on in the subdiscipline next door.
Speaker: So, for instance, if you're really only string theorists can understand string theory, like physicists working in other subdisciplines of physics, they have no idea how to understand that.
Speaker: And that's just the way knowledge has progressed.
Speaker: In the 18th century, you could be a natural philosopher and sort of more or less know everything there is to know.
Speaker: And back in the day, we saw a lot of polymaths, right?
Speaker: People doing everything.
Speaker: Like Leibniz did a lot of stuff.
Speaker: You know, William Huell, 19th century philosopher and historian of science, who coined the term scientist, by the way.
Speaker: He did a bunch of stuff.
Speaker: He was a polymath, too.
Speaker: You can't really do that anymore.
Speaker: So knowledge is so specialized.
Speaker: There's so much to know.
Speaker: We need to rely on testimony.
Speaker: Epistemology is a point of this out.
Speaker: So, yeah, I guess someone might appeal to this factor.
Speaker: Like, well, you know, we rely on testimony so much.
Speaker: Why should we not rely on testimony when it comes to Bigfoot?
Speaker: So important to note though, right, we don't just believe any old testimony.
Speaker: Sometimes people lie, right?
Speaker: Sometimes people are mistaken or we care about their competence.
Speaker: We tend to apply certain criteria when deciding to believe a testimony or not.
Speaker: One famous list of criteria for whether a testimony is reliable comes from our friend, the philosopher John Locke.
Speaker: So Locke is another guy Megan doesn't really like very much.
Speaker: But I think his reliability conditions for whether testimony should be believed are pretty sensible.
Speaker: So here he has six of them.
Speaker: So whether you ought to believe a testimony depends on the number of witnesses.
Speaker: So if it's some, you know,
Speaker: extraordinary event, more witnesses is better.
Speaker: The integrity of the testifier, how good is their character?
Speaker: That will tell you whether you should think they're lying or not.
Speaker: The skill or expertise of the testifier, the reason why they are giving you their report, so do they have some special interest in the truth of the thing they're saying?
Speaker: So if it's something that, if it's some proposition that would be good for them if it were true, that might make you doubt whether they're being sincere.
Speaker: The internal consistency of what they're saying, so whether they contradict themselves, that is often taken into account in courtrooms.
Speaker: If the witness contradicts themselves, that looks bad for the witness.
Speaker: And finally, whether there's any contrary testimony, whether there's any testifiers that say the opposite.
Speaker: These seem pretty sensible.
Speaker: Locke's going to say, to the extent that the testifier, the testimony exhibits these criteria to a high degree, you ought to believe it.
Speaker: He says you can't know on the basis of testimony.
Speaker: That's an important thing about Locke's.
Speaker: He can't have knowledge on the basis of testimony.
Speaker: You can only have probable opinion.
Speaker: So, yeah, I guess if we're going to form beliefs on the basis of testimony, we need to get these testifiers in a room and we need to question them with respect to these criteria in order to see whether they're reliable or not.
Speaker: Well, some of the criteria are a little bit unfair to use to assess testimony Bigfoot encounters because like 99% of the time when you encounter Bigfoot, you're...
Speaker: you are alone or almost alone in the woods.
Speaker: It's not like there's the possibility for a lot of other witnesses to be around.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: Because that's where he lives.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, then, yeah, sure, then you can't apply the criteria, but then it seems like you can't have a testimonially based belief.
Speaker: You can't apply the criteria, then you can't apply the criteria.
Speaker: They're the right criteria.
Speaker: But that doesn't sound right, because then testimony becomes epistemically inert whenever we're talking about things deep in the woods.
Speaker: You know, some things just you can't have knowledge of.
Speaker: We can't know.
Speaker: We should at least be agnostic about Bigfoot.
Speaker: All right, so you think that all of the people who say that they encounter Bigfoot are probably lying or insincere or maybe insane?
Speaker: No, I don't want to say that.
Speaker: So I don't want to be like the cynic who thinks they're just stupid.
Speaker: So, I mean, there's a lot we can say here.
Speaker: I think they believe they saw what they saw.
Speaker: But as we know, as we know...
Speaker: Perception is not like a camera, right?
Speaker: Perception doesn't work the way Locke and the empiricist thought.
Speaker: It's not just a copy of reality.
Speaker: When you perceive something, it's not just a copy of the external object.
Speaker: What you believe can affect what you see, literally affect what you see.
Speaker: So cognitive scientists and philosophers call this cognitive penetration, that your beliefs, your cognitive stuff,
Speaker: can like literally affect your perception.
Speaker: So there's experiments to demonstrate this.
Speaker: People, if you tell people that you, that they're going to see a flash of light, they will report seeing a flash of light, even if, even if there wasn't one, or if you tell them they'll, they'll feel a shock, they'll report feeling a shock, even if there wasn't one.
Speaker: Color constancy, that's another sort of thing.
Speaker: We all seen these optical illusions.
Speaker: There was that
Speaker: famous dispute between people about whether the dress was blue and black or white and white and gold.
Speaker: Or is that the other one?
Speaker: I saw blue.
Speaker: I saw blue and black.
Speaker: Yeah, I was never confused by that either.
Speaker: It's obviously blue and black.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So presumably people's beliefs about what color the thing ought to be is going to affect what they see.
Speaker: And that's how a lot of those optical illusions work.
Speaker: You put some object under red lights or green light, it's going to change how you see it, even though the objective color hasn't changed.
Speaker: And you can look up those optical illusions yourself.
Speaker: So perception is not all it's cracked up to be.
Speaker: And neither is memory.
Speaker: We know that memory is not like a tape recorder.
Speaker: Memory is constructive.
Speaker: It's reconstructive.
Speaker: There are false memories.
Speaker: We wrote a paper, Megan, about people seeing patterns that aren't there.
Speaker: Our paper, Online Misinformation and Phantom Patterns, where we talk about this idea that human beings are evolved to recognize patterns, and sometimes this pattern recognition instinct goes awry.
Speaker: People see patterns that aren't there.
Speaker: Sometimes it's called pareidolia.
Speaker: People see the man in the moon, or a face on Mars, or...
Speaker: The Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, right?
Speaker: That's pareidolos.
Speaker: Seeing patterns, looking for meaning in ambiguous stimuli.
Speaker: So some of this stuff might factor into the Bigfoot reports as well.
Speaker: Surely it does.
Speaker: If you're steeped in Bigfoot lore, you're a true Bigfoot believer, and you go out into the Pacific Northwest and you see a large furry animal in the distance, you might think it's Bigfoot rather than a bear.
Speaker: But I'm probably going to see a bear, right?
Speaker: Yeah, so, all right.
Speaker: I mean, but two things about this.
Speaker: One, we have no reason to think that most, all or even most, or even many of the people who have Bigfoot sightings are quote-unquote steeped in the Bigfoot lore.
Speaker: You know, some of these are just average folks just trying to get by.
Speaker: But further, I have an anecdote that is immune to this cognitive penetration objection.
Speaker: So the noted primatologist Jane Goodall, two years ago, gave an interview for GQ magazine where she talks about her work with...
Speaker: with primates in various places.
Speaker: And one of the things she talks about in the interview is when she spent some time in Ecuador and she talks about being flown out to this really, really remote part of Ecuador.
Speaker: She said they flew over uninhabited
Speaker: land for like two hours they got to this uh spot in ecuador and she's talking to uh using a translator she's talking to one of the people in the village and she asked them for some reason i would be interested to know what sparked this question actually but for some reason she asked uh the um the person from the village she was talking to do you ever see any uh monkeys around here when you're out in the wilderness forest jungle
Speaker: I think it was a jungle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the person she was talking to said, oh, yeah, we have monkeys.
Speaker: They're about six feet tall and they walk upright.
Speaker: I think she asked them, do you ever see any monkeys without tails?
Speaker: That's right, without tails.
Speaker: Right, because Bigfoot's supposed to be like an ape.
Speaker: He's supposed to be like a great ape or something like that, right?
Speaker: Some kind of hominid.
Speaker: So, yeah, she asked them if they saw any monkeys without tails.
Speaker: Monkeys without tails.
Speaker: And this is significant, right?
Speaker: Because there aren't supposed to be any...
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Humans are apes, but any non-human apes in North America or South America.
Speaker: So there are monkeys in South America.
Speaker: The whole continent.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There are monkeys in South America.
Speaker: There used to be monkeys in North America.
Speaker: So those died out millions of years ago.
Speaker: But there are not supposed to be any apes here.
Speaker: So what do I make of this?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I guess I would I would want to interview them more.
Speaker: So then here's another point, right?
Speaker: So when we think about testimony, we don't just use those criteria of reliability that Locke has.
Speaker: I think he's missing some stuff.
Speaker: I think we should also care about the extent to which the testimony coheres with our background knowledge.
Speaker: What else we know about the world?
Speaker: What our best scientific theories say?
Speaker: And, you know, our best scientific theories say that...
Speaker: There were no hominids in North America until humans arrived, right?
Speaker: And yeah, so what about that sort of thing?
Speaker: And you can go back to also the lack of evidence, right?
Speaker: I feel like this is part of our background knowledge too.
Speaker: There's a lack of hard physical evidence.
Speaker: Where's the DNA?
Speaker: Where's the Bigfoot poop?
Speaker: Why aren't there more footprints, more convincing footprints?
Speaker: Why aren't there more...
Speaker: photographs, where we live in a world of smartphones, where people are filming everything, right?
Speaker: This is a marked absence of other hard physical evidence that the Bigfoot hypothesis needs to explain, right?
Speaker: So, okay, the Bigfoot hypothesis explains the testimony of the people in Ecuador, right?
Speaker: Those people that Jane Goodall talked to, but there's a lot of other stuff it needs to explain, right?
Speaker: It needs to explain this absence of hard physical evidence.
Speaker: That's part of our background knowledge.
Speaker: So, presumably then, since this is so hard to override via someone's experience, if you see Bigfoot on your threshold, you open the door to take your trash out in the morning, oh my god, it's Bigfoot, you're going to say, well, let me check my background knowledge.
Speaker: Well, I mean, you know, I wouldn't think explicitly about that sort of stuff.
Speaker: I'd probably just like react.
Speaker: So what you're asking me, like, what would I think if I had some of the alleged experiences of some of the people that we've seen in the documentaries, in these interviews?
Speaker: Yeah, would you be a believer then?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't really know.
Speaker: I guess a lot depends on the experience.
Speaker: A lot depends on the percept.
Speaker: Might I think if it was really dark and the perceptual conditions were suboptimal, might I think it's a bear?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe.
Speaker: Might I think it's someone who's in a Bigfoot costume trying to scare me?
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: I don't really know.
Speaker: It really depends a lot on the character of the experience.
Speaker: It's hard to really say in the abstract.
Speaker: All right, so maybe you would believe if you encountered Bigfoot yourself.
Speaker: But here's a question for you.
Speaker: Since we have all this background information that seems to tell against Bigfoot existing, why is your experience special?
Speaker: Why shouldn't you just think, gosh, I must not have woken up yet.
Speaker: Must still be dreaming.
Speaker: Maybe I'm hallucinating.
Speaker: Maybe those mushrooms in my salad were the wrong kind.
Speaker: Because, you know, the modern philosopher David Hume thought that things that were on the level of miracles, we were in fact never justified in believing, even if we take ourselves to have experienced one or or even if it seems to us like we've experienced one.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't think Hume really applies here, though, because I don't think the existence of Bigfoot is miraculous.
Speaker: Like I said, I mean, it's a perfectly natural entity.
Speaker: It's perfectly possible that there's some relative of Homo sapiens hanging out in North America.
Speaker: Maybe it's something like that.
Speaker: So I don't think it's miraculous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: Bigfoot's not miraculous, but maybe it's more plausible that you would be hallucinating in any given instance of seeming to have a Bigfoot encounter than it is that Bigfoot exists.
Speaker: How can we compare these plausibilities?
Speaker: Yeah, I guess a lot depends on what the prior probability of Bigfoot exists.
Speaker: The good thing is, right, I'm not sure, right?
Speaker: And also it depends a lot on what the experience is like, right?
Speaker: I have to sort of compare, you know, these two things, like which one's more probable.
Speaker: And it's hard to say right now because I haven't had a Bigfoot experience.
Speaker: Bigfoot hasn't visited me yet, unfortunately, even though I have the license plate of his.
Speaker: I really hope Jane Goodall takes on this project next.
Speaker: Yeah, I was surprised to see that she was so pro-Begfoot.
Speaker: And she's been consistently pro-Begfoot.
Speaker: So she gave an interview like 15 years ago with NPR, and she was pro-Begfoot then.
Speaker: And this interview you found was from like 2021, I think.
Speaker: So she's been consistently pro-Begfoot.
Speaker: So what she says, let's be clear, right?
Speaker: She's not like a believer.
Speaker: She just says, I don't think the people that say they saw Bigfoot are stupid, and I'm not going to rule it out.
Speaker: I've been consistently a Jane Goodall fan, and I'm even more so now after reading her interviews today.
Speaker: So, all right.
Speaker: What if maybe.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's consider this situation.
Speaker: You didn't see Bigfoot yourself, but the person that you love and trust and know the best in the entire world, namely me, did see Bigfoot.
Speaker: Oh, this is like that.
Speaker: What if my girlfriend was a worm thing?
Speaker: No, you can't ask me this, Megan.
Speaker: No, I'm asking you.
Speaker: I saw Bigfoot outside the front door.
Speaker: I freak out.
Speaker: I run to tell you.
Speaker: Of course, by the time I drag you out there to see him, he's gone.
Speaker: But I'm like, he was standing right here.
Speaker: No mistaking it.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess it would depend on were the perceptual conditions suboptimal?
Speaker: Did you just watch a Bigfoot documentary?
Speaker: Are we in bear country?
Speaker: Are there tricksters afoot?
Speaker: Is there a Bigfoot convention in town?
Speaker: I need to know all this stuff.
Speaker: That would factor into whether I believe you.
Speaker: All right, so perceptual conditions are good.
Speaker: If I'm, you know, not on a Bigfoot kick at the moment, then I tell you I saw Bigfoot standing outside the front door.
Speaker: Probably you're going to believe it.
Speaker: Well, I think so.
Speaker: It's possible I might believe you, depending on a lot of other factors.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But I guess I could say that I would probably believe it more if I saw it than if you saw it.
Speaker: I'm not like hardcore empiricist or anything like that.
Speaker: But I guess I I guess I trust my own perception more than I do the perception of some kind of testifier.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Some people have a view of testimony where testimony is just sort of like a knowledge transfer.
Speaker: They have the knowledge in a bucket and they just dump the water from their bucket into my bucket and now I have the knowledge too.
Speaker: So I don't really think of testimony like that.
Speaker: I don't think you can just transfer your experience to me.
Speaker: If I get...
Speaker: Some personal experience of Bigfoot.
Speaker: I have something that you don't have.
Speaker: I can't communicate that to you.
Speaker: I can't communicate all aspects of my experience.
Speaker: So I guess if I had the personal experience of Bigfoot, I would probably be more likely to believe it than I would be to believe it if you had the personal experience and told me.
Speaker: So I don't think I can transfer my experience to you.
Speaker: I'm not that good of a storyteller, unfortunately.
Speaker: But I guess I don't know why I should think that has any special epistemic value.
Speaker: Like, why does the experience, what kind of justifying work does the phenomenology have?
Speaker: Yeah, so like I said, I'm not like a hardcore empiricist or anything like that.
Speaker: So I don't think it has any special value in and of itself.
Speaker: Because certainly I can know something based on experience, and I can also know it based on testimony.
Speaker: So I might know that some thing is a theorem in mathematics based on the testimony of my math professor.
Speaker: Or I can just do the proof myself.
Speaker: So I don't think that, but I do think that if I have the perception myself, I get access to something that I don't have if you give me the testimony of your experience.
Speaker: So if I have the experience myself, I can better consider whether some debunking explanation of my experience is warranted.
Speaker: I can better consider whether the experience that I had is best explained by it being a
Speaker: bear or whether it's best explained by some guy in a suit or something like that, right?
Speaker: I can sort of think back, although memory is fallible, of course, but I can think back to what I actually saw and consider whether these kinds of alternative explanations are more plausible.
Speaker: I can't really do that if you give me the testimony.
Speaker: I can't really examine your percept.
Speaker: You can only be so vivid with respect to what you saw.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: I have a less better epistemic position to examine and analyze and evaluate these alternative explanations in your case than in mine.
Speaker: So if I saw Bigfoot and I ruled out all those alternative explanations, I think I would be more warranted for me to believe in Bigfoot than if you just gave me the testimony.
Speaker: I guess I understand that.
Speaker: I'm not sure I agree.
Speaker: I guess I maybe I just doubt my own experiences so much that I maybe I doubt my experiences just as much as I doubt other people.
Speaker: So I kind of see them as being on a par.
Speaker: But maybe that says more about me then.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like it's weird for you to believe these testimonies so much.
Speaker: You're always doubting people's testimony all the time.
Speaker: Whenever I tell you that we have enough eggs in the fridge, you always doubt my testimony.
Speaker: But when it comes to the Bigfoot people, you believe whatever they say.
Speaker: Well, no one's buying eggs anymore, so those days are done.
Speaker: Okay, so do you think that this idea that you have on testimony versus experience, does this hold true for everything, or is it only for weird stuff?
Speaker: Yeah, I think maybe it's a good principle to adopt for weird things like UFOs and chupacabra, ESP, ghosts, right?
Speaker: Some of the other stuff that we may have.
Speaker: Anything that may be featured on the History Channel past 10 p.m.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Spooky things, right?
Speaker: Philosophers like to use this term, right?
Speaker: When people defend views like physicalism, that the only thing that exists, the only stuff in the world is physical stuff, they'll say, what I mean is just there's no spooky things, right?
Speaker: There's no, like, ghosts and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, philosophers like to use this term, even though it is a terrible term, spooky things.
Speaker: Because, of course, when we're talking about spooky things, weird things, there's no other way to cash it out, right?
Speaker: This is just a naturalistic bias.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, I don't know.
Speaker: No, I don't think so.
Speaker: Because remember we said Bigfoot is just supposed to be another hominid.
Speaker: He's a natural thing, right?
Speaker: Bigfoot's weird, even though he's a natural entity.
Speaker: So it's just stuff that is not what we would expect?
Speaker: No, I don't want to say it's just like stuff that we don't expect because there's lots of stuff that we don't expect that's not weird, right?
Speaker: I don't expect to win the lottery, but that's, and if I do, my winning's not weird.
Speaker: It's like, I don't know.
Speaker: You know when you see it.
Speaker: Like, weird stuff, right?
Speaker: We all need intuitive concepts.
Speaker: We want this button cheese that makes the booing sound.
Speaker: Everyone needs intuitive concepts.
Speaker: Everyone has to have some concepts that are primitive.
Speaker: It's weird things.
Speaker: You know what I mean.
Speaker: Intuitive concepts are often not-so-subtle covers for just...
Speaker: preserving the status quo.
Speaker: But moving on, that's fine.
Speaker: I'll give you that one.
Speaker: All right, Megan.
Speaker: I have a question for you since you've been asking most of the questions here.
Speaker: I've been on the hot seat.
Speaker: This is Bigfoot skeptic, unfriendly territory.
Speaker: Bigfoot hour with Megan.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Do you think it's rational, at least for some people, to believe in Bigfoot?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: How many?
Speaker: How many people?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like who should believe in Bigfoot?
Speaker: 412.
Speaker: Do you think it's rational for you to believe in Bigfoot?
Speaker: No, not full fledged belief.
Speaker: So here's a question.
Speaker: If you think it's rational to believe in Bigfoot, shouldn't Bigfoot be in the science textbooks?
Speaker: You can get sufficient evidence for the existence of something on the basis of testimony.
Speaker: You don't need this hard evidence.
Speaker: Testimony is good enough.
Speaker: We think it's good enough in a lot of other contexts.
Speaker: Why isn't it good enough here, you say?
Speaker: So if you think it's rational for Bigfoot to believe in Bigfoot, why don't you put them in the zoology textbooks?
Speaker: There's a new species, Bigfoot.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: So if it's rational for some, maybe a lot of people to believe in Bigfoot, and for the record, I don't just think it's rational for people who have experienced Bigfoot to believe in Bigfoot.
Speaker: Maybe people who have done more evidence gathering than I have, it'd probably be rational for them.
Speaker: I think I'm really close to having to be rational to believe in Bigfoot.
Speaker: I'm looking forward to that day.
Speaker: I'm going to celebrate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So your question is, why shouldn't we put him in zoology textbooks?
Speaker: Yeah, if it's rational, like, you know, for a lot of people believe in him, like maybe the zoology textbooks should at least mention him.
Speaker: The zoology textbooks?
Speaker: The primatology textbooks should talk a little bit more about Bigfoot.
Speaker: Oh, well, I'm assuming that Dr. Goodall's primatology textbooks have large sections devoted to Bigfoot, the coolest primate.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I'm not really that worried about that because textbooks can't contain every animal.
Speaker: There's a lot of them.
Speaker: And we might have a good reason for leaving Bigfoot out while other ones are in, which is just that we don't really have any information on it.
Speaker: We can't really put that much in there.
Speaker: No, no, no, you're wrong, right?
Speaker: Bigfoot believers, they have lots and lots of chapters about Bigfoot behavior.
Speaker: He likes to eat watermelons and candy bars, and he likes to swim and climb trees, right?
Speaker: Yeah, well, if you find me a zoology textbook where they talk about the kinds of candy that the other animals in the book like, then I fully agree Bigfoot should have a role in that book.
Speaker: Well, my favorite alleged behavior of Bigfoot is that he can paralyze his prey with his voice.
Speaker: I've never heard that.
Speaker: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker: Look it up.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: Do your own research.
Speaker: It's true that people say it.
Speaker: So, I guess... What have we learned here?
Speaker: I mean... What have we learned?
Speaker: What have we learned?
Speaker: Well, we've learned a lot about ourselves, I think, and how much...
Speaker: We want to believe in Bigfoot.
Speaker: I must say my mind has not changed.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Okay, so I guess the most interesting things I've learned thus far that, you know, I guess the Jane Goodall anecdote is interesting, right?
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: That's a puzzling one, I will say.
Speaker: And I do want to add, I think that something that we need to consider in this discussion is that we often don't have an idea of just how much uninhabited land exists on this continent.
Speaker: It's so much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true, but that also makes me think about this other curious fact that throughout history, people have often told stories about a kind of like wild half-man on the edges of society.
Speaker: So you might think the fact that there's a Bigfoot idea in Asia and Australia and all these other sorts of stories about weird creatures on the edges of society, like people talk about
Speaker: cyclopses in the ancient world.
Speaker: Pliny the Elder, my favorite guy, Pliny the Elder.
Speaker: Your favorite guy?
Speaker: Yeah, I love Pliny.
Speaker: Good old Pliny.
Speaker: So who's Pliny?
Speaker: First century Roman admiral and natural historian.
Speaker: He wrote the famous Natural History, which is a kind of encyclopedia of all there was to know in the first century AD.
Speaker: Pliny the Elder died trying to rescue people from the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in
Speaker: Anyway, so he wrote The Natural History, and in his Natural History, there's a lot of curious anecdotes.
Speaker: And he talks about dog-headed people, or people with no neck, or people with, you know... Umbrella feet!
Speaker: Umbrella feet, right?
Speaker: And other weird sorts of characters on the edge of society.
Speaker: Things between man and beast.
Speaker: So maybe there's just something in, you know, the human mind that makes it have to posit these sorts of things that...
Speaker: are in between the animal kingdom and us that connect us to it.
Speaker: The missing link, right?
Speaker: Maybe that's what explains all of this.
Speaker: The missing link between humans and umbrellas.
Speaker: Pliny's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, I could have also just been people with really big feet or people with very small or no neck.
Speaker: I have to say, I've seen men at the gym with no necks.
Speaker: So that one doesn't agree with me.
Speaker: You haven't seen dog-headed people.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, you're unconvinced.
Speaker: I'm still pretty convinced.
Speaker: I think you're a little more convinced than you were before we started.
Speaker: Eh, I don't know.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, I'm just saying if I see Bigfoot and I tell you, you better believe me.
Speaker: Yes, dear.
Speaker: We're out of time for this episode, but join us next time when we discuss the existential insights of the 1989 sleeper cinematic experience Roadhouse starring the late, great Patrick Swayze.
Speaker: Patrick Swayze.
Speaker: Patrick Swayze.
