The System illustrates the features of Science discussed in ‘The Truth is Out There’ as the experiment which Derren Brown presents the features of inductive reasoning, falsification, Occam’s Razor and Paradigm Shift. In ‘The System’, Kadisha’s confidence in the system is based purely on inductive reasoning, as it is her previous experiences with winning in the horse races that boost her confidence that she will win with the next race- her doubts slowly dissolve as she wins, and her bets get higher and higher as she assumes she will win the next race.
In addition, there has been nothing to falsify Kadisha’a confidence in the system, as every time she bets on the horse that is predicted for her to win, she has always won. Kadisha was also the only one out of the 7000 people who was involved with the experiment who did not experience falsification, and although we think that she does in the end of the video, she still wins. Brown carried out and repeated his hypotheses and tests in order to reach a scientific ‘truth’, as shown when he explains how he was able to flip a coin and have it land heads 10 times in a row, and the whole process of eliminating 6999 people from the experiment until one was left who was able to win consecutively.
Next, ‘The System’ also illustrates Occam’s Razor, because the simplest explanation for the ‘system’ was that it simply did not exist. Paradigm shift is also presented, as the experts who firstly, and strongly, did not believe that the concept of a system existing was impossible, started to open up to the idea that perhaps the system could possibly exist. This not only started to change the experts’ perceptions, but also the viewers, as they started to be amazed at how Derren was able to predict which photographs the experts were going to pick, and in which order they would stand in.
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