Inductive Reasoning is illustrated in The System when Khadisha, as well as many of the other participants, came to believing in Brown’s ability to predict the outcome of any horse race. This universal statement is arrived at, based on past observations which was the seemingly 100% accuracy of all the results he had given to them anonymously. The participants’ confidence in the existence and efficiency of ‘The System’ was based on the correlation between Brown’s guesses and the actual outcomes as well as the fact that they had won hard money by betting on what Brown told them to. Their beliefs however, were logically flawed as with inductive reasoning, just because the results came out 100% accurate every time the experiment was carried out, does not mean that it will definitely be true for the subsequent test. However, the participants still believed, at least somewhat, in the system until there was some falsification.
There is absolutely no way to prove that something is completely true so we result in trying to prove that things are false instead. In this case of ‘The System’, it was impossible to prove that Brown truly came up with a system which could accurately predict the outcome of horse races, something with results that are unforeseeable by nature. This means that the only way to determine whether or not it can be classified as an accepted truth or not was to find out whether or not it can be falsify. As we follow the documentary, unaware if the actual workings and secrets behind it, we were led to believe - along with Khadisha herself- that she was the only participant of the show and hence making Brown’s predictions appear to be 100% accurate. It wasn’t until close to the end of the show when Brown finally revealed that falsification had actually occurred to the other 7699 participants of the show who we were not aware about. Falsification occurred at the participants lost when they placed their bets on the horses Brown told them would win. This is the proof needed to certify that the existence of ‘The System’ was not a truth.
Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanations are the best and that the more complicated people view things, the more chance they have of going wrong. In this case, as Brown used smooth strategies and well kept secrets to baffle the participants, experts and the viewers, he had caused everyone [except those participants who had saw the falsification] to gradually move from their state of disbelief to amazement in the supposedly system. Their minds, instead of looking for simpler explanations, had been guided to seek out more unlikely justifications such as that Brown was a sort of psychic. However, Occam’s Razor had proven itself true when the truth came out from Brown that the simplest explanation was correct: there was no system.
There were two main paradigm shifts in the documentary; the first was when Brown mystified the viewers as well as the experts using the Polaroid photos and the numbers. It was not revealed to us how Brown managed to do this, excluding the possibility that the whole scene was scripted and it was all just an act. This had caused the idea that Brown had some sort of supernatural ability to predict things before they happen to be unconsciously imprinted into our minds and become the basis for our subsequent views and beliefs of ‘The System’. The second Paradigm Shift was when Brown revealed to Khadisha, as well as the viewers, the secrets and details behind the working of the documentary that were not shown to us before. This had completely changed the way we thought about the accurate outcomes and showed us that the real reason Khadisha won all those bets was simply because she happened to be the one who was assigned with all the winning horses and not because of an amazing system that Brown came up with. However, at the end of the show, Brown once again puzzled Khadisha as well as the viewers by actually betting on the winning horse instead of the one he suggested before the race. This left us to reason and make our own speculations as to how he managed such a stunt, scaring Khadisha greatly but winning her an enormous sum of money in the end.
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