How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (16 page)

How I Met Your Mother
is a fictional show. That much is clear. And we know many things about it: that our five friends live in New York; that Robin is Canadian; that Barney wants to nail Ted's mother (but hasn't, *wink*); that the Sasquatch is as real as the Loch Ness Monster, and both
very
real (at least if you ask Marshall). We know these things because we're told so in the show. But not all the things that we're told in the show are true in the story, especially when it comes to Barney's words. In spite of his indisputable awesomeness—he can even stop being sad and be awesome instead!—it's not true (not even in the fiction) that he has an additional awesome gland where others have a shame gland or that, when it seems that his nose is running, it is just overflowing with awesomeness that has to come out. Even though Barney tells us these things, we're sure they're not true even in the fictional show itself. How do we know that these things are false in the story?

Furthermore, there are plenty of things that are true in
How I Met Your Mother
which we are never explicitly told. We know from the very beginning that Ted's children's mother has a face and that Quinn was once a toddler. What makes those things true?

Bimbos Do Not Pop into Existence in MacLaren's (and Out Again After Sleeping with Barney)

Ted, Lily, Marshall, Robin, and Barney are having a drink at MacLaren's. We see how Barney targets a beautiful (say) brunette. He walks to her, whispers something in her ear and off they both go to Barney's apartment. Next day Barney tells Ted that they had (by Barney's standards, at least) sex that just about made the awesomeness threshold. For all we see in the show, the girl might have just popped into existence in MacLaren's and popped out of existence again after sleeping with Barney. This would probably be Barney's dream, but (just this time) Barney's dream must go unfulfilled. Unfortunately for Barney, it's false in
How I Met Your Mother
that chicks suddenly cease to exist after leaving his apartment. An interesting question is how we know that.

Well, in this case there's an easy answer. We know that the girls that Barney picks up are human beings and we know that human beings do not suddenly pop in and out of existence—they are born, they die, that sort of thing. In general, some things are true in fiction because other things are true: since both Barney and Ted's children's mother are humans, and because humans have faces but not awesome glands, we know that Barney does not have two awesome glands and that Ted's children's mother has a face.

What is true in any story depends on what the author tells us; in the case of
How I Met Your Mother
, these truths depend on the story that Ted tells their children and the images and conversations that illustrate it. But clearly, as the case of Barney's victims (and their existence before and after meeting him) shows, not exclusively on this. Some things are true in
How I Met Your Mother
because we're told so and we see so—we might call these “primitive” truths. But some things are true in the show merely because
other
things are true in the show—call them “derivative” truths. Examples of primitive fictional truths are that Ted's children have a mother, or that Barney was close to completing a perfect week. Examples of derivative fictional truths are that the Captain, at some point in his life, didn't know port from starboard, and
that there was some wisecrack realtor that coined the name “DoWiSeTrePla” for the neighborhood in which Marshall and Lily live.

The interesting philosophical question at this point is how the latter, merely implied, derivative truths about the show are generated from the former, explicit, primitive fictional truths. Unfortunately this is not the only problem that we have to solve (neh,
fortunately
: problems are awesome.) We also need to get clear about what are the primary truths in a story. We're told that Lily, Ted, and Marshall used to pass around subs while in college, but we don't think that this is true. Why is it true that Robin is Canadian but not true that Ted, Marshall, and Lily, while in college, ate from two feet long subs that they passed from one to the other? Let's start with derivative truths.

Why Barney's Dream Isn't True

Barney's
one-night stands
are not always clear about the time-window that Barney has allotted for their relationship: one night. In Barney's dreams girls would disappear right after crossing the door of the apartment or even better right after a crazy night—committing to oblivion those that insist on having a long breakfast in the morning. Unfortunately for Barney, this is not what happens in
How I Met Your Mother
, and he has to deal with girls calling back and not understanding that the best night of their lives has already gone; but why is Barney's dream not fictionally true?

Barney's dream is false although we are not explicitly told so. We're told in the series that some girls call back trying to get Barney, but in some cases we're not told what happens with them. Nonetheless, we know that it's not the case that they pop out of existence. The girls he landed during his “almost” perfect week kept on existing after meeting him: this is a derivative truth. It is true because it is fictionally true that they are girls and that girls do not pop out of existence. The first one is a primitive fictional truth, we are explicitly told so in the series, the second is not. The problem of derivative truths is the problem of determining which truths we're supposed to keep fixed, in the process of generating derivative truths.

If It's True There, It's True Here

Well, there's this: in general, when we watch a fictional TV show or read a novel we do not believe things that are
inconsistent with what we know is true in the real world
, unless this is required for understanding the story. We don't go around saying things like “You know, for all we know, two plus two might very well equal five in
How I Met Your Mother
—after all, this is a
fictional show
, maaaan.” That would be pretty stupid: nothing in the show suggests that math might be fundamentally different in the
How I Met Your Mother
universe; so we simply assume that math is just the same as we know it in the real universe.

And we're not required to suspend our belief that Barney is a human when we watch
How I Met Your Mother
—even if it's hard to believe that a human being can be that awesome. Along these lines, the most straightforward attitude towards
How I Met Your Mother
is to deem true all the things that
really
are true, if they're not incompatible with the primary truths in the show. We know that people do not pop out of existence, that they have kidneys and faces, and that's why it's true in the show that Lily has kidneys, Ted's children's mother has a face, and Barney's dream is false. On the other hand, we know that no one can be as awesome as Barney, but we give up this belief when following the show because it's incompatible with what we're told in
How I Met Your Mother
: Barney is as awesome as Barney!

There's a catch, though: if we take this idea too seriously, we end up generating the wrong kind of fictional truths: there are
way too many
things that are compatible with
How I Met Your Mother
primary truths, which we do not want to count as true in the show. It would be true in
How I Met Your Mother
that at three in the morning on the Third of November 2008 there was no one eating gazpacho in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, or that, I don't know, something really random was taking place, or not, in some really random corner of the world. It's unreasonable to take
How I Met Your Mother
as being concerned with those things. It's a show about important stuff, people. Also, if such things were to be counted as true in the show, no one, not even the screenwriters, would ever come to know whether it was true in
How I Met Your Mother
. And we like to think that
screenwriters have some kind of control on what is true in the story they are writing (even if many of us have watched
Lost
, but let's not go there).

If We All Believe It, It's True Here

One way to avoid this absurdly-random-fictional-truths conclusion is to appeal to the beliefs that are openly shared by the community in which the story is written. There are no openly-shared beliefs about gazpacho consumption in Brighton Beach in November, and therefore those things do not count as true in the show.

This proposal is not free of problems. For example, we are not willing to count as true in the show everything that most people believe in contemporary North America. Apparently, a majority of Americans believe in God, but it's weird to take that as a reason to believe that it is true in
How I Met Your Mother
(as opposed to, say, true in
Bruce Almighty
) that there is a god.

Now we can consider the case of Lily, Marshall, and Ted eating from the two-feet-long sub that they're passing around. While they are doing that, they are laughing and they look stoned. We all know that they are high and that they are not passing a sub around. We conclude this because we all believe that those are clear symptoms of smoking dope. (We're not accusing the reader of having experienced these effects though—on the other hand, how else does the reader know about those symptoms? Will the reader start respecting us, the writers of this chapter, as the discerning adults we are and come clean? Or are we to continue playing little ambiguity games with the reader? Geez, the reader should give us a break.)

So, it's reasonable to think that at some point fifty-something Ted became—he probably always was—a bit prudish and that he doesn't want to tell his children that he used to smoke grass when he was younger. The problem now is that, in the show, we're explicitly told that Lily, Marshall, and Ted gather together to eat subs and therefore this should count as a primary fictional truth. But, come on, it's perfectly clear that they gather to smoke grass and not to eat subs; that is, it follows from what we believe about the behavior and looks of people smoking grass: a derivative fictional truth.

There you go: a derivative fictional truth that contradicts a primary fictional truth. Should we, in this case, not hold fixed those beliefs that brought us to derive this truth? We expect the reader's head to be spinning at this point. Even without smoking dope.

They Used to Smoke Dope, Didn't They?

In
How I Met Your Mother
Ted tells his children the story of how he met their mother. In doing so, we learn many things about the gang and some of the characters surrounding their lives, Ted tells us that Lily and Marshall have been together since college, that Victoria is a pastry chef, and that Barney is (for lack of a more awesomer word) awesome. Those are primary fictional truths.

We have seen that there are more things that are true in
How I Met Your Mother
than the things Ted explicitly relates—what we have called derivative fictional truths. Primary fictional truths together with certain background beliefs entail derivative truths like that Robin has two kidneys (we also learn that Doogie Howser gave up his brilliant career and that Chris Peterson didn't pass away after meeting Spewey but it is not clear that those are derivative truths in
How I Met Your Mother
).

One would think that primary truths are easy peasy: in
How I Met Your Mother
they are the things that fifty-something Ted, who is the narrator, tells us. As the philosopher David Lewis has suggested, the author of a fictional story pretends to be a narrator, so when Ted tells us about their lives during their early thirties, the screenwriters are pretending to be Ted giving us accurate information about Lily, Ted, Marshall, Robin, and Barney. Since Ted tells us that Robin is Canadian, this will count as a primary fictional truth.

Yeah, not so quick. (That should be the
motto
of all philosophers: Gothic letters inside a laurel wreath reading “YEAH, NOT SO QUICK.” When you see the T-shirt, remember: you read it here first.) The Ted-as-narrator account of primary truths has some flaws. For example, we believe that Ted might tell things wrongly, that he is not infallible; in fact, and to judge by the way he handles his personal life, he is
far
from infallible. Ted's fallibility in turn requires that things in the fiction
are allowed to be different from the way in which Ted presents them and therefore, that there are primary truths that differ from what Ted tells. Maybe some of the goofs and mistakes of the show (some of the continuity errors, say) can be explained by older-Ted's unreliability. A further problem is that there are more primary truths than what Ted tells us. For instance, as Ted is fighting that evil goat we can see that there is a striped carpet in the floor. This seems to be a primary fictional truth but hardly something that Ted is telling his children:
Kids, in May 2009, my living room was furnished as follows: . . .

The philosopher Gregory Currie has proposed a theory of truth in fiction that attempts to solve this kind of problems. Currie proposes that each fiction has a
fictional narrator
, who is neither the author nor the narrator
in the fiction
—the screenwriters and Ted respectively, in our case. Such a fictional narrator, as opposed to Ted, is supposed to be reliable; he is telling us known facts of the story. When we engage in the fiction what we do is reconstruct the beliefs of such a narrator.

We can see how such a fictional narrator is helpful in stories-with-narrators: in
Sunset Boulevard
, for example, the story is told by Joe Gillis, but (leaving aside the fact that he is dead) it's impossible that Joe remembers (let alone narrates) all of the details that are portrayed in the film—everything Norma Desmond says, word by word, how every shadow falls on her face, and so on. That's where the fictional narrator comes in handy:
that thing
can remember and narrate everything with Terminator-like attention to detail. Yay the fictional narrator. The highest of fives for them.