ETEC 530 Discussions / Assignments

Movie Review: Annihilation

I recall Annihilation as a disturbing foray into uncharted epistemological boundaries when I first watched it almost a decade ago. I decided to revisit the film with a more critical lens and a deeper interest in the epistemological implications of Alex Garland’s cosmic-horror depiction of what it means to be human.

Movie summary
The characters in Annihilation are highly skilled and educated female scientists, each proficient in her field and seemingly equipped with a greater capacity for learning than their military counterparts, who met tragic ends within the alien biosphere known as the Shimmer prior to the assembly of the all-female team. The setting is an obscure swampland off an unnamed coast, where a meteorite strikes a lone lighthouse before an expanding, refractive phenomenon begins to spread outward.

The protagonist, known only as Dr. Lena, joins the team after her missing husband returns home, apparently from the Shimmer, only to fall gravely ill shortly thereafter. The team enters this alien landscape in search of the source of the phenomenon that threatens all life on Earth.

The breakdown and deterioration of fundamental epistemological frameworks in Annihilation:
The film opens with Dr. Lena being interrogated by a man in a hazmat suit inside a quarantine area. He asks her a series of seemingly mundane questions, to which she repeatedly replies that she does not know. When he finally asks, “Then what do you know?” (Garland, 2018, 00:00:58), the epistemic stakes of the film are immediately established, through which the audience is invited to discover and explore the horror of the unknown.

We learn that the characters are scientists- vetted experts in their respective fields and who prioritize reason, inquiry, and learning over the militaristic approach previously employed by the soldiers who vanished within the Shimmer. In particular, Dr. Lena, a biologist at Johns Hopkins, and the military psychologist Dr. Ventress explicitly frame their decision to enter the Shimmer as motivated by a desire to know and to understand. Lena hopes to save her husband, while Ventress harbors more opaque motivations that gradually reveal themselves.

By establishing these motivations, the film initially presents the characters as possessing epistemic virtues: curiosity, rationality, and methodological discipline, which we might reasonably assume would be conducive to discovering the truth of the alien phenomenon.

This assumption is quickly undermined. Upon entering the Shimmer, the team loses any stable sense of time, memory, and self, regaining consciousness days later with no recollection of what occurred (Garland, 2018, 00:30:00). Neither propositional knowledge nor procedural knowledge functions reliably when their communication systems fail and their navigational instruments become meaningless.

As the expedition progresses, the explorers struggle to preserve any form of epistemic reliability, gradually sinking into a state of epistemic skepticism as they oscillate between awe and despair in the face of the incomprehensible environment (Garland, 2018, 00:38:00). Characters tend to fall back on process-based justification, such as taking samples of DNA, trying to form guard parameters and forming social structures to make sense of what they are learning. This reflects a broadly Kantian attempt to make sense of phenomena through the application of human cognitive frameworks.

Yet these strategies ultimately fail. The Shimmer constitutes a fundamentally hostile epistemic environment in which no belief-forming process can reliably track truth.

One of the film’s most striking allegories is its treatment of mutation. Early on, Dr. Lena remarks on the improbability of a single plant producing multiple species of flowers on separate branches, suggesting a process of continual and accelerated mutation. This refractive mutation is mirrored in the increasingly corrupted biological forms encountered as the team approaches what they call the source.

In parallel, the characters’ personal histories reveal their internal epistemic conditions. As the geomorphologist Cassie describes them, they are “damaged goods” (Garland, 2018, 00:39:54)- a phrase that serves as an allusion to the corruption and instability of both their inner lives and the external world they inhabit. As the story unfolds, the accelerated mutation of their own DNA forces each character to adapt to overwhelming environmental pressures, shedding not only their epistemological frameworks but also their sense of self.

Ultimately, Annihilation asks the audience to embrace a profound form of epistemological humility. The knowledge which gives way to transformation, and understanding is no longer grounded in mastery or explanation, but in acceptance of radical uncertainty.

Discussion Questions:

1. How do we hold up epistemic reliability when the environmental conditions for reliabilism are hostile?
2. What kind of epistemic virtues are critical for most efficacious reliabilism?
3. How does experiential knowledge shape reliabilism?
   ---

Note: The review has been checked for epistemological validity through ChatGPT.

Vantage Points Discussion

**Citation
J. Angelo Corlett (2007) Analyzing Social Knowledge, Social Epistemology, 21:3, 231-247, DOI: 10.1080/02691720701674049

I chose this article primarily because in my work context, social knowledge is an ever-present force which is known to nebulously dictate critical learning junctures throughout a young person's educational experience.

Summary

Corlett distinguishes random "collectives" merely as groups rather than autonomous, decision-making entities or conglomerates that can be said to possess knowledge. In particular, Corlett makes an example of a group of television watchers who enjoy the same T.V show, versus an institution that is in agreement with their fiscal policies and impacts (Corlett, pg. 232). Corlett goes on to deconstruct the argument that such institutions might be known to possess knowledge by running it through a battery of epistemological tests that question said institution's epistemic rigor. Corlett surmises that rather than an analysis of specific institutions or deconstruction of institutional existentialism, the article merely sets forth the conditions required for what constitutes collective knowledge. Which is, collective belief, truth and justification (Corlett, pg. 244). In the end, Corlett concludes that what makes belief, acceptance, justification and knowledge collective is that they are the results of human decision-makers related to one another in groups that represent the groups’ interests—even though the groups are artificial entities (pg. 245).

Response

Below is a flattened hierarchy of what comprises social knowledge based on Corlett's model:

SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE ├── 1. Proper Group (Conglomerate) │ ├── 2. Collective Belief (Degree-based) │ ├── 3. Collective Acceptance (Higher-order endorsement) │ ├── 4. Truth (Non-accidental) │ └── 5. Justification │ ├── Coherence ├── Reliability └── Epistemic Responsibility ├── Intentionality ├── Voluntariness ├── Open-mindedness ├── Reflective evaluation └── Limited epistemic luck

Corlett's parameters for what constitutes a collective is interesting to me in the sense that it does not actually take into consideration how groups coalesce into an autonomous, belief-sharing entity, rather as a pre-established entity that might have seemingly manifested at will. While the Agrippan trilemma is mentioned in regards to Coherentism justifying the collective's beliefs, the structural problem of how and why the collective came to be formed remains unaddressed.

Though it seems an important point to leave out of the equation, Corlett does argue that a conglomerate knows p at a particular time to the extent that: (a) its members accept p at that time; (b) p is true at that time; (c) the group is justified in believing p at that time (tn), which entails that the group is epistemically responsible in forming and accepting p at that time in light of any epistemic luck that might obtain in the group’s doxastic circumstance (pg. 234). In this way, Corlett locks the collective knowledge into a point in time rather than depicting the conglomerate as an unchanging entity that relies in epistemic luck to hold any knowledge. Corlett also imparts the recursive nature of social knowledge, encapsluated aptly in this Platonic quote:

"But, Cratylus, I have long been surprised at my own wisdom—and doubtful of it too. That’s why I think it’s necessary to keep investigating whatever I say, since self-deception is the worst thing of all … Therefore, I think we have to turn back frequently to what we’ve already said, in order to test it by looking at it “backwards and forwards simultaneously” …

Thus, the article's lack of concern for how a conglomerate comes into existence can be understood as a tangential topic, keeping focused on the conditions of possession of knowledge alone regardless of how it came to be formed.

Discussion

Some points that I thought I'd like to query in regards to Corlett's social knowledge conditions are

1. What are the parameters of a conglomerate? As in does it reach nationalistic levels? In this case, if the governing body of a nation is considered a conglomerate, does that mean its citizens are required to be in alignment with its collective belief and or collective acceptance?

2. Corlett ascribes blameworthiness as part of epistemic responsibility, what does this imply in a practical sense? If an entire collective is to "blame" for failing to meet standards of epistemic virtue or falling into sceptical fallibilism, or even acting in bad faith, can a collective hold itself responsible? If so, how?