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spectoergosum · 7 years ago

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[edited transcript]

Part I: Introduction

Today, I’ll take a slightly different approach than I’ve taken in previous episodes. Normally, I take a topic from philosophy, and a single TV show to study in conversation with that philosophical question. In this case, my question itself is more connected to television, and I’m going to be using several TV examples to explore the question.

My question for today is, What is television? Today more than ever, that question is getting harder and harder to answer. Just think about all the new ways of watching TV: streaming, Netflix, cable, On Demand. And there are new kinds of programming. Creators are experimenting with lengths, narrative structures, nonfiction versus fiction, timelines, sequels, prequels—and that’s not even taking into account variations in broadcasting policy and regulations from country to country, and network to network. On the audience side, television can occupy a variety of different roles in different people’s lives. These are just some of the reasons why it’s so hard to answer the question, What is television?

This points to a broader discussion about what it means to define something, in a philosophical sense. That’s how I’m going to start this episode: a brief history of how philosophers have thought about definitions in the past, the kinds of definition that are useful for philosophical discussion, and what those definitions need to accomplish in the context of philosophical discussion. I’m going to give a brief overview of definitions from a philosophical standpoint. Then, I’m going to look at a handful of TV theorists who have either attempted to define television for themselves, or have given arguments for why we can’t define it. Finally, I’ll propose a way that four very different programs can all be grouped under the heading “television.” I’m going to be using a variation on family resemblance theory to do that. I’ll explain family resemblance theory in a little bit, but this is a controversial alternative to giving a traditional definition of a term.

Part II: Oxford English Dictionary

Before we get into some more heavy duty, philosophical definitions, I thought I’d start with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of television. The OED defines television as: “(1.a.) A system used for transmitting and viewing images and (typically) sound; the action of transmitting and viewing images using such a system…esp. such a system used for the organized broadcast of professionally produced shows and programs. (b.) The activity or occupation of broadcasting or transmitting on television; the television system or service as a whole; television as a medium of communication or as a form of art or entertainment. (c.) That which is broadcast or transmitted by television; the content of television programs.”

The first thing I noticed about this definition is the emphasis on broadcast, which modern television has certainly expanded beyond. But that is where television history is rooted: it evolved from radio into a series of broadcast networks, so I think that’s part of why broadcast plays such a prominent role in the OED definition. Along the same lines, television is defined first with reference to the physical TV system itself. That’s definition 1.a.: “a system used for transmitting”… et cetera [emphasis mine]. My question here is, in philosophy parlance, what kind of definition did I just read in the Oxford English Dictionary? Are there other kinds of definitions that are better suited to the task of discussing television, and the task of giving a philosophically-satisfying definition of television?

Part III: Philosophical Definitions

Let’s get into philosophical definitions. To work through this section, I’m mainly going to be referring to a piece from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Anil Gupta. I’ve cited from the Stanford Encyclopedia in previous episodes, and it’s a really great resource if you want a brief, but fairly detailed overview of any kind of general philosophical topic. Gupta notes that he is not covering every kind of definition, and of the kinds he covers, I will only address a few.

The first point Gupta makes is that some debates about definitions “can be settled by making requisite distinctions, for definitions are not all of one kind: definitions serve a variety of functions, and their general character varies with function. Some other debates, however, are not so easily settled, as they involve contentious philosophical ideas such as essence, concept, and meaning.” Later on, Gupta says, “The different definitions can perhaps only be subsumed under the Aristotelian formula that a definition gives the essence of a thing. But this only highlights the fact that ‘to give the essence of a thing’ is not a unitary kind of activity.” In other words, there are different kinds of definitions that are suited to different purposes. But if all definitions aim to give the “essence” of a thing, that seems to just push the question further back. What does it mean to describe an essence? Even if we know what we mean by essence, is that something that can be satisfactorily described in a single definition? Keep that question in mind as we move along.

One kind of definition that this article discusses is a stipulative definition, which “imparts a meaning to the defined term, and involves no commitment that the assigned meaning agrees with prior uses (if any) of the term.” A stipulative definition is set out for the purposes of the given discussion. As far as I can tell, a stipulative definition wouldn’t seem to capture essence in the fullest sense, because a stipulative definition is not committed to agreeing with preexisting uses of the term it defines. A definition that captures the essence, whatever that means, should reflect how that essence is understood in earlier uses of the term. Say that you stipulatively define “dogs” as “things with four legs” for the sake of a discussion. Someone could come up with counterexamples, like a three-legged dog, and in that sense they could argue that you’re not capturing the essence of dog (which includes three-legged dogs) in your stipulative definition. However, I think as long as you’re aware that your definition is a stipulative one, and you don’t attempt to use it as you would a comprehensive, essence-describing definition, then you should be okay. To that end, Gupta discusses some of the criteria for stipulative definitions, one of which is called the “conservativeness criterion.” The conservativeness criterion says that “a stipulative definition should not enable us to establish essentially new claims.” The implications of a stipulative definition should be restricted to the confines of the discussion in which it’s put forth. Since stipulative definitions don’t have to agree with prior uses of a term, this means that stipulative definitions can’t be used to make new arguments about the term, as that term was used in prior discussions. That’s a brief summary of how stipulative definitions work.

The next kind of definition is descriptive. “Descriptive definitions, like stipulative ones, spell out meaning, but they also aim to be adequate to existing usage.” In this case, if a descriptive definition doesn’t fit existing usage, it’s unsatisfactory. Think of it as an additional requirement added on to a stipulative definition. Your descriptive definition has to agree with how the term was used and understood, before you put forward your own definition. I think descriptive definitions sound like they come closer to capturing the essence, since the requirements placed on them are more stringent, and descriptive definitions are wedded to preexisting uses of the terms that they define. Gupta’s article lists three grades of descriptive adequacy for a descriptive definition. These are three ways you can judge a descriptive definition. A descriptive definition is“extensionally adequate iff there are no actual counterexamples to it”; it’s “intensionally adequate iff there are no possible counterexamples to it”; and the definition is “sense adequate (or analytic) iff it endows the defined term with the right sense. (The last grade of adequacy itself subdivides into different notions, for ‘sense’ can be spelled out in several different ways.)” [author’s emphasis]. Sense adequacy seems like a murky criterion. I think it’s similar to what it means to give the essence of something. What it means to endow the term with the right sense could be up for debate, and I think that’s why Gupta notes that there are different ways of understanding what it means to give the sense of a term, depending on the context in which you’re defining it. But I think the first two grades of descriptive adequacy—extensional adequacy and intensional adequacy—seem fairly straightforward. If you want to prove that a descriptive definition is extensionally inadequate, you supply a real-world counterexample. To return to dogs, to prove my stipulative definition extensionally inadequate, you could refer to an existing three-legged dog. To prove a descriptive definition is intensionally inadequate, you need to provide a logically-possible counterexample. The counterexample doesn’t need to be something that actually exists in the real world (because that would prove extensional inadequacy); it can be something that’s merely within the realm of possibility that would disprove the definition.

The final kind of definition we’ll discuss is an ostensive definition, which “typically depend[s] on context and on experience.” Gupta says, “We can think of experience as presenting the subject with a restricted portion of the world. This portion can serve as a point of evaluation for the expressions in an ostensive definition.” I think most ostensive definitions come in the form of “let x be this thing.” So, if we were talking about dogs, to paraphrase Gupta, I would say, “let Dug be this dog,” and I would be pointing to my pug, Dug. Ostensive definitions can be a way for new terms to enter the lexicon. When you see something new and assign it a name, you are giving it an ostensive definition by saying, let’s call this thing x. If that definition and name catches on, then we have a new term in our language. The Gupta article notes that Bertrand Russell and some other philosophers have proposed that ostensive definitions are “the source of all primitive concepts,” and that we built our language by giving names and ostensive definitions to the things we encountered. Presumably, whoever named television “television” could be thought of as having given an ostensive definition to this new thing, television, based on what they experienced in their first encounter with this new technology. But again, this ostensive definition doesn’t seem like the most useful definition for understanding what television is. We’re past the point of encountering, identifying, and naming TV for the first time, and we also want our definition to be agreeable with prior uses of the term. Ostensive definitions make no attempt to do that.

One question I had in reading this article is: what is the difference between stipulative and ostensive definitions? They both differ from descriptive definitions in that they don’t have to agree with prior uses. What I gathered is that typically, a stipulative definition is given for a term that is already in use; whereas an ostensive definition is often used to give a new name to some specific object within a limited field of experience. I also got the impression that an ostensive definition is less descriptive than a stipulative one, because an ostensive definition can be as simple as “let x be this thing”; whereas a stipulative definition, according to Gupta’s article, usually tries to impart a meaning beyond describing the defined term in terms of immediate reference points. It’s not something as simple as “let y be that book over there.” I think a stipulative definition aims a little higher, in terms of descriptive power, than an ostensive one.

When I turn to examples of definitions from the realm of TV theory, I’ll try to look for a descriptive definition of television. That will enable me to make claims about television as it has been understood in prior uses of the term, as well as into the future. Neither an ostensive nor a stipulative definition can do this, which is why I’d prefer to find a descriptive definition. Returning to the OED definition I talked about earlier, I think we can best categorize it as an attempt at a descriptive definition. It aims to be adequate to existing uses, and it spells out the meaning of the word “television” in several different contexts: television as a medium, television as a kind of content, television as a physical object. But if we want to parse that OED definition more, we could prove the more broadcast-centric part of the definition extensionally inadequate. Our counterexample (remember: for extensional inadequacy, you have to provide a real-world counterexample) would be Hulu, Netflix, or any streaming-only television. It’s not broadcast, but it’s still, arguably, television. The later parts of the OED definition are a little vaguer, and less obviously objectionable. For instance, the dictionary describes television “as a medium of communication or as a form of art or entertainment.” But I don’t know if this tells us the essence of television. If the first part of the OED definition fails because it’s too specific—because it doesn’t cover everything we now consider television—the latter parts of the OED definition might be too general. There are a lot of things that are mediums of communication, or forms of art or entertainment. Anyway, I think the OED definition won’t do much for us in this philosophical attempt to define television, but I think we can call it an attempt at a descriptive definition of television that is at least partially extensionally inadequate.

When we talk about television, it has grown and changed over its history, and it continues to do so as new technologies and new kinds of programming emerge. In trying to define television, how can I be sure that whatever descriptive definition I come up with will capture an essence of TV that will still hold true into the future? As we’ve seen, what we call television is liable to change. This is where I think Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory could be of use. My interview with Professor Floyd will give a more thorough explanation of family resemblance, but the basic idea is that a definition doesn’t need to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be an instance of the defined term. Rather, in family resemblance theory, there is a class of related instances of a term. Everything in this family resemblance class shares at least one trait in common with another member of the class, but not everything we call television needs to have all the same traits, and no one instance of television needs to have all the traits represented in that family resemblance class. I will turn this over to Professor Floyd for a more detailed explanation of how family resemblance works.

Part IV: Interview

For this next segment of my podcast, I would like to introduce my interview guest. Professor Juliet Floyd from the BU Philosophy Department specializes in analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics, among other areas. She has done some really interesting work translating Wittgenstein’s old writings and compiling them, and tracing his correspondence with Alan Turing. You might be familiar with Turing as one of the originators of the internet, and Benedict Cumberbatch played him in The Imitation Game. I took two of Prof. Floyd’s classes, one on Symbolic Logic, and one on Wittgenstein. Professor Floyd explained to me how this family resemblance theory works, according to Wittgenstein.

CJ: What are some of the problems that Wittgenstein identifies with traditional definitions, and how does he think family resemblance can address some of these problems?

JF: Of course, it’s an old problem in Plato, in the Euthyphro. How do we define piety? And Socrates goes around demanding necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s counting as just or virtuous. And we already see in Plato the tendency to fail. Most of us can utilize a concept without stating explicitly sharp, necessary and sufficient conditions. So first of all, it’s an old problem. It’s also an old problem in mathematics. As modern mathematics got more and more abstract in the 19th century, and logic was formalized, there are actually internal paradoxes in logic that emerge from this quest to try to define basic notions. So Wittgenstein came into philosophy as a young engineer, and he was very taken by Russell’s Paradox, which says you cannot talk about the set of all sets. And this was very upsetting, because set had become the basic notion by means of which mathematicians and logicians could talk about concepts. Every concept, or definition, should correspond to a set. We have the set of all birds, the set of all people, the set of all natural numbers… what’s wrong with the notion of set? He very early proposed a solution to that. We don’t know what it was, but we know that he did that as a young man. So the basic problem for Wittgenstein was, why is it that we could have perfectly well-formed definitions, that seem to meet all the criteria for sense, and yet when we put them together, things fall apart and we get contradictions? Just because a set of words is put together, and appears to obey all the rules of grammar, doesn’t mean that you have a definition. That’s kind of a different problem from the Euthyphroproblem, although it’s related, because it raises a very general question about what this is.

Now, the family resemblance idea comes up in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, when he begins to realize how deep this problem is, of asking for necessary and sufficient conditions, as if our words are supposed to carry us into all possible future contexts. That we have to decide what a chair is, in all possible future contexts, even where aliens land, and with different bodies, and all kinds of things. So, in his later work, he proposes family resemblance, thinking that definitions can be okay even if they don’t handle all possible circumstances, or all possible numbers. He uses number as his example. The image is a beautiful image. We could have a cord, or a rope, that corresponds to the life of a concept as we deploy it through time in different circumstances. And there could be one cord, but there might not be one single thread that extends the length of the cord. The cord might be a weaving of shorter threads that only work in certain circumstances. But in the end, if we’re careful, and we work at our words, that plasticity turns out to be the very thing that holds the thread together.

I’ll give you an example that I like, from the law. We have definitions in the Constitution, and judges have to deploy those definitions—like “the right to bear arms,” “well-regulated militia”—and judges who give arguments are forced to sharpen those notions through time. But I would say, what makes the Constitution last over time is the family resemblance, is the way in which judges can carefully and creatively put together new collections of precedents, in order to create something that will allow the concept to be projected into a new situation.

CJ: On the other side of this topic, what are some of the criticisms of family resemblance? For instance, I think one that comes up often is, are these categories actually precise enough to be useful in everyday usage of terms? And are there any other objections? Was Wittgenstein in conversation with other people about family resemblance?

JF: The first, most basic response would be Socrates’s response, or Plato’s response, which is, how do you know ahead of time that we can’t get necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept? To take a famous example, water, when we do a lot of chemistry, turns out to be H2O. So we kind of found a reduction of the concept to chemistry. Isn’t that enough? So one objection comes from scientists who think that they have analyzed concepts sharply, and also philosophers who don’t like the kind of pessimism involved in Wittgenstein’s idea.

Another kind of worry comes from people who worry that we’re losing our hold on truth, that everything now becomes a question of power, or stipulation, or mere playing with words, and somehow we have a kind of linguistic idealism, entailed by, for example, what I just said about the law. To me, the deepest thing Wittgenstein has to teach us is, no, the notions of truth and objectivity actually require the plasticity. Otherwise, we lose hold of those notions. My teacher, Stanley Cavell, was quite wonderful on this. For him, the interplay in Wittgenstein’s philosophy—between the demand for sharp concepts, and what we do in ordinary life—gives rise to skepticism. That’s what gives our skeptical questions in philosophy—about other minds, or the external world, or tables, or law, or objectivity—all their life. Wittgenstein still embraces certain Enlightenment ideals, but he’s saying, we can’t have what we thought we needed for objectivity. But we still have to pursue objectivity as we go.

CJ: Great, I think that’s all I need.

JF: That’s all you need, wow! So we don’t get to talk about TV.

CJ: We can if you want! Later on in the podcast, I’m going to try to propose what a family resemblance definition of TV would look like. The problem that I was running into, which it sounds like Wittgenstein anticipated, is that we don’t know everything that’s going to characterize this term we’re defining into the future. But I guess if you can find those threads of connection to future iterations of this concept, from things that are already present—

JF: Yeah, or whether you say, as a lot of media people I talk to say, the “era of television,” in its former sense, is over. And then what you might be doing is dropping the concept, because it had a home, and an use, inside people’s homes, watching things. And we still need the concept of “binge-watching,” and “home,” because it seems important if it’s domestic. The real change, I think, is mobile technology. Mobile technology really does penetrate very differently into our everyday lives. Now television becomes a kind of omnipresent feature of our bodily environment, and I think that really changes how we have to think about things. Since, in a way, mobile technology is the most successful, quickest penetrating technology, in the history of humanity.

CJ: One thing that I noticed in looking at some TV theory articles that grapple with this problem—this was from a Noël Carroll piece. He said, “I predict that in the future the history of what we now call cinema and the history of video, TV, CD-ROM and whatever comes next will be thought of as a piece” (65). So I think a lot of people are predicting a convergence. I think Netflix is a good example. They started renting out DVDs, and now they’re producing their own TV shows and movies. The lines between those two genres are blurring a little bit. You were talking about binge-watching. We can treat a TV series as a long movie, and there are some movies that never actually make it to the theater, and you’re watching it at home in a TV setting.

JF: Yeah, they’re the novels of our age. I think that’s what TV series are, and I think that’s what binge-watching is, actually.

Part V: Television Theory Definitions

Before I try to apply family resemblance theory to defining television, I’m going to look at a couple of either attempts at defining television, or discussions of the difficulty of defining television. All three of these come from more of the TV theory side than the philosophy side, but I think they’re still relevant to this discussion.

The first piece, from Jonathan Gray, advises against attempts to give a descriptive definition of television. He argues that TV’s reach into culture, and its technological evolution, and the breadth of programming available, make it nearly impossible to sum all of that up in a single descriptive definition. John Hartley also acknowledges the difficulty of defining television. His strategy is to stick to a specific subset of TV, and he focuses on audience usage and interpretation of television. So this kind of definition from Hartley might be a stipulative definition. Hartley is saying that for his discussion, he’s excluding prior, non-audience-centric uses of the term “television.” Finally, Noël Carroll tells us what a definition of television isn’t: it is not a description of the medium’s technological capabilities, and the kinds of programming that television is best suited for. But Carroll does seem to think that there is an essence of TV that isn’t captured by a definition that focuses on the physical medium. Although he doesn’t provide an alternative, Carroll says that the physical or material definition of television aims to be descriptive, but fails, and he rejects it for that reason.

A. Gray

In his book, Television Entertainment, Jonathan Gray tells us not to try to give a descriptive definition of television, and he explains why that’s so difficult to do. Gray says, “Part of the problem of definition lies in the trends towards narrowcasting, niche marketing, and both channel and medium multiplication. Television began as a broadcast medium, and most countries had only two or three channels well into the 1970s” (9). Since its beginnings, TV has broadened the range of content that it offers, and the outlets for watching television have proliferated. Gray continues, “Even beyond content, however, we all have different experiences of watching. Some viewers carefully consult TV Guide, Radio Times, or their cable television guide channel, planning what to watch. Some have television on all the time…Some graze and channel-surf…Some watch alone. And some watch in groups, at specialized viewing parties, or in pubs or bars…most of us move across most of these viewing positions” (10). Not only are there a variety of forms of output that we can call television, but there are a variety of ways to consume television. Gray says, “Add the ever-growing assortment of technological paraphernalia that surround television, and the tale gets yet more complex” (10). Additionally, he mentions variations from country to country in broadcasting practices (10). So even if you’re looking strictly at broadcast television, which is arguably only a small part of the modern television landscape, even that can present itself in a wide variety of ways, depending on where you are.

Gray says, “Television exists at a level beyond its programs, productions, technologies of consumption, and national systems: it is pervasive…We all live in a heavily televised, telvision-ized culture” (11). Just to recap what Gray said, television can encompass programming, production methods, government policy, viewing technologies, cultural impact, and international permutations of all of these themes. Because of all these different considerations we have to take into account when we’re discussing television, Gray argues that it’s almost impossible to construct a satisfactory descriptive definition of TV that encompasses the breadth and still-changing nature of the medium. Again, this is an area where family resemblance theory starts to look more attractive. I think as Gray illustrates, it’s not just that TV is evolving, and has changed from its past state. TV is evolving in multiple different directions. It’s not a straight line progression from TV’s origins to now. There are all these ever-multiplying, branching tendrils of television as a medium. We somehow have to corral all of that into a definition, and for Gray, a descriptive definition can’t accomplish that.

B. Hartley

Now I’m going to look at a piece by Hartley, who I think proposes a sort of speculative definition of television. I’ll explain what I mean by that with examples from his book. Hartley wrote a book called Uses of Television, in which he argues that “Television is far too big as a textual system, far too complex in all its facets of production, programming and reception, far too varied across time and place, to be studied as a single entity. It is too chaotic an object of study to be described detail by detail. As a result, many books that introduce the general study of television tend to abandon any attempt to describe a coherent entity or phenomenon” (17). Like Gray, Hartley is pointing out the seemingly impossible nature of the task of defining television. But rather than leaving it at that, and saying that a descriptive definition can’t accomplish this, Hartley thinks that providing a speculative definition, which sections off a portion of this big mess that we call television, and focuses on giving a complete account of that section, might be the way to go. Hartley doesn’t mention or consider family resemblance as an alternative, although hang onto that idea, because that might be an alternative.

Hartley says, “There seems to be no such ‘thing’ as ‘Television’, whose natural properties can be described by scientific methods, or whose activities can be explained by causal sequence” (18). I wonder if part of the difficulty of defining TV is the fact that it’s something manmade, and TV’s artificial nature makes it harder to assess objectively, especially because we as viewers are creating television at the same time that we view it and attempt to define it. That certainly sounds different than something biological or naturally-occurring. But then again, it seems like there are other manmade things that are easier to define than television, like tables. This point about TV’s artificiality might also be made for a lot of art forms, including literature, theater, and film. So maybe the fact that TV is a more recent invention makes it harder to define objectively than older media. We don’t yet have the right critical distance from television. That might be something to consider.

Hartley continues, “‘television’ is usually described by drawing attention to one of the separate ‘moments’ of production, text, audience and history, looking at institutionalization, discourse, political economy and social impact of the industries, technologies and practices involved” (18). And this focus on one of many “moments” of TV will ultimately be Hartley’s approach. Each of these moments informs a different stipulative definition of TV (at least that’s how I’ll put it, in terms of philosophical definitions). Hartley says, “the habits, changes and histories of analytical, theoretical and critical discourses about television, media and culture need to be seen increasingly as part of the historical milieu which needs explaining, rather than as some safe haven of scientific truth for academics to use as that mythical ‘effective standpoint from which to criticize society’” (25). You can’t discuss television in isolation from its position in our historical and cultural narrative. But on the other hand, when we take this cultural surrounding into account, that seems to get us further from a concise, objective, descriptive definition of television.

Hartley continues, “While it is not possible to imagine ‘television’ as a singular object of study, and not wise to reduce it to a single characteristic, it is possible to take a simple analytical approach by changing the question to one that is fundamentally historical. Not: what is television? But: what is television for? What are The Uses of Television?” (25). This is Hartley’s solution to the problem of defining television. He still is partitioning off a subset of television—in this case, he’s focusing on how audiences respond to TV and use it—as opposed to proposing a descriptive definition of television, which Hartley thinks might be impossible and, at any rate, he doesn’t attempt here. This makes sense as a way of dealing with the problem of defining television. There is a drawback to Hartley’s stipulative definition of TV. Because of the conservativeness criterion, he can’t establish any new claims about television as a whole (whatever that means) based on what he says about television as an audience-use medium. That’s a consequence of the limited scope of a stipulative definition, and a reason why we might be motivated to look for some sort of descriptive definition of television.

C. Carroll

Finally, I’ll turn to Noël Carroll’s piece. Carroll says, “from a very early date the potential of video for use in terms of what is called instantaneous transmission has also led many to claim for the medium a special advantage, or maybe even a destiny, in the service of certain forms of documentation, such as news reportage” (6). This is actually a fairly prevalent strain of thought in TV theory: that liveness, or the capacity for live broadcasting, is central to the nature of television. This makes sense in a way, because that is something that set television apart from film and literature. But if we look at the evolution of television, TV as a whole is far less live today than it was in its early years. For some television theorists, with whom Carroll disagrees, “essence is construed as the physical feature that defines entities as being instances of that medium” (12). For some people trying to define television, it’s not the artistic traditions, or government policies, or cultural impact, but physical technology that serves as the defining feature of television.

I think this kind of definition is harder to defend today, since television can be produced and viewed with a much wider range of media technologies than were available at its inception. This technology-focused definition is probably extensionally inadequate as a descriptive definition of television. If you say that television is something produced by broadcast technology, for instance, there is an existing counterexample in the form of streaming television and cable television. That would disprove a descriptive definition that uses the concepts of broadcasting and liveness to define television. Perhaps a broadcast-centric definition was satisfactory at TV’s inception, but it seems nearly impossible to give a descriptive definition of television that we can trust to remain satisfactory throughout continuing changes to TV technology. This would be intensional inadequacy: we can imagine other possible permutations of TV technology in the future that would contradict any medium- or technology-specific definition that we came up with. Even if we said, TV is a medium that utilizes live broadcast, and cable, and internet streaming technologies, and listed all the technical possibilities for TV that we have right now, there’s no guarantee, and in fact it’s very unlikely, that that definition would remain accurate into the future.

Another reason Carroll gives for why the medium-specific definition of TV doesn’t work is, “the medium may support conflicting and even contradictory avenues of development” (12). I’ll give more examples of this in the next section, but just consider the diversity of TV programming that we have today. Even when television’s technical resources were more limited, we still had a wide variety of programming, including news, soap operas, and TV movies. This second reason for rejecting the medium-specific definition, focused on the variety of content that TV produces, might be an accusation of sense inadequacy. By focusing on the medium as a determining factor of TV content, we misrepresent what we mean when we talk about television. Again, I’m not completely clear on sense inadequacy, but I think this might be an instance of sense inadequacy for this medium-specific descriptive definition of television.

Carroll continues, “The impression that proponents of the medium-specificity thesis impart is that one need only examine the physical structure of the medium, and the sort of effects the art form based in that medium should traffic in more or less jump out at one…However, it is far from clear that one can move so neatly from the physical medium to the telos of the art form” (26). On the next page, he says, “it is our purposes that mold the medium’s development and not the medium that determines our artistic purposes” (27). Once again, part of what makes the task of defining television so difficult is that we’re still discovering what television is and what it will be, and we’re constantly finding new ways to use the medium. Carroll says, “I predict that in the future the history of what we now call cinema and the history of video, TV, CD-ROM and whatever comes next will be thought of as a piece” (65). Carroll anticipates more of the convergence that we’re already seeing today. This is just further support for the claim that a medium-specific definition of TV, based on the physical facts of TV production, is too limiting to be satisfactory. For Carroll, a descriptive definition of TV based on the physical capabilities of the medium fails and is unsatisfactory. By focusing on physical, technological capabilities we might be able to divide up different stipulative definitions of television. We could give a stipulative definition of broadcast, streaming TV, cable TV, etc. But that doesn’t get us any closer to explaining why we call all of these diverse mediums “television,” and I think that’s part of Carroll’s larger point.

Part VI: Testing Family Resemblance

A. TV Examples

From my point of view, our dive into TV theory definitions of television didn’t get us much closer to what I really want, which is a descriptive definition of television that captures the medium in all its diversity and complexity. I’m going to test out family resemblance theory by taking a look at four TV shows that I consider marginal cases of television. I’ll explain a little more what I mean by that later. But I’m going to be looking at Orange Is The New Black, Documentary Now!, The Real Housewives of New York City, and Twin Peaks. I chose these shows in part because they don’t appear to have much in common on the surface. But I think each can be categorized under the TV umbrella, and each challenges the boundaries of what we consider television in its own way. I will attempt to propose a working answer to the question, “What is television?” by looking for a way to incorporate these somewhat nontraditional TV shows into a descriptive definition that still distinguishes TV from other, similar forms of media. And I’m going to use a variation of family resemblance theory to try that.

I’ll run through the shows I’m considering. Orange Is The New Black is a Netflix-only series. It’s one of the most successful series on Netflix, and they are currently producing the sixth season. It airs only on Netflix; it has never been broadcast or put on cable. Netflix releases approximately hour-long episodes, but the lengths vary, because Netflix shows don’t have to fit around commercial breaks. It’s like other TV dramas in that it’s fiction, and serialized. It’s a story about a central cast of characters, told over several seasons. The main area where OITNB challenges the traditional definition of television is in the streaming release model. Netflix releases thirteen episodes every June, and then viewers wait a whole year, after they inevitably watch the whole season in a week, for the next season to come out. This is clearly different from the traditional model of weekly installments of a series.

The next show I’m looking at is Documentary Now! This is a series produced by IFC, the Independent Film Channel, so it airs on basic cable. However, the third episode of the first season was released online on vice.com, ten days before the series premiered on television, which is confusing. It has half-hour long episodes that are basically shot-for-shot parodies of famous documentaries. The show stars former SNL cast members Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. This is an episodic series, so each episode is a self-contained narrative (with the exception of a couple two-part season finales). Documentary Now! is fiction, but based on non-fiction subjects. I chose this show because it’s almost like a mini movie every week. It’s completely episodic, which I think is rare for TV comedies and half-hour shows. Even if there aren’t these huge, serialized soap opera plots, there is generally some narrative continuity from episode to episode in a sitcom. That’s not the case with Documentary Now!: it has new characters every episode. Also, the fact that the show is self-consciously imitating both another art form—documentary film—and another side of the fiction/nonfiction divide, makes it an interesting case to study.

My third example is Real Housewives of New York City. This is a show that also airs on basic cable. Bravo is the channel. It has hour-long episodes. The show is non-fiction. There are some elements that are arguably scripted, but the cast members “play” themselves. RHONY is highly edited and stylized; it isn’t cinema verité by any means. There are some interesting experiments with narrative timeline in Housewives. You see action playing out, and then they cut to these talking-head interviews, with the cast members commenting on their own actions and their friends’ actions from the standpoint of a few months after the events in the show occurred.

The timeline of the show is also entangled with real-world developments. What I mean by that is, the cast members interact with each other on social media, and they maintain blogs where they discuss the episodes as they air. There are things going on in the show that certain cast members won’t find out about until after the show has already aired, and they watch themselves and learn secrets that they’re keeping from each other. A recent example of this phenomenon happened last season. One of the women, Luann, was newly married when they filmed the finale. But the news of her divorce broke before the season finale aired. The producers had to scramble to address this breaking news. They tried to talk about the divorce during the reunion episode, although the full story hadn’t come out at that point. So they also recorded an extra, one-on-one interview with Luann. It was complicated, but it was a really interesting look at how reality shows try to toe the line between having a neat, narrative timeline that you see on television, and letting those events bleed out into the real world. There are also some paratext elements in RHONY. I mentioned the case blogs, where they react to each episode. There are also post-show interviews hosted by the producer, Andy Cohen. Some housewives also live-tweet episodes or fight with each other on social media, and that drama will come into the next season of the show.

Finally, I’ll talk about the original run of Twin Peaks. The show aired during the nineties on ABC, one of the “Big Five” broadcast networks. It was co-created by film director David Lynch. Twin Peaks is a serial drama, but it often felt more like a movie. For instance, the pilot episode was two hours long. The fact that it was created by a film director led to comparisons to film. The series was called “cinematic,” and was said to play with the conventions of the TV medium. After the original Twin Peaks series ended, Lynch made a follow-up movie called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, that attempted to resolve lingering questions from the TV show. Over twenty years later, Twin Peaks: The Return premiered on Showtime, a premium cable channel. This was a reboot of sorts that picked up with characters from the original series, and expanded the original story into different locations and the present timeline.

B. Analysis and Conclusions

In compiling this list of my test cases for television, I noticed that the features I chose to highlight about each show—Twin Peaks’s film-length pilot and “cinematic” style; OITNB’s streaming-only release model—were features that diverge from my idea of traditional television. I guess I picture traditional television as broadcast, self-consciously fiction or non-fiction (either Walter Cronkite-style news shows with all the trappings of objectivity, or traditional sitcoms, soaps, or procedurals), and conforming to half-hour or hour-long time slots. Maybe the TV paradigm that I’m starting from is based on a historical norm of television. That norm would be partially defined by the medium’s roots in radio broadcast. Taken as a group, none of my example shows fulfill all of these traditional criteria. If these criteria are necessary and sufficient to call something “television,” which I’d argue they are not, then none of my examples are television as understood in this definition that I just made up.

I wonder how much longer we can look to a traditional model as a starting point for understanding television. The more recent shows that I’m discussing indicate that we’re moving further and further from the network programming model. Family resemblance might help us define television, because it means that the various TV programs don’t all have to meet the same set of requirements to qualify as TV, but they’re still bound together by sharing one or more traits in common. Although, the traits that any two shows share may differ from the traits that another two shows share. I think family resemblance might also allow us to maintain a flexible framework for understanding television as it continues to change and evolve. Some new programs might look significantly different from my examples, but they’re still share some common ground with a member of the TV family.

I’ll return to Floyd and Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the cord running through the group “television,” which is made up of many strings, no one of which runs the length of the cord, but each of which connects to other strings in the cord. That metaphor makes a lot of sense to me. But the difficulty with family resemblance theory is, to begin with, coming up with the list of traits shared by the family; and secondly, keeping this cord representing TV from merging into another cord. By that I mean that the separation between two family resemblance classes might not be as sharp as we like it, especially if we’re dealing with marginal cases of a concept. If you’re going to try to put together a comprehensive list of all of these TV qualities, at least one of which is shared by any two members of the TV resemblance class, it’s a long list: broadcast or cable or streaming or fiction or nonfiction or funded by commercials or funded by subscription payments or public television or viewed at home or viewed online or comedic or dramatic or incorporating paratexts or episodic or serialized. This is a lot to take into account. I feel like we’re bound to miss something, or have something else new added to the list of TV qualities that we can’t anticipate right now.

I don’t want to say that attempts to define television descriptively are pointless, if only because, in everyday conversation and in the TV industry, we do talk about television as a distinct entity, and we can make sense of it. Professor Floyd mentioned that, for Wittgenstein, we don’t need to be able to list necessary and sufficient conditions for something to qualify as a term, to be able to use that term in conversation. But perhaps for a philosophical analysis, we do want to have a firmer grasp on the term we’re discussing.

I tried to come up with a variation on family resemblance that I’m calling an evolutionary view. It’s a family resemblance-inspired descriptive definition which accounts for the history of the medium, while allowing room for modern developments and permutations. I would define television as: “anything part of the tradition of programming which originated with the invention of the television set; including, but not limited to: broadcast, cable, and streaming series, their production processes, and their audiences’ viewing practices.” This would be a set of criteria, not all of which must be met, that together set the limits for the family resemblance category of television. I think what makes my definition different is that the starting point for this family resemblance category, instead of a long list of possible traits, is this first historical instance of television. Everything else has branched off from there. Instead of stretching forward and back in time like a geometric line, my definition would be a ray, and the fixed point from which it extends would be the historical origin of television.

Obviously, we can’t give this kind of definition for everything we want to define using family resemblance theory, because not every concept has as clear of an origin point as a manmade object does. Basically, I think something qualifies as television if it is somehow connected to that first instance of TV, but it’s still ambiguous as to what qualifies as being part of the tradition of television. I worry that by basing my family resemblance definition of television on a historical starting point, instead of a list of traits, I’m just pushing the question further back. Even if I claim that a certain program counts as an instance of TV because it’s related to the medium’s origins, I still need to identify what relates a given program to that origin point of TV, which means I’d still fall back on some list of shared qualities.

Overall, I’m fairly comfortable with family resemblance as an alternative to descriptive definitions, because I think the benefits of adaptability and flexibility for future permutations of a concept—especially a concept like television, that we know is going to grow and change in coming years—outweigh the drawbacks of not being able to articulate a brief, concise list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to qualify as television. But of course, there are situations where you want that concise list of traits. Still, I think family resemblance theory or a variation of it looks like our best option for defining television.

Works Cited

Carroll, Noël. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Friedlander, Whitney. “IFC’S ‘Documentary Now!’ Delays Episode Due to Virginia Shooting.” Variety, 27 August 2015.

Gray, Jonathan. Television Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Gupta, Anil. “Definitions.“ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/ definitions/>.

Hartley, John. Uses of Television. London: Routledge, 1999.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “television,” <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198769? redirectedFrom=television&>.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Works Consulted

Bazin, Andre. Andre Bazin’s New Media. Edited by Dudley Andrew. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014.

Bourdon, Jerome. “Live Television is Still Alive.” In The Television Studies Reader. Edited by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Brennan, Andrew. "Necessary and Sufficient Conditions.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = <https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/necessary-sufficient/>.

Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Feuer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” In Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology. Edited by E. Ann Kaplan. Los Angeles, CA: The American Film Institute, 1983.

Fiske, John. Reading Television. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

Irvine, Andrew David and Deutsch, Harry, "Russell’s Paradox”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/russell-paradox/>.

Plato. Euthyphro. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2001.

Thomasson, Amie. “Categories.“ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/ entries/categories/>.

Young, James O. "The Coherence Theory of Truth.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2016/entries/truth-coherence/>.

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