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      Note

      1 1 For more extensive discussions of logic, see Watson, J.C. and Arp, R. (2015). Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well , 2e. London: Bloomsbury ; Bassham, G., Irwin, W., Nardone, H., and Wallace, J.M. (2018). Critical Thinking: A Student's Introduction , 6e. New York: McGraw‐Hill ; Hurley, P.J. and Watson, L. (2017). A Concise Introduction to Logic , 13e. New York: Cengage .

      David Kyle Johnson

      Summary

      When Stephen Colbert hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, everyone thought he was playing a character. He even admitted as much when he began hosting The Late Show on CBS. But how can we know for sure? After all, when Jordan Klepper started hosting The Opposition, everyone thought he was playing a conservative “Alex Jones” type character, but then Jordan said that he wasn't. Instead it was his liberal persona on The Daily Show that was the character. Indeed, Alex Jones's lawyers have argued, in court, that he's playing a character on his show. So who can tell? It turns out, the philosopher can. By using philosophy, and a little something called the principle of charity, we can examine what Stephen Colbert said on The Colbert Report and determine that he must have been playing a character. The ideas he espoused – like relativism, truthiness, gut thinking, and an unrestricted right to one's opinion – are so clearly absurd, he must be kidding. And in revealing this, we will be learning how to do philosophy.

       Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut … I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.

      – Stephen Colbert

      White House Correspondents Dinner April 29, 2006

      Now, again, conventional wisdom holds that Report‐Colbert was a character, and that when he began hosting The Late Show, he revealed his true self. Indeed, Report‐Colbert occasionally appears as a character on The Late Show. The Colbert Report was satire, the theory goes – a satire of conservative “talking head” shows that you could find on FOX News at the time, like Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor. But Colbert delivered his lines in such a “dead‐pan style” that it was difficult for those unfamiliar with Colbert to realize he was joking. Studies – real, honest to God, studies – showed that most conservatives seeing Colbert for the first time thought that he was completely serious and defending the conservative positions he was stating.

      How the hell can anyone tell who's playing a character and who's not?

      Now to those who, like me, have watched Colbert for years, this might

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