--Bill Samuels, The Outsider (season one, episode two)
"A human being cannot be in two realities at the same time."
--Holly Gibney, The Outsider (season one, episode six)
"And over the centuries, you know, people got called devils, and demons, and, you know, called witches. The werewolf of this, the vampire of that. And we always say, 'Well, people back then, they were ignorant, and hysterical and superstitious. Because nowadays we've got science, psychology. So we know better than to mistake humans for demons. You know, but what if . . . what if every now and then we mistake a demon for a human?
--Alec Pelley, The Outsider (season one, episode six)
The Outsider tells the story of a murder that proves far more philosophically challenging for those involved in the investigation than any of them expected, forcing them to directly grapple with ideological issues that some of them do not want to examine. This setup makes The Outsider a show that actually does not just address the topic of assumptions and epistemology indirectly because all of life is drenched in epistemology, but very directly because the plot demands it. The story focuses on the aftermath of an arrest for the murder of a child, a murder that initially seems to be committed by the arrested man that the detective is blindsided when the accused truthfully says that there is video evidence of him being in a completely different place at that time. In fact, there are honest eyewitnesses claiming he was in two different places at once.
The conflicting evidence--genuine evidence at that, as opposed to evidence misunderstood by various people--only seems more bizarre when multiple people associated with the case have experiences with a being that is both superhuman and supernatural. This is the conclusion of a private investigator named Holly who, though she is by no means a rationalist or someone who even tries to make airtight deductions, is not incompetent enough to just assume that the perpetrator of the murder is not an explicitly supernatural being. Despite her genuine evidence that the being behind the murder has a supernatural ability to exchange physical forms, she is told that her openness to this is idiotic, and the detective involved in the investigation objects despite being stupid enough to literally assume the guilt of the man he arrested and then keep making further assumptions.
Now, the fact that there is no logical contradiction in the idea of someone accused of a crime having a doppelganger means that no one could ever prove that the accused actually committed the crime as opposed to an alien lookalike, a clone, or a stranger who simply looks like them. This does not mean that people should believe or act as if someone who truly seems to have committed a grave offense according to all physical and testimonial evidence did not carry out whatever deed they supposedly did; it means that it is asinine to actually believe that they did it when there is no way to prove that something extremely unlikely but logically possible is untrue. Without logical proof, not perception-based evidence, there is no such thing as knowledge and thus no such thing as justified belief.
One ramification of this is that it cannot be proven that even someone who was literally seen committing a crime actually did it due to the unverifiability of memories of events and the unprovable accuracy of sensory perceptions, and it is also possible albeit unlikely that a nonhuman entity observed in a crime context has the appearance of a person. Even though literally anyone is capable of understanding that anything that does not contradict logical axioms or what follows from them is indeed possible, many of the main characters automatically dismiss Holly's claim that it is possible that a spiritual entity is associated with the murders. The irony of this is that some of them, including Detective Anderson, ridicule her for admitting a genuine possibility out of her supposed epistemological stupidity, all while they do nothing but assume that their false ideologies are true. Of course, if they had only thought rationalistically and made no assumptions, they would quickly see on their own that they were irrational to ever hold their initial position in the first place.
There are some asinine things the characters who do not assume the killer is nothing but a human still claim. One, the wife of Detective Anderson, calls the situation irrational just because it is not normal, when something that is logically impossible--and thus irrational--could never happen in the first place. A host of both nonphysical and physical events, entities, and layers of reality are possible, but how closely they match a non-rationalist's pathetic worldview has nothing to do with this. Possibility and impossibility are rooted in reason, not expectation, preference, or a non-rationalist's undeveloped grasp of reason. Unsurprisingly, since most people in actual life fail to understand this except perhaps in small bursts of very limited rationality, it is realistic when fictional characters talk like this.
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