See, there are two primary worldviews simultaneously present in statements like “Clips, or you didn’t do it.”

The first has to do with the way the statement demands evidence. This is the basis of empiricism. In case you’ve never heard that before, empiricism is a worldview that relies on sensory perception and testing. It is marked by two primary objectives: the ability to predict something, and the ability to repeat something.

Something else that is tied up in an empiricist worldview is an ontology that requires a reality external to the perception and actions of people. In a nutshell, that means when a tree falls in a forest it still produces crashing sounds even if no one is around to hear it.

Having film footage is a way around direct observation because most of us take video footage of an event to be a demonstration of that event. Film acts as a stand-in for reality in that case, and most people would accept the event as having happened. As you surely know, that isn’t necessarily true, but most people tend to take things at face value because that’s what our brains readily do for us—they construct a coherent reality.

The thing is, viewing the world as being strictly empirical often causes us to miss things that might otherwise be apparent. For example, when you’re faced with a statement like “Clips, or you didn’t do it,” you probably understand several things. Foremost, the speaker is mostly likely just harassing you and knows that you probably did do the trick you say you did. But you also know that the speaker is being somewhat sarcastic—which means he (or she) is saying one thing and meaning something different. Like when you say “nice job” to somebody right after they’ve screwed something up.

So you know that your challenger isn’t necessarily saying that you didn’t do the trick you said you did. What he’s really after isn’t an empirical question at all. What’s really being said is that the trick you say you did doesn’t “count” without the footage. Whether it happened probably isn’t really in question.

Although, we’ve all talked to skaters who just flat out lie about shit.

Rumor has it that a number of skaters whose names you’d recognize routinely lie about what tricks they’ve done so that they’re forced to deliver the goods the next time they skate a certain spot in the presence of others. Honestly, it ain’t a bad strategy to make yourself do something — I mean, if you’re into that kind of thing.

But back to the worldviews.