88:1 January 2005
Humor

Advisory Editor: Laurence Goldstein, Hong Kong University

‘An unarmed man has been shot dead by police in London for the second time this week.’ Interesting. Both Russellians, who give a quantificational analysis of sentences containing indefinite descriptions, and anti-Russellians, who say that such descriptions typically pick out an individual, seem to be wrong about the indefinite description occurring in the quoted sentence. And talking of the police, I got knocked down by a bus the other day, and there I was, lying injured in the road, when a policeman came up to me and said, ‘Let me have your name, sir, and I’ll inform your relatives.’ I said ‘But my relatives already know my name.’ Here the policeman’s utterance invites misinterpretation, yet it does not contain any ambiguous expressions. The policeman was optimistically relying on my having mastered those principles of interpretation, on which all competent speakers depend, which would have delivered his intended meaning. The theoretical challenge is to identify those principles. Nonsense and absurdity are frequently amusing, and a certain kind of nonsense springs from conceptual (‘grammatical’) error of just the sort that philosophy aims to expose. Wittgenstein went so far as to identify the depth of philosophy with the depth of a grammatical joke (Philosophical Investigations, 111). He himself made much of utterances such as ‘It is raining and I don t believe it’ (op. cit., p. 192), and ‘I know that I am in pain’ – which, he held, can’t be said, except perhaps as a joke (op. cit., 246). But Wittgenstein aside, there has until now been little investigation of humor as a stimulus to philosophy, and little investigation of the forms and varieties of humor and of how these relate to the forms and varieties of language-use in general.

Table of Contents:

Laurence Goldstein

Introduction 

Deborah Brown

What Part of 'Know' Don't You Understand?

Peter B. Lewis

Schopenhauer's Laughter

Nickolas Pappas

Morality Gags

John Lippitt

Is a Sense of Humour a Virtue?

Philip Percival

Comic Normativity and the Ethics of Humor

Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

The Good, the Bad and the Funny

Peter Cave

Humour and Paradox Laid Bare

Noël Carroll

Two Comic Plot Structures