I was commissioned by Barry Smith, Editor of The Monist, to act as Advisory Editor for issue 88.1, January 2005 on the topic Humor, and we drafted the appended description. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2004, and you are welcome to submit an article to me for consideration (word limit 7,500 words, including footnotes). What the Editor and I are, hoping for, is some serious and seriously good philosophical writing on this topic.

Humor

`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, Sect.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. Sect.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.

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