Steve Gimbel

Reality television provides us with an opportunity to run an experiment comparing humor theories. The programs Fear Factor, Survivor, and Taskmaster are similar in format pitting competitors against one another in a series of unusual challenges. They differ in that while the third is a comedy, the first two are not. The standard range of humor theories—superiority, relief, incongruity, and cleverness—can each account for Taskmaster being a comedy. The question, then, is whether the theories can differentiate the comedy from the non-comedies. If the non-comedies possess the same properties that were deemed sufficient by the theory to make Taskmaster a comedy, then the theory is incapable of passing the test. Only cleverness passes and therefore this experiment should be seen as evidence in favor of it.

Analytic Philosophy began in the first decades of the 20th century at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, in Vienna with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, and in Berlin with Hans Reichenbach’s Society for Empirical Philosophy. While the story of the rise of this intellectual movement is chronicled in a number of recent and not so recent books, these treatments largely focus on the story of the ideas. Largely missing are the figures themselves, their lives and personalities. Those are saved in the memories of the people who knew them. Analytic Logic/Synthetic Lives is a collection of eleven edited transcripts of oral history interviews collected over twenty years with those who had such memories – the widows, spouses, classmates, and students of these towering figures of 20th century analytic thought. The primary and secondary scholarly literature on the history of early analytic philosophy is plentiful, but the same is not true when it comes to the personal side of these figures. This volume fills that hole by collecting personal remembrances from those who knew them best.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that a serious work of philosophy could be written composed of nothing but jokes. Taking Wittgenstein’s assertion seriously, we examine a range of philosophical accounts of verbal humor, specifically jokes and puns, dividing them according to whether they focus on the syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic elements of joking and punning acts. We then employ them to see if standard examples of philosophical discourse could thereby be seen as jokes themselves. Perhaps Wittgenstein was more correct than he realized and we are already writing philosophy in terms of jokes.

Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most charitable interpretation of Kasparov’s second allegation, that scouting information was used in an unfair manner, concerns questions of the nature of the identity of artificial individuals. Consideration of this issue finds Kasparov’s claim groundless.

The currently dominant view concerning humor ethics is punching up/punching down. According to this view, members of one community with less social capital are allowed to make jokes at the expense of another with more social capital as a means of achieving social justice, while those in a community with more social capital are forbidden from making jokes about those with less. The latter is considered an act of bullying, which further entrenches pre-existing social injustice. While there is value in the moral intuitions that underlay this view, it falls prey to several problems. A new approach, the joke capital approach, is introduced which has the virtue of accounting for the cases in which punching up/punching down is effective but also is capable of handling the problematic cases.

The epistemic foundation of Hellenic-Christian thought is based on a correspondence between thought and a single reality, but the epistemic foundation of Jewish thought stresses the creative act of perspectival interpretation of an absolute text. This stress on wisdom from extracting a multiplicity of contextualized understandings of an absolute can be seen in the writings of the great rabbis, but also in the work of Jerry Seinfeld. Where Talmudic thought takes as its basis, passages of the Torah as its source of truth to interpret, Seinfeld’s stand-up is neo-Talmudic in using a different source – phenomenological commonalty (our shared experience) – as its basis. The move from the stage to the small screen changed the comedy of Seinfeld as his eponymous television program now lampoons the sort of neo-Talmudic thought of his stand-up material just as the classic rabbis of Chelm jokes mock Talmudic thought.

Who is morally permitted to tell jokes about Jews? Poles? Women? Only those in the group? Only those who would be punching up? Anyone, since they are just jokes? All of the standard approaches are too broad or too narrow. In on the Joke provides a more sophisticated approach according to which each person possesses "joke capital" that can serve as "comic insurance" covering certain jokes in certain contexts. When Bob tells a joke about Jews, we can never know exactly what Bob is intending since we cannot see inside Bob’s mind. But we could reasonably infer, if we knew Bob himself was Jewish, if he worked tirelessly for Jewish causes, or was a card-carrying Neo-Nazi. Each would affect his joke capital, and, in certain circumstances, we would have a moral standing to demand to see his ledger to see how much joke capital he had with respect to Jews. The permissibility of that joke depends upon four factors: the joke, the teller of the joke, the audience, and the setting. The view developed in In on the Joke is the only view that clearly explains how each of these components work together in an integrated, effective ethic of humor.

Distinguishing necessary and sufficient conditions can be challenging to undergraduate logic and critical thinking students. Explaining J. L. Mackie’s notion of INUS conditions—insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions—is an even more difficult concept to understand. It is helpful to have memorable examples that not only clarify the concept, but make it easy to remember. Law student turned stand-up comedian Demetri Martin uses necessary, sufficient, and INUS conditions to construct absurdist jokes. These jokes provide effective tools for making Mackie’s notion understandable and memorable.

Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, non-pragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptible to a class of counterexamples involving intervening causes which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have an equal status with respect to sufficiency

Ludwig Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie has been portrayed as a pre-cursor of the semantic view of theories and as such, the word “Bild” is translated as model. But this anachronistic understanding of Boltzmann’s use of Bilder fails to account for the wide range of roles they play in his understanding of scientific methodology. When the concept of Bild is understood historically in Viennese thought, a much broader sense emerges that leads to the investigation of its use in multiple ways in various contexts in the process of proposing, pursuing, and justifying scientific beliefs.

Philosophy’s richness comes in part from the wide range of conceptual frameworks from which meaning can be made of aspects of the world. Philosophy can be done from feminist, Marxist, positivist, or Freudian standpoints. The difference in the sorts of analyses produced by these different approaches can be tricky to explain to undergraduates. Contained here are short explanations of the nature of a collection of these frameworks and a fun example of each, an analysis of the chicken crossing the road joke to be used to give undergraduates a sense of the breadth of philosophical methodology.

Humor can be used as a tool for a wide range of tasks, including fighting for social justice. How to most effectively use it, however, is a matter of contention. Jokes that alienate members of an out-group can be called “Otherizing,” and can cause harm by virtue of the alienation. Woke comics, like Hari Kondabolu, intentionally avoid Otherizing in general, but may engage in a version of it that seeks to defang stereotypical treatments of out-groups by replacing the alienating content with something benign. We term this use of Otherizing, “mOtherizing.” Pride comics, like Russell Peters, take a different approach and try to usurp the power of Otherizing by over-engaging in it. The intention is to use the jokes to cobble together a coalition of out-groups that turns itself into an in-group. We term this use of Otherizing, “brOtherizing.”

The National Football League, the premier professional organization for American football, developed a policy concerning the protocol in cases where players contract COVID-19. This policy includes elements such as collective punishment that appear, at first glance, to be morally problematic. To the contrary, the policy is indeed morally acceptable as we should not think of organizations such as the NFL in the same way we think of governments in stable nations, but rather in the same way that we think of hybrid justice systems in countries where because of histories of colonialism, the identity of citizens is divided, with tribal identities being more important than national citizenship.

The ability of a computer to have a sense of humor, that is, to generate authentically funny jokes, has been taken by some theorists to be a sufficient condition for artificial consciousness. Creativity, the argument goes, is indicative of consciousness and the ability to be funny indicates creativity. While this line fails to offer a legitimate test for artificial consciousness, it does point in a possibly correct direction. There is a relation between consciousness and humor, but it relies on a different sense of “sense of humor,” that is, it requires the getting of jokes, not the generating of jokes. The question, then, becomes how to tell when an artificial system enjoys a joke. We propose a mechanism, the GHoST test, which may be useful for such a task and can begin to establish whether a system possesses artificial consciousness.

Danny Boyle's film Yesterday is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses his wrong-doing, however, he is redeemed and his life becomes wonderful. The presupposition that underlays the plot is that in claiming authorship of the songs of the Beatles in a world in which the Beatles never existed, he is acting immorally. But on what theoretical grounds can this intuitive judgment be justified? Can one plagiarize work for which there is no author in one's world? Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, dubs terms that refer in all possible worlds to be “rigid designators” and considers the metaphysics necessary to support them. In this case, it is not reference but moral responsibility that is invariant under changes of possible world and so we must ask a similar question for “rigid obligators.” We argue that a virtue ethics approach is the only way to support the foundational moral intuition.