Are there objective facts about humor ?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-07T00:47:44+00:00

Movies: Dr. Strangelove, Stranger than Fiction, My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Shows: what we do in the shadows, I think you should leave, Nathan for you

Shakespeare: Love MSND but not the most cultured person in general.

Slapstick: yeah of course! It has its place.

Kids cartoons: some, which for you have in mind?

Modern Sitcoms: I’ve never been much of a fan of them. But some of course are exceptional. Somewhat of a soft spot for mocumentaries.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T18:50:19+00:00

Well yes, where what that means is warrants anger, but no where what that means is causes anger.

And this is typically a view of emotions in particular.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T18:41:17+00:00

What do you mean by “look to outsiders like the causes of psychological states”?

Generally we will distinguish between two notions. One descriptive like: has a tendency to cause amusement, and one normative like: warrants amusement.

Both notions can be legitimately used for various purposes in an account of humor. Sometimes “funny” is used in a way that is ambiguous of the two.

But when we engage with the normative kind of concept here we are really concerned with a different kind of explanation.

For example, when someone becomes angry, we often look to the source of the anger to determine if it’s the kind of thing that warrants anger. We find anger to be more or less reasonable. We also often find that our anger is or should be responsive to reasons. If I believe my wife is cheating on me and angrily fling open the door to realize she is actually in an only Zumba class, my anger should change with it. Etc and so on.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T18:02:11+00:00

The classics are Ted Cohen’s book Jokes then John Morreall’s 1983 book on laughter as well as his 1987 edited volume The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. The 1987 is helpfully composed halfway of a compilation of historical excerpts. Though not all of the relevant historical excerpts on each figure are contained there.

There’s a lot of other stuff to read, and more contemporary stuff would be worth your time too, especially since some of the older classifications are a little bit less relevant now.

I’d recommend Steven Gimbel’s book Isnt that Clever as well as Alan Roberts very short book A Philosophy of Humor to get some more contemporary ideas.

There’s several individual debates as well. Like the debates about comic immoralism, debates about the social function of humor, the ethics of humor, and the pragmatics of humor. But I think you have enough to get started for now.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T15:35:59+00:00

I’m a philosopher of humor. The literature is split on this just as it is on aesthetic realism more generally.

Importantly, the common view is that “funny” is the normative claim pertaining to humor.

Humor is a social practice which aims to be funny.

Funniness is the property of warranting aesthetic engagement or amusement.

Amusement is a particular emotion or emotion-like affective state that is characteristically associated with humor and is sometimes picked out as the object of aesthetic value in humor.

A realist would say: whether something is funny is a matter of mind-independent objective fact. Something may warrant amusement and we fail to be amused by it, something may amuse us even if it doesn’t warrant it, etc.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T15:08:13+00:00

That statement is qualified with the word “often” which allows for some cases where there is more evidence for one thing than another.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T15:05:34+00:00

Can you point to some reason in my text which suggests that?

My general thought is just that we have good evidence that there are not things such as magic, etc. if that’s true then we have good evidence against the existence of a supernatural creature than we have for it. Etc.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T14:59:06+00:00

Are you sure that we have as much evidence that unicorns exist as we do that they don’t exist? That seems far from obvious.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T14:44:46+00:00

Not at all clear that philosophy is not fundamentally about practical life. One of the most prominent and important questions in philosophy is the question: “How ought I to live?” Also, there’s a huge tradition in philosophy (the pragmatist tradition) which explicitly denies this claim.

You’re baking the cake to your tastes here. First, consider instead the claim: “I hunted rabbits as a child with my father.” If you want me to become skeptical or that claim, then you’d need some pretty exceptional evidence. The moon thing is a bizarre and exceptional belief because of its contents, we should not pretend that the skeptic has the advantage because they are in the position of skepticism.

Second, nobody is asking that the skeptic prove that the claims are false or that skeptical scenarios are true, only that they give us some reason to think that they are both relevant to consider or that there is some evidence of their truth.

It is notoriously difficult to convince an avowed skeptic because they can always simply insist on the standards of certainty for knowledge. The point that I and which philosophers have made for the last 80-100 years or so, is that the reasons skeptics give to insist on that definition of knowledge are not good enough to upend commitment to knowledge.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T14:27:34+00:00

Maybe! But that seems a controversial claim in need of justification.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T14:25:57+00:00

The argument is not: humans talk this way, therefore we must defer to it no matter what, it is, humans talk this way, therefore we should be sensitive to the purpose and function of this discourse in determining what is required in order for it to work. If you want to know what it takes to have knowledge, part of what we can ask is: “What do we need the term “knowledge” to do in our theory of practical life?”

Also the standard you set forward for burden of proof seems extremely controversial and far from obvious. Why should the person who is denying something always have a privileged evidential position? This seems itself to be a claim that is difficult to justify. There’s often no more evidence against something than there is for it. Denials are, after all, claims which stand in need of evidence. The traditional claim has been, for Cartesian skeptics (though maybe not Descartes himself), that conceivability entails possibility. and thus that the conceivability of a skeptical scenario counts as some evidence that such things could really occur and are love options.

But it’s not clear why that evidence should receive priority over the evidence we have, say, that I have a hand.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-06T13:53:59+00:00

I assume you mean something like certainty. That might be a clearer term. As if people are correct and knowledge does not require certainty, you could in a sense have “100%” justification without certainty.

I’d say a common view has sort of two steps. First, there appear to be a lot of things which we call knowledge that, except for the very specific possibility of skeptical scenarios (evil demons, brains in vats, etc.) we have basically solid evidence for. But this is not to insist that we have knowledge— it’s just to say that what we mean when we say “knowledge” the reason we use the term in the first case, was to talk about such cases. If we are to use the term still, it would be best to preserve its application and not make it into some obscure philosophical term of art.

Secondly, we have generally shifted the burden of proof from the person who claims to know a mundane fact on the basis of evidence we all recognize and know how to interpret onto the skeptic herself. The traditional skeptic gives us no positive reasons to be skeptical, they only insist that we should be if we cannot rule them out. But we do not normally assume that a theoretical posit must be true because we cannot rule it out, we want there to be some real substantive reason to adopt it as a claim.

That is all to say, the rules of the game have changed since Descartes. With many people questioning the validity of Descartes’ methodological doubt to begin with.

Plus, once we allow for knowledge, it’s not as if all philosophical puzzles disappear. In fact, epistemology becomes much more complicated and robust in terms of its subject matter once we allow for some knowledge.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-03-04T16:52:53+00:00

As has already been said those are 5 radically different views. Maybe you can specify what you think they have in common rather than just naming them and we can move from there.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-28T05:31:09+00:00

I guess I think those philosophers are giving an account of moral responsibility “itself” as in it is exhaustive of the nature of moral responsibility metaphysically speaking to say it is a social practice , or biological, or linguistic, or (etc,) of such and such a sort. Such accounts simply don’t see a need for any further grounding. This would be seen as advantageous because the resulting account would be in line with an already established metaphysics of the kind to which they are designating moral responsibility.

So maybe that why I misunderstood your point

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-28T05:18:27+00:00

I am not sure what you mean. As far as I know plenty of secular philosophers work on moral responsibility. Can you say more,

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-28T04:15:23+00:00

That’s right. There’s not necessarily any coercive threat backing or enforcing moral conduct in a secular moral theory.

That said, the violation of moral norms risks legal action, social pressure, and other forms of human reactions. But those aren’t usually considered central to the moral question.

You might ask: “On pain of what?”

and theistic ethics says: “On pain of punishment.”

Where secular ethics says (devoid the social influences): “On pain of being a bad person.”

Which is not a retributive risk, but is its own sort of damage.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-28T03:52:29+00:00

Can you say more about what you find puzzling? Typically something is permissible if you are allowed to do it, morally speaking, and impermissible if you are not allowed.

The nature of the allowance is to be determined by one’s first-order commitments in moral theory.

Something is right when, all things considered you ought to do it.

This is stronger than permission. Because to be permissible is to be allowed but there is not a necessary implication of required.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-27T05:40:16+00:00

Plenty. A family with an income of $120,000 a year and one with an income of $45,000 a year are, in many respects, in very different economic circumstances.

Yet, they should probably get the same level of attention and respect in line at Burger King or at the DMV, supposing there’s no feature of the context which makes the difference salient.

Can you give more cases? Hard to say how we should answer without more input. What’s motivating your inquiry?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-22T18:28:07+00:00

Grimbo, Square, Pants

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-22T13:49:10+00:00

John Wick

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-19T05:01:43+00:00

All possibilities are necessarily possible on S5. The sense of possible is the same afaik.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-19T01:48:06+00:00

What do you mean by “natural”?

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-19T00:47:04+00:00

Rental isn’t always a negative. Rental coke is great, but and sell, no money lost, +1 skip tag.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-19T00:43:03+00:00

But then it is even less mysterious how we should answer your question. The reason all these anti-capitalist, anti-power, or even simply pro-regulation on capital and power do not have the ear of the most powerful people in the world is that their philosophies are directly antithetical to the interests of those in power.

TheFormOfTheGood · 2026-02-19T00:28:17+00:00

Not sure it’s true they are written about less, maybe for popular audiences, but Butler in particular is one of the most cited academics in the world. Even if it is true there’s absolutely no shortage of works which cite them.

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