What part of 'know' don't you understand?

Monist

Volumn 88, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 11-35

  Brown, Deborah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949947762     PISSN: 00269662     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/monist20058813     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haidane & J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964): I, 76
2. Juan Luis Vives, De anima et vita,III. 202. (Basilea 1538/Torino: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1963)
3. Hobbes allowed that laughter without offence was possible when it proceeds from "absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons." Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, in English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (1839, reprinted 1962), IV, 45-46, 56
4. For a survey of treatises on the passions of humours in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (London: Warburg Institute Surveys no. 6, 1975)
5. and my "What Was New in the Passions of 1649?" in Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes, Mikko Yr-jonsuuri and Tuomo Aho, eds., Acta Philosophica Fennica, 64, (1999): 211-31
6. For an account of the proliferation of comedies of humours in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Percy Simpson's introduction to Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946)
7. The resentment that such uses of humour provoked would not go away easily. As we shall see below, the third Earl of Shaftesbury was forced publicly to defend the use of ridicule in public forums at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, in Characteristics of Men, Matters, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (Library of Liberal Arts, 1900/1964)
8. See also Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, The Malone Society Reprints, 1600/1920)
9. In The Triumph of Wit, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), Robert Bernard Martin has traced the convergence of the notions of wit, with its intellectual connotations, and humour with its emotional and sentimental connotations, to the Victorian period
10. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, (1650), IX, 13
11. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965): I, 47
12. Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter, p. 8
13. John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983) at p. 47
14. Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1963)
15. See M. K. Rothbart, "Psychological Approaches to the Study of Humour," in A. J. Chapman and H. C. Foot, eds., It's a Funny Thing, Humour, (New York: Pergamon, 1977)
16. and Jerry Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously, (London: Routledge, 1994): ch. 7
17. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1892): p. 223
18. For a sophisticated revision of the incongruity theory to include the inappropriate as objects of humour see D. H. Monro, Argument of Laughter. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), ch. 19
19. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 224
20. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in his Essays on Truth and Interpretation (Oxford; Clarendon, 1984)
21. From Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, 10.11
22. A. Brillat-Savarin, The Philosopher in the Kitchen, Penguin Handbook, 1985
23. Mike Martin takes inspiration from the OED entries under 'incongruity' in preparing his list. Mike W. Martin, "Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of Incongruities," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 23, no. 1. (1983): 74-84, at p. 76
24. Martin, "Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of Incongruities," p. 79
25. Martin presents these cases as counterexamples to Michael Clark's attempt in "Humour and Incongruity," Philosophy, vol. 45, 171 (1970): 20-32, to refine the incongruity theory by arguing that enjoyment of an apparent incongruity for its own sake is equally a necessary condition for laughter. [sec. VI] Martin suggests postulating a necessary connection between amusement and laughter
26. See pp. 240-43 of his "Humour, Laughter and the Structure of Thought," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 27, 3 (1987): 238-46. I can think of counterexamples to this idea, for example, gallows or death-bed humour
27. Michael Clark, an incongruity theorist himself, raises the prospect that humour is a family-resemblance concept in "Humour and Incongruity," p. 20
28. This is not to say that modern theories of humour do not recognise the importance of emotions in the development of humour. Morreall distinguishes between "non-humourous laughter" which issues from "emotional shifts" as a developmental stage in the progression towards "humourous laughter" which arises from "cognitive shifts." It is such shifts that he takes to be necessary and sufficient for humour, and although humour may produce various kinds of feelings (pleasure, emotional release or relief, etc.) its essence lies in the enjoyment of incongruity. Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, pp. 45-47
29. Monro argues that humour involves a "violent collision" or "mixing" of emotional attitudes when something " inappropriate" (rather than incongruous) is introduced into a context or brought into connection with something it does not normally connect with. Monro, Argument of Laughter, p. 157
30. John Morreall, "Humour and Emotion," American Philosophical Quarterly (1983) 20: 297-305, at pp. 302-03
31. Compare, for example, the work of cognitive neuropsychologists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph Le Doux, who argue that rational decision-making depends on higher cortical emotional processes. Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, (New York: Grossett/Putnam, 1994)
32. and Joseph Le Doux, The Emotional Brain, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)
33. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1987) at p. 288
34. Shaftesbury, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, I, 44
35. Few writers on wit and humour have been prepared to argue that wit and humour are themselves forms of knowledge. One exception is Isaac Tuxton, whom Martin identifies as having defended the idea that wit, in a paradoxical manner, reveals the real congruity of two or more terms that seem at first sight incompatible. Wit, on this view, is and communicates genuine knowledge. We need not agree with Tuxton on this conflation of wit and knowledge to accept the importance of wit to knowledge. As an expression of knowledge, wit may carry the same kind of conversational implicatures about what propositions a person believes or knows to be the true as figurative speech acts without stating or asserting these propositions. Tuxton is also unique for having subsumed humour under wit as "the wit of the emotions or feelings . . . the fusion of contrasted emotions." Martin, The Triumph of Wit, pp. 44-45
36. M. J. Scott-Taggart, "Socratic Irony and Self Deceit," Ratio, vol. 14, no. 1, (1972): 1-15, at p. 13
37. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Empiricism, II.244-7, trans. Rev. R. G. Bury, (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). Thanks to Stephen Menn for drawing this example to my attention
38. The most prominent advocate of the view that emotions are judgements is Robert Solomon. See his "On Emotions as Judgements," American Philosophical Quarterly 25, (1988): 183-91
39. Compare Morreall's grounds for dismissing emotion from the realm of humourous experience on the grounds that, unlike emotional attitudes, amusement inter alia (a) entails no positive or negative evaluations of the situation, (b) does not require that one have any beliefs about the actual properties of the objects, and (c) is purposeless in being unconcerned with the practicalities of particular situations. Humour and Emotion, pp. 298-301. Morreall does not consider the possibility of an emotion that is evaluatively neutral, which may stimulate the acquisition of, rather than presuppose the existence of beliefs about the object, and which is not defined in terms of some practical and particular aim it may have in the context
40. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 75
41. And then there are the general problems, familiar to philosophers and cognitive scientists, associated with supposing that there are rules or rational procedures which, when applied, tell us what to attend to or what we should believe. See Gilbert Harman on the irreducibility of rationality to rule-following or logic, in his The Nature of Morality, (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1977), chs. 10 and 11
42. and Reasoning, Meaning and Mind, pt. 1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
43. and discussions of the "frame problem" in Zenon Pylyshyn, ed., The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem and Other Problems of Holism in Artificial Intelligence, (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1987) and n. 34 above
44. On the humanising and uplifting effects of self-ridicule see Simon Critchley's On Humour, (New York: Routledge, 2002), ch. 7