Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks, The Thousand Year Old Man.
Abstract
Very often, different people, with different constitutions and comic sensibilities, will make divergent, conflicting judgments about the comic properties of a given person, object, or event, on account of those differences in their constitutions and comic sensibilities. And in many such cases, while we are inclined to say that their comic judgments are in conflict, we are not inclined to say that anybody is in error. The comic looks like a poster domain for the phenomenon of faultless disagreement. I argue that the kind of theory that does the best job of accounting for the appearance of faultless disagreement is a de se version of a response-dependence account, according to which thinking that x is funny is self-attributing a property of the type, being disposed to have R to x in C.
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Notes
Maybe it’s funny here, with the setup that I’ve given it. I hope so, anyway. But it wouldn’t be funny in the setting in which the original Mel Brooks line was delivered.
Similar cases are thick on the ground. Opinions differ on the relative funniness of Seinfeld vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louis vs. Looney Tunes, Louis C.K. versus Mike Birbiglia, Best in Show vs. Bridesmaids, Blackadder vs. A Bit of Fry & Laurie, etc. etc. etc. Opinions differ on binary funny/not judgments about, for example, David Cross’s standup bits on post-9/11 New York, Andrew Dice Clay, Gallagher, The Family Circus, Marmaduke, etc. etc. etc. I think there are plenty of good cases to support the possibility of faultless disagreement about binary funny/not funny judgments, but we can short circuit a lot of the fighting by focusing on judgments of degree or of relative funniness. Disagreement about whether Louis CK is hilarious or just pretty funny, about whether he’s funnier than Stephen Merchant, about which Eddie Izzard set is the funniest, and so on, are cases where it’s super plausible that divergences in judgment needn’t be due to error on either side.
Note—this isn’t to sign up for the view that all comic disagreements are faultless. Here, as in many other aesthetic domains, we see both cases where the rhetoric of faultless disagreement looks attractive, and cases where it doesn’t—where it seems clear that somebody’s getting it right and the other is getting it wrong. Hume captures both thoughts early in Hume (1757/1965):
“[A] thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: because no sentiment represents what is really in the object… To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or the real bitter”, and then, “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean”. There is certainly room for Milton/Ogilby cases in the comic domain. Everybody ought to agree that Better off Dead is funnier than Porky’s, that Caddyshack is funnier than Back to School, and that Stephen Wright is funnier than your friend who’s always just slightly mis-reciting Steven Wright jokes. (This is especially clear for judgments or relative funniness within a genre.) (One puzzle, which I won’t take up here, but do in Egan (2010), is how to give a metaphysics of taste that lets us mark this distinction in a satisfying way.).
It’s worth noting and setting aside another thing we might mean by “faultless disagreement”: a case in which the parties to the dispute genuinely disagree, one of them is mistaken, but the error is understandable, not blameworthy, etc. There’s no deep puzzle about this phenomenon. But it’s also not adequate for underwriting the intuitive reaction that many of us have to a lot of differences of opinion about the comic.
A lot of what I say here will be very similar to things that I’ve said, about other subject matters, in other places. What’s new here is the focus on the phenomenon of faultless disagreement, which hasn’t been my central motivation in presenting relativist accounts in other domains. I hope that I also give in what follows a clear statement of, or at least clearer-than-previous statement of, the story I favor about the relation between de se thought and de se talk, and the relation between verbal disagreement and disagreement in thought.
I’ll say more about some of the ways in which it’s clearly wrong, and some of the ways it might be fixed up, in Sect. 5.
There are, obviously, big fights to have about the metaphysics of possible worlds. Happily, how they turn out doesn’t matter for our purposes, so long as there’s some story to tell. So feel free to read talk of worlds below according to your own favorite metaphysical account. Nothing hinges on the details.
This isn’t the only answer—most famously, Perry’s solution invokes modes of presentation of more conventional propositions (though he’s working with structured propositions, not possible-worlds propositions), rather than a fancier possibility space (Perry 1979). I’ll ignore this fight here. My agenda in this paper is just to lay out how a de se story would go, assuming that that’s the right framework in which to theorize about the phenomena that make trouble for the simple possible-worlds taxonomy.
We probably shouldn’t have started off too sympathetic to this particular analysis, for reasons we will get to in a moment. But it does no harm to run the example with a cartoon case, since the point doesn’t depend on the details of the response-dependent contextualist analysis.
Note: this is not a general puzzlement about de se content in language. Attribution of de se content to e.g. clauses in belief contexts is totally unproblematic, and pretty uncontroversial. That’s because it doesn’t make the prediction that what’s asserted is sometimes de se, and it’s de se assertion that’s puzzling and potentially problematic.
Since they’re dispositional properties, it’s also possible for us to be wrong about them—this kind of story isn’t going to make us infallible in our comic judgments and assertions. And you can, if you like, also make more room for error by moving to an account that deals with dispositions after idealization, rather than occurrent dispositions. But there will certainly be room for cases in which neither party is making a mistake about their own relevant dispositions.
Officially: states of acceptance.
Something to be worried about at this point: Given that I need to say that assertion of interestingly de se stuff is only felicitous when the parties to the conversation are, or are presupposed to be, alike in the relevant respect, why don’t I also need to say (like López de Sa) that sentences like “Gervais is funny” carry a presupposition of commonality? So doesn’t this undermine my complaints about López de Sa’s story?
No, for two reasons: First, the de se content account gives an explanation of why the assertion of “Gervais is funny” would only be felicitous against a background presupposition of commonality. Its content is one that would be bad to add to the conversational common ground if the presupposition were absent. On López de Sa’s view, the content of “Gervais is funny” is something that’d be fine to add. It’s just the solipsistic contextualist thing. The presupposition-triggering has to be an additional feature of the lexical items, built in by hand, in what I think it’s fair to be concerned is an ad hoc way.
Second, on the present account, the disagreement doesn’t hinge on the presupposition’s being in place. Even in cases where presupposition’s absent, we still get disagreement on this picture. We just get faulty-in-a-respect disagreement.
(Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.).
Some pairs of de se beliefs are such that they can’t both be correct—incompatible self-attributions of world-occupancy properties are an obvious case, but not the only one—but the relevant cases won’t be like that. They’ll be more like the New York/Lexington, burning pants, and bear cases.
See also Huvenes (2011) for an application of this sort of strategy in defense of a contextualist view of predicates of taste.
A good feature of this way of underwriting the sense of disagreement: it allows us to handle cases where P = Q, and sameness in de se belief makes for disagreement, as when Jimi and Eric both self-attribute being the best guitarist in the world.
A bad feature of this way of underwriting the sense of disagreement: it pretty clearly needs some tweaking, in order to avoid having it turn out that whether it’s a disagreement will depend on how likely it is that the subject would arise if we started talking, how conflict-averse we are, or whether we speak a common language, for example.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to audiences at the Narrative of Aesthetics conference at they University of Kentucky, the Northern Institute of Philosophy, and the City University of New York for extremely helpful comments and discussion. Thanks also to Bob Beddor for invaluable research assistance and comments.
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Egan, A. There’s Something Funny About Comedy: A Case Study in Faultless Disagreement. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 1), 73–100 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9446-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9446-3