Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.326
2. 1_2.
Ted Blumberg, «Defiantly Incorrect,» The New York Times Magazine (28 June, 1992).
3. 1_3.
There is quite a large body of literature on such psychological experimentation. See, for example, Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, «Retaliatory Equity as a Factor in Humor Appreciation,» Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1974): 480-488.
4. 1_4.
See Irving Thalberg, «Visceral Racism,» in Today's Moral Problems, ed. Richard Wasserstrom (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1975), pp.187-204.
5. 1_5.
As was done in Zillmann and Bryant, op. cit..
6. 1_6.
Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), esp. pp.275-299; a version of the relevant secion is included in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor ed. John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp.226-249. De Sousa, incidentally, has a footnote (p.292 = p.249 in the Moreall) whimsically canvassing some difficulties inherent in psychological experimentation on mirth.
7. 1_7.
Pace Robert Roberts, «Humor and the Virtues,» Inquiry 31 (1988): 127-149.
8. 1_8.
See Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985)
9. 1_9.
I borrow this example from Michael Philips, «Racist Acts and Racist Humor,» Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1984): 75-96.
10. 1_10.
Mahadev Apte, «Ethnic Humor Versus `Sense of Humor',» American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1987): 27-41.
11. 1_11.
See Harvey Mindess, «The Panorama of Humor and the Meaning of Life,» American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1987): 82-95 on the Antioch Humor Test.
12. 1_12.
Charles Schutz, «The Sociability of Ethnic Jokes,» Humor 2 (1989): 165-177. See p.176.
13. 1_13.
I'm grateful to Andrew Jack for the formulation of this objection.
14. 1_14.
In his review, «Reason, Love and Laughter,» Dialogue 28 (1989): 499-507 of de Sousa's book, Steven Burns claims, less plausibly I think, that the rôle of such jokes is to help cope with grief. It is very doubtful whether the joke-tellers were grieving about the fate of the astronauts, and it is certain that these jokes would not have helped alleviate the grief of the astronauts' close relatives.
15. 1_15.
For an intelligent discussion of the possibility of grasping what it is like to be something other than what one is, see Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chap.11. I hasten to add that Nagel, in personal conversation, has resisted extending his argument about the interspecies inaccessibility of `point of view' in the way that I have suggested.
16. 2_1.
The ideas expressed in this paper took shape in discussions and conversations with Cy Anders, Robert Kraut, Neil Tennant, and the late Jared Monroe. For comments and suggestions I am especially indebted to Cy Anders, William Taschek, Michael Watkins, and an anonymous referee. I also benefitted from comments by a charitable audience at the 1993 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, where an ancestor of this paper was read.
17. 2_2.
See for example chapters 7 and 8 in S. Blackburn 1984, a standard bearer of contemporary irrealism. Blackburn articulates the irrealist strategy that we shall be most concerned with, namely non-factualism.
18. 2_3.
The reader will notice that Boghossian takes a deflationary conception of truth to be defined by the thesis that the predicate «true» does not refer to a property. I shall for the time being respect this use, although I think that deflationism is more perspicuosly stated in a slightly different manner (see the definition [DEFL] below). A further terminological caveat: one often sees the dispute between deflationary and non-deflationary conceptions of truth characterized in terms of «robustness», a notion which tries hard to legitimate a certain metaphysical picture of the dispute. In these terms, the opposite of a deflationary notion of truth would be a «robust» notion of truth. I find the picture misleading, so I avoid this terminology. The proper opponent of deflationary truth is not robust truth, but correspondence truth (more on this in sect. III). But if I am right, the latter is no more robust than the former.
19. 2_4.
There is also the temptation to read this statement as the deflationist's definition of truth. One might be well-advised to resist such a temptation. Anil Gupta has recently challenged this basic deflationary idea: in his view, it is simply false that sentences like (T) provide a definition of truth, in any plausible sense (although they certainly are an important consequence of a proper definition of truth). Furthermore, there is the «inflationary argument» advanced by Crispin Wright 1992, ch. 1, which purports to demonstrate the incoherence of a similar version of deflationism. However, I shall not discuss Gupta's ideas, which rest upon a different set of considerations from those central to this paper. I plan to discuss Wright's argument elsewhere («A brief against the inflationary argument», in preparation), but it seems to me that the outcome of that dispute is independent from the treatment presented in this paper: here my primary concern is to show the compatibility of what Wright would call «minimalism» (which is at least coherent, in his view) and non-factualism about content.
20. 2_5.
The assertoric content of a sentence (roughly, the meaning conveyed by an assertive utterance of that sentence) must be understood to exclude certain pragmatic factors that make, in particular contexts, an assertion of, e.g., «That is true» not quite the same as an assertion of whatever utterance is referred to by «That» (a similar problem may arise for utterances containing indexicals). Such factors are discussed and dealt with by D. Grover, J.L. Camp and N. Belnap 1975, see especially pp. 79 and ff.
21. 2_6.
See H. Field 1986, p. 58. The prosentential theory of truth (see Grover, Camp, Belnap, op. cit.) seems to be a particularly sophisticated version of what I (following Field) have called «disquotationalism» here.
22. 2_7.
The first formulation of the compliment is by R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 308; the second I owe to R. Kraut, and is articulated throughout his (1993). Obviously, my sketchy account of coherentism and pragmatism about truth has no pretense to do justice to either doctrine.
23. 2_8.
Convention T requires that an «adequate definition of truth» have as consequences:
all sentences which are obtained from the expression «x \\epsilon// Tr if and only if p» by substituting for the symbol «x» a structural-descriptive name of any sentence of the language in question and for the symbol «p» the expression which forms the translation of this sentence into the metalanguage;...(A. Tarski 1935, p. 188)
Clearly, the disquotational definition does entail all such sentences, i.e. sentences like «`snow is white' is true iff snow is white», for it results in fact from an infinite conjunction of them.
24. 2_9.
For a thorough examination of this aspect of Tarski's theory, see H. Field 1972, especially pp. 354 and ff. (To be sure, this is not quite to say that the notion that Tarski defined was actually disquotational truth; the point is rather that Tarski's contributions to the theory of truth are compatible with the deflationary conception, and are consequently available to the deflationist. For a review of some technical and philosophical differences between the disquotationalist and Tarski's notion of truth, see Field 1986, cit., pp. 64-65 and footnotes.)
25. 2_10.
A similar point is very carefully worked out in ch. 2 and 3 of Wright (1992), cit. The question there is whether one or the other «platitude» about truth -- the kind of pronouncement which is typically intended to mark the robustness of truth -- proves impervious to the minimalist (the Wrightean deflationist), and can thus be used to demarcate minimalist truth from robust conceptions. Wright shows that no such platitude emerges.
26. 2_11.
I use the attribute «semantic» here in the broad sense of pertaining to interpretation. This may not entirely correspond to the narrow sense familiar from contemporary philosophy of language, where «semantics» is almost synonymous with truth theory.
27. 2_12.
A word of caution on the way «ontology» is used here: I am assuming a somewhat parsimonious, naturalistic world, one in which there are no Platonic universals hanging around with no instances. For some, this may be unduly restrictive, but I am prepared to face the risk.
28. 2_13.
According to the Russellian parsing of sentences such as «the king of France is bald», their English negation («the king of France is not bald») is ambiguous and generates two readings. If we take the negation as having wide or sentential scope, as in «It is not the case that the king of France is bald», then the result is true if there is no king of France. Is this an objection to the analogy I draw with the moral judgment «lying is wrong»? I am not sure. In the situation described, in which wrongness cannot be found, I would imagine that one may sensibly state that it is not the case that lying is wrong and that it is not the case that lying is right, either; but notice that the same would hold for the king of France sentences. It seems to me, however, that wide-scope negation in natural language is not all that clear (in fact, it is not even clear that there is such an operator). «It is the case that S» in ordinary language is almost synonymous with «It is true that S» -- but then we are back to the starting point, for it certainly would be correct, in the situation envisioned in the text (no wrongness to be found), to assert that it is not true that lying is wrong. In fact, a correspondence theorist would be committed to asserting this.
29. 2_14.
A referee has pointed out to me that my argument here may be in concflict with the analysis of Jackson, Oppy and Smith 1994. (Unfortunately, I learned of their excellent paper too late to take it into account.) The conflict may stem from this: I may be seen here as suggesting a certain «minimalism» about truth-conditionality (what they call, much more felicitously, «truth-aptness»), while they claim that even a minimalist about truth (such as a disquotationalist might be) should not be confused into believing that truth-aptness itself can be construed minimally. But I find myself in agreement with this claim, and I think that it in fact goes in the direction I am gesturing toward: I do believe that truth-aptness is an important, non-minimal property of discourse; I do not believe that this property hinges upon a certain conception of truth. Obviously, much work here is left to be done.
30. 2_15.
My recognition of this point was greatly aided by N. Tennant's detailed parsing of Boghossian's argument in his (unpublished manuscript).
31. 2_16.
M. Devitt and G. Rey 1991, p. 94; M. Devitt 1990, pp. 252ff.; and Boghossian's reply in (1990b). Devitt, in fact, is even more critical than Boghossian toward deflationism, and claims that Tarski erred in calling his own the «semantic» conception of truth: for Devitt semantics in and of itself demands a correspondence conception, and evidently he agrees that Tarski's theory of truth is not substantially different from the deflationary conception. Of course, these issues are much too important in their own right to be fully discussed here.
32. 3_1.
Unfortunately we cannot yet handle TeX or LaTeX files. The convertors we've tried have proved useless.
33. 3_2.
The following information is mainly due to Ian Graham. We have abridged some relevant parts of his document and added the item concerning LaTeX.
HTML Writer HTML Writer is a Windows-based HTML editor. Additional information can be found at: http://www.et.byu.edu/~nosackk/html-writer/index.html.
HoTMetaL for Windows is a commercial HTML editor, but afree implementation is available via anonymous FTP. There may also be Mac (and other) versions. SoftQuad (who makes HoTMetaL) has their own Web server with up-to-date information. There are several anonymous ftp sources of the HoTMetaL executable. One is in gatekeeper.dec.com, while another is the NCSA ftp archive.
PC-Write-HTML-Editing-Macros, a package for editing HTML docs with the PC-Write editor, is available at: ftp://www.ucc.ie/pub/pcw4.zip.
HTML Assistant is an MS Windows text editor with extensions to assist in the creation of HTML hypertext docs to be viewed by World Wide Web browsers like Cello and Mosaic. FTP-available from ftp.cs.dal.ca/htmlasst/.
HyperEdit is a facility designed for MS-Windows users to aid in the creation of HTML docs. Version v0.2a is largely based on «A Beginners Guide to HTML» produced by NCSA. Author: Steve Hancock, sorites@fresno.csic.es and include your just uploaded dilemmas.ker file into the body of the message. (What command serves to that effect depends on the e_mail software available; consult your local host administrators.)
With WordPerfect 6 the conversion to kermit format is simple and straightforward: you only have to save your paper as a `kermit (7 bits transfer)' file.
37. 3_6.
Those devices are temporary only. Later on we'll strongly advise and encourage those of our contributors who can use neither WordPerfect format nor one of the other word-processor formats our convertors can handle automatically to resort to HTML, with certain conventions in order to represent Greek characters as well as logical and set-theoretic symbols.
38. 4_1.
The reader may find an excellent discussion of copyright-related issues in a FAQ paper (available for anonymous FTP from rtfm.mit.edu [18.70.0.209] /pub/usenet/news.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ). The paper is entitled «Frequently Asked Questions about Copyright (V. 1.1.3)», 1994, by Terry Carroll. We have borrowed a number of considerations from that helpful document.