Wittgenstein once remarked that 'a serious and good philosophical work could be written that consisted entirely of jokes'. Inspired by this idea, John Allen Paulos shows how conceptual humour and analytic philosophy resonate at a very deep level.
Both evince a keen concern for language and its (mis)interpretations; both require a free intelligence in a relatively open society, as well as a sceptical tendency towards debunking; and both are quintessentially human.
"I Think, Therefore I Laugh" is packed with jokes, stories, parables, puzzles and anecdotes, all of which relate in one way or another to various philosophical problems, leading to some unexpected insights.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
chapter o n e
TWO UNLIKELY PAIRS OF MEN
Introduction
Wittgenstein and Carroll
Groucho Meets Russell
chapter t w o
LOGIC
Either-Or
You Bet Your Life
Sillygisms
The Titl of This Section Contains Three Erors
Russell’s Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Rubin
Language and Metalanguage: Do You Get It?
Meaning, Reference, and Dora Black’s First Husband
Analytic vs. Synthetic, Boole vs. Boyle, and Mathematics vs. Cookery
Miscellany
chapter t h r e e
SCIENCE
Induction, Causality, and Hume’s Eggs
The Tortoise Came First?
Of Birds and Strange Colors
Truths, Half-Truths, and Statistics
Duhem, Poincaré, and the Poconos-Catskill Diet
Reductionism, Fallibilism, and Opportunism
Randomness and the Berry Task
Determinism and Smart Computers
Bell’s Inequality and Weirdness
On Assumptions
chapter f o u r
PEOPLE
Context, Complexity, and Artificial Intelligence
Why Did He Just Now Touch His Head?
Arrow, Prisoners, and Compromise
AFTERWORD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX