a bit more on “getting the point”

Recently I made a post speaking about how getting the point has more to do with truth than being right does. I have a bit more to say about that now, and it’s closely connected to other things I’ve said about truth in different contexts.

One area where I’ve often heard people miss the point is on the topic of humor. People will give definitions: “humor is a sudden incongruity,” “humor is absurdity,” etc. These sorts of definitions are only only seldom false. There is usually some merit to them. But they miss the point precisely by being overdeterminations in terms of palpable qualities. Humor is clearly not the same thing as sudden incongruity, because many sudden incongruities (such as finding your diary on the boss’s desk, a Taliban rebel hiding in your closet, or your lover in the arms of your mortal enemy) are not funny in the least. The same holds a fortiori for “absurdity”: a Lovecraft denigrator might scoff at Great Cthulhu as a juvenile figure, but would hardly laugh if Cthulhu swam after his cruise ship in reality. Nor would we find it funny to wake up one morning to the absurdity of seeing seven spatial dimensions, or finding ourselves transformed into cockroaches.

In general, to define things in terms of their palpable qualities, though it is currently considered a mark of supreme intellectual rigor devoid of spooky substances, is to repeat the work of Meno against Socrates. To know a thing is to have a certain sense for it, not to be able to list all of its valid knowable properties.

This has numerous applications in everyday life. It is now common to say of individual people that they “get it” or “don’t get it”. One might work for one employer who makes a series of statements that are difficult to falsify, but which somehow miss the main point at issue, or one might be lucky and work for someone who does get the point even while applying certain faulty measures to that end.

I see a lot of this on committees. Certain statements are made about salary inequities, needs for certain reforms, and the like, and though it is rare that these statements are utterly idiotic, it is equally rare to hear genuine wisdom in selection of priorities, and in a balanced assessment of strengths and weaknesses of different possible options.

This is why I don’t take inconsistencies and hypocrisies and mistakes to be especially major human flaws. The real flaws are shallowness and a lack of sense for the real stakes at issue in any situation.

The same holds true in philosophy. It is pretty rare that I find outright incompetent mistakes in published books. (It’s a different story when teaching Intro to Philosophy, of course, but that’s a different arena.) But it’s quite common to find boring or unimaginative books that get us sidetracked on minor issues while ignoring the dragons loose in the fields nearby.