Is it? It doesn't seem to me that the species of the assertive act is even the same. A teacher wants her students to believe something, so she makes assertions intended to determine or shape their (permanent) belief. The Renaissance was a time of artistic renewal. A housing bubble caused the stock market crash. She wants them to believe something. As you say, "Her intent is to cause them to believe something."
Now take the liar. He also wants his interlocutor to believe something, but something that is contrary to truth. Nixon tells us he played no role in Watergate. He wants us to believe a falsehood, plain and simple.
Is the person who tells a joke a liar? You say that they too "intend to cause you to believe a falsehood," yet "believe" in this sentence means something rather different from what is meant in the two truth-assertions above (assertions intended to shape the long-term epistemic status of the mind you are speaking to). You're not asking them to believe something so much as to entertain something. The locution is simply not intended to influence their epistemic apparatus (and is therefore technically not an 'assertion' at all). The locution is not about reality, it is about a counterfactual, fictional, imaginative proposition, and unlike the liar scenario this proposition is proposed as imaginative.
No, not really. Deception is intertwined with jokes in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, as with dry humor, you aren't supposed to know going into it that you're hearing a joke. But causing you to make false assumptions is deceptive also.
My wife complains all the time that I never tell her how much I love her. But I don't want to upset her. With that joke, I'm not proposing the scenario of my wife complaining
as imaginative. I'm trying to get you to actually believe my wife makes those complaints, which is false. I am stating a falsehood as seriously as I can to convince you it's true. But it gets even more complicated with this example. The "false assumption" is that I do love my wife, but I don't tell her that often enough for her. Then I reveal the "truth" that I don't love my wife and telling that would upset her. So where the setup is supposed to cause you to make a false assumption, you're making an assumption that is basically true. And where the punchline reveals that assumption was erroneous, it does so by stating something that is actually false. It's a real tangled web of deceit, that one. And sure, it's kind of mean, so if my wife didn't find it funny I'd think there might be something morally wrong with it.
So, a baby seal walks into a club. With that "blink and you'll miss it" joke, you know it's a joke going in. The "a character walks into a location" format is extremely common so you know it's a joke from the start. However, I want you to
first believe that I'm talking about a night club and then
later discover that I am talking about a wooden club. My intent is for you to hold a false belief even though the scenario itself is clearly imaginative.
Two muffins are in an oven baking. One muffin turns to the other and says, "It sure is hot in here!". To which the other muffin replies, "Holy crap! A talking muffin!". Now
that joke isn't very deceptive at all. It's clearly presented as an entirely imaginative scenario because most muffins can't talk, and there is no specific belief I'm trying to get you to hold before the punchline. It's funny simply because it's ironic for a talking muffin to be surprised to hear a muffin talk, there isn't really any deception involved in that. As a side note for that joke, it's best told with an actual swear word. It sounds so much like a kid's joke, a good S-Word in there
really catches people off guard. You can always change it to "Holy moly!" if you want to teach it to kids. That was the first joke I taught my kid when he was three
.
I'll grant you that the deceptive nature of jokes is intended to be temporary, but that doesn't change the fact that if I'm successful, I caused you to hold a false belief for a time. It isn't merely entertaining the idea of a fictional story. If you don't actually believe the pertinent parts, it doesn't work as a joke.
Perhaps the interlocutor believes you are asserting rather than joking, but eventually they "catch on" and recognize the intention of your original locution. In my opinion they would come to the common conclusion that it was not intended to deceive them, and was therefore not a lie.
Right, first they believe something that is false, then they realize the truth. I don't know why you're hung up on whether we would call it "deception" or "a lie".
Stating something that you know is false with the intention of causing someone else to believe something that is not true sounds like a good definition for "lying" to me, but that works just as well for someone setting up a joke too. Remember, we're talking about whether truth can be grounded in a good god or not. I'm saying that even a good god can cause you to hold false beliefs and be doing something good with it.
Humor doesn't even function if the listener is fully deceived. If he has no "sense of humor"--and humor is an acquired taste--then he will not understand the intentional difference between an assertion and a joke, he will not laugh, and he will not frequent the comedy club. If the listeners thought they were simply being lied to then the comedians would quit or alter their approach because they are being misunderstood, and are not in fact lying.
Well, for starters, a comedy club removes a lot of the deception, but not all of it. People will know that you're telling a joke no matter how dry the presentation is because telling jokes is what comedy clubs are for. But the comic is still going to cause you to make false assumptions and hold false beliefs. Later,
after the punchline you realize you were wrong to believe what you had, but you still held that false belief for a time. Most jokes follow the standard two part format of "set up" then "punchline". The set up is the lie, the punchline is the reveal. Just because you reveal the truth eventually doesn't mean you didn't start out lying.
Humor strikes me as too unique to ground an argument for deception. I joke all the time and yet people find me to be very trustworthy. This is because they can differentiate between a joke and an assertion and they know that I can too. No one thinks that because I enjoy joking around I am therefore untrustworthy or deceitful.
No, it's because people liked being tricked when they don't have a personal stake in the matter. The natural response to realizing you were tricked into making a false assumption is laughter. People enjoy magic tricks for the same reason. People enjoy being immersed in a good book or movie where they forget that it's just characters on a page or a screen. What people
don't like is discovering for themselves later that they were deceived. That's where paranoia comes from. As long as
you're the one revealing that you were being deceptive through a joke, people are fine with that because you can be counted on to tell the truth. Just like if you snap at someone out of anger, they're quick to forgive if you're quick to apologize.
In my case, dark dry humor is my specialty. And I know so many jokes that almost everything reminds me of one, so I interject them into conversations like regular anecdotes. People don't generally catch on that it's all a big joke until after I've finished the punchline, so the extra surprise that they've been hearing a joke the whole time amplifies the funny. I tell so many, that sometimes when I'm telling a true story people want to interrupt and ask, "Is this for real?". Oddly enough, they never interrupt my jokes, just the true stories. But people trust me too because I always reveal whether the stories are true or false.
However,
while I'm telling a joke, you don't know that your belief is false
until I reveal that to you. And if I do it well, I won't give you any reason to be suspicious.