Abstract

Despite sustained philosophical attention, no theory of humor claims general acceptance. Drawing on the resources provided by intentional systems theory, this article first outlines an approach to investigating humor based on the idea of a comic stance, then sketches the Dismissal Theory of Humor (DTH) that has resulted from pursuing that approach. According to the DTH, humor manifests in cases where the future-directed significance of anticipatory failures is dismissed. Mirth, on this view, is the reward people get for declining to update predictive representational schemata in ways that maximize their future-oriented value. The theory aims to provide a plausible account of the role of humor in human mental and social life, but it also aims to be empirically vulnerable, and to generate testable predictions about how the comic stance may actually be undergirded by cognitive architectures.