Analytic Philosophy’s Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying (updated)
“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.
I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.
“Let’s Say a Baby” by Saul Kripke
And it may be the best example of unintentional self-parody in the history of analytic philosophy.*
To be sure of that, though, we’d need to know what the other candidates for this designation might be. Your suggestions?
*UPDATE 1: Some are suggesting Kripke’s line was meant to be funny, in which case I suppose we should broaden the request for suggestions to include intentional self-parodies by analytic philosophers.
UPDATE 2: In a comment below, Brian Rabern shares the audio of Kripke saying the line in question. Does it sound like he’s making a joke? How subtle was his delivery of jokes in general?
Wasn’t Kripke joking there? There are enough obvious jokes elsewhere in N&N to make this a plausible claim.
In which case it’s not unintentional but still funny, as jokes are supposed to be.
Yes, it’s definitely a joke, c’mon!
I think we should defer to MG here. MG knew SK well … or well enough. 😉
Someone, let’s say an agent A, has the property F; those related to A by property R call him φ.
(Sentences like this strike me at least as unintentional self-parody.)
I’ve always found Alvin Plantinga’s analysis of “fundamentalist” (an intentional parody of a certain style of analytic philosophy) in Warranted Christian Belief (pp. 244-245) worth a grin.
This is clearly not *self*-parody – but still, yes, it’s very well done.
I love this extract you gave. I’m actually working on kripke for my PhD
I think what he means to say is that we shall assume there’s some S at t who is baptized with a modally robust ascription ‘N’.
Exactly
I don’t know about parody, but shout-out to Michael Thompson for one of my all-time favorite philosophy quotes. From Life and Action:
“Suppose we freeze a bunch of camels’ corpses, and arrange them for art’s sake in a sort of flying wedge, hurtling toward Alpha Centauri; could the adventitious arrangement supply, for the whole, what the individuals lost with death?”
Hot take: Analytic philosophy’s descent into obsession with the dullest form of conceptual dissection is probably (at least partially) to blame for the philosophical profession’s fall from the prestige it once enjoyed.
Has it fallen in prestige? And if yes, more so than other humanities disciplines less concerned with (what you take to be) “the dullest form of conceptual dissection”? Isn’t the opposite true: recent attacks on academia seem to have mainly targeted the “less dissecting” areas of the humanities, like area studies and also parts of Continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy may have occasionally been caught in the crossfire, but that might have more to do with a lack of discernment on the part of the attackers
Indeed. The “fall” — and I agree with the assertion that it obtains — is for all of the above reasons, though perhaps not the reasons simpliciter, but the too often poor pedagogical skills that leave students unable to relate what is taught to the ordinary problems, conditions and aspirations of life.
A couple of things:
(1) I dubbed my original comment a “hot take”, because it’s obviously a biased and oversimplified account of what’s transpired; I understand that.
(2) However, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to clarify what I had in mind when I said “prestige”. In your reply, you seem to align the “fall in prestige” that I mentioned to “recent attacks on academia”. I assume you’re referring to the political antipathy towards the academy that we’ve seen in recent years? I, on the other hand, meant mainly to invoke the perception of philosophy WITHIN academia. The fragmentation of contemporary analytic philosophy into a multitude of ever-more-specialized “literatures” (with a tendency, I think, towards rather dull conceptual hair-splitting) seems to have created the impression among observers in other disciplines that nothing “worthwhile” (whatever that means) is being done in philosophy. To put this in the form of a caricature: I know plenty of computer scientists who enjoy Nietzsche, but none who are captivated by our era’s heady debates over grounding.
At any rate, this is certainly an interesting topic.
However, I suspect more computer scientists actually follow the literature on causal modeling, and on certain aspects of formal epistemology, than there are who actually follow contemporary literature on Nietzsche!
Fair enough. But I’m not sure that undermines the main idea I’m gesturing at: hyper-specialized literatures tend to be alienating.
This self-parody of continental philosophy is not funny.
Well played. Here’s another for you, to show that I’m not incapable of laughing at myself:
“What strikes me about pop music, and it is particularly apparent in the United States, is that it is an immense, monstrous body that does no more than bring forth, year after year, new variants, new sound organizations, that were previously unheard.”
That’s J.F. Lyotard in “Just Gaming”. I always found this to be a pretty hilarious self-parody of Continental figures’ tendency to make everything into some broad-strokes assertion about society.
I don’t think he’s joking. You have to remember this is the transcript of a talk. He’s just throwing in very standard though experiment language. Compare “a number of people, say five, are tied to a railroad track”. You’re just signaling that the number 5 is only important in that it’s more than one. But in Kripke’s case, the whole point of the example is that there’s nothing distinctive about the person at all except the ensuing baptism. So he’s going “someone is born” and he’s brain goes “we need a “say” clause, and ends up making the funniest sentence ever.
I’ve always interpreted this line as a clear self-parody. When he’s trying to stay object-level, he has no trouble coming up with specifics, like naming his pet aardvark Napoleon, or any example involving, say, Nixon. In this case, I think he’s observing the need to include “say X” afterwards, and then filling it in with the one thing that actually adds nothing, rather than “someone, let’s say, the future teacher of Aristotle, is born”.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing about exactly what he’s doing I think we’re only disagreeing that he was in a position to predict how unbelievably funny it would come out sounding.
Aren’t there a lot of similar wry jokes (funny passages) in N&N and other Kripke stuff? Somehow or other I’ve come to have a conception of Kripke’s sense of humor, which I take this passage to match perfectly, and I believe(d) with something close to certainty that this was a joke. But I am open to reassessment, as it’s been a long time since I’ve read much Kripke and am having trouble thinking of other jokes offhand.
When giving talks, Kripke would occasionally laugh at his own witticisms.
Was there a recording of the original presentation of naming and necessity? Maybe we can find out whether he laughed at this point.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L9u8TumziC-yepRdjyw8VX_JsNIRA30v/view?usp=sharing
I always loved Wiggins’s conception of how ordinary people (“almost anyone”) express their views (“will say”) when they are not under the influence of a theory:
“Almost anyone not under the influence of theory will say that, when a person is weak-willed, he intentionally chooses that which
he knows or believes to be the worse course of action when he
could choose the better course; and that, in acting in this way,
the weak-willed man acts not for no reason at all-that would be
strange and atypical-but irrationally”
I was talking to an ordinary person just yesterday, and they said this verbatim.
You can’t ride a bus for more than 10 minutes without hearing it.
This is much ado about nothing given that NAN is a transcribed talk. The parenthetical “let’s say a baby” is a mere afterthought. No need to read intention into it, except maybe to ascribe genius demonstrated elsewhere into every nook and cranny.
Love the visuals in this YouTube clip: Ryle and Urmson in lawn chairs (jackets and ties, pipe-smoking) (1972). At 3.59, Ryle holds forth on a rabbit feeling anger at another rabbit running off with its partner but NOT indignation. https://youtu.be/vT9U107Yn6M?si=EDQvPB-pM1nKVfbX
Was it an intentional joke or just something formulaic? Here’s the audio—decide for yourself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L9u8TumziC-yepRdjyw8VX_JsNIRA30v/view?usp=sharing
Obviously formulaic and not an intentional joke.
What I notice is the long pause after “let’s say”. It’s not “someone, let’s say a baby, is born”, it’s “someone, let’s say — a baby is born”. It is as though he hesitates and restarts his sentence from the beginning. No indication of a joke.
Let’s say a baby is born and the parent call it by a certain name that is not it. Is the baby to be, or not to be, an it? That is the question.
‘Thus “hungry” in the sense of “having a good appetite” means roughly “is eating or would eat heartily and without sauces, etc.”‘ (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, ch. 4). Without sauces? The very idea!
The irony of analytic philosophers saying “No! Kripke meant to be funny!”. That’s parody in itself, divorced from the reality that failed jokes are failed jokes, based on context, and even most literary critics don’t care completely the intention of the author because the author like all humans, aren’t completely aware of their intentions.
Update #1: that’s the parody of analytic philosophy at itself, by itself.
Very much intentional other-parody, but a gem in the genre:
https://youtu.be/80AovwgVY8Q?si=lZXSC5TCYnftWNIF
It’s all about the commas.
(1) The text as published has an additional comma (between “say” and “a baby”):
“Someone, let’s say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
This matters because it raises the question whether “let’s say” is meant to go with “a baby” or with “someone” (i.e. to the effect of “Let’s say someone, a baby, is born: his parents call him by a certain name.”
(2) The audio provided by Brian Rabern sounds like this to me — with a different comma removed from the published text:
“Someone, let’s say, a baby is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
(Actually it sounds to me like he said this:
“Someone, let’s say, a baby is born, he is called by his parents by a certain name, for instance.” etc.)
I think this supports the suggestion in (1).
(3) As noted by others below this is a transcript of a written talk, given, as Kripke says in a footnote to the first lecture, without a text or even notes. So Kripke was just throwing in “let’s say” like “for example.” (With an additonal “for instance” that was removed from the published text, perhaps.)
(4) It doesn’t seem to me that Kripke was deliberately making a joke, or even that as delivered the line is particularly funny. Winsberg’s inadvertent removal of a comma, plus the original insertion of a comma in the printed text, make it seem funnier than it originally was.
Thank god I’m not the only one who was completely mystified about this apparently hysterical line from Kripke.
Fwiw, I originally it was a joke, and upon hearing the audio no longer do. Though I also agree the comma placement matters a lot, and the version that more faithfully captures his usage would’ve read less like a joke and more like just verbal hesitation (ie, not like the funny version suggested by the comma placement.)
Well, I was taking the question to be about the published/written version. He edited/proofread the transcript, and when doing so I still feel confident that he knew that was a funny passage and kept it that way intentionally. The question of whether he originally intended what he said to be funny–or whether it even was funny–is much harder to adjudicate.
Good point.
“For a predicate to stand in the relation of ascription to a property or concept is just this: for its sense so to relate it to that property/concept that it may be used in concatenation with an appropriate singular term to say of the bearer of that term that it has the property, or falls under the concept in question. That relation is, pre‐theoretically, every bit as clear as the ordinary notion of reference as applied to singular terms. Indeed, it is its dual: for the ordinary notion of reference, as applied to singular terms, is just that relation such that an expression’s bearing it to an item enables it in concatenation with an appropriate predicate to be used to say of that item that it has the property, or falls under the concept ascribed by the predicate in question. It is also pre‐theoretically utterly intuitive that ascription, so conceived, is not the relation that singular terms like ‘the concept horse’ which intuitively *refer to* concepts, or properties, bear to the items they stand for. So much would seem mere common sense to one innocent of Frege’s thought about the matter.”
Here’s are two gems from Prichard’s 1912 ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’
At the bottom of p. 27: “The rightness of an action consists in its being the origination of something of a certain kind A in a situation of a certain kind, a situation consisting in a certain relation B of the agent to others or to his own nature.”
That is, that the rightness of a person’s action consists in its producing a certain kind of thing in a certain kind of situation in relation to other people or himself. A brilliant insight, obviously.
And at the top of p. 28: “We recognize, for instance, that this performance of a service to X, who has done us a service, just in virtue of its being the performance of a service to one who has just rendered a service to the would-be agent, ought to be done by us.”
That is to say, we recognize immediately and directly that we ought to do a good turn by someone who has done us a good turn.