Prejudice, Humor and Alief: Comments on Robin Tapley's "Humour, Beliefs, and Prejudice" Henry Jackman York University There are two commonly held views about racist and sexist humor, Wrong Telling: It's wrong to tell racist or sexist jokes. and Racist/Sexist Laughing: Only a racist or sexist could ever find racist or sexist humor funny.1 In her "Humour, Belief, and Prejudice," Robin Tapley (2012) draws on the work o f Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks (1993) to argue for something like Racist/Sexist Laughing. As she puts it in her conclusion: Racist/racial, sexist/gender humour is funny because we think it's true. We know the beliefs exist in the laugher, there's no way to philosophically maneuver around that. (Tapley, 2012, p. 92) While both Tapley and I believe Wrong Telling, I 'm unpersuaded by her arguments for Racist/Sexist Laughing, and in what follows I'll be trying to do some philosophical maneuvering o f the sort that she thinks hopeless in the quote above. Tapley contrasts her own view with the much more benign explana tion o f the person who laughs at a racist or sexist joke. According to the benign explanation, one can find such jokes funny by simply hypotheti cally holding (or imagining that one holds) the racist or sexist beliefs in question. Tapley argues that given our current understanding about how humor works, hypothetical or imagined belief cannot do the work needed to cause the 'flickering' that LaFollette and Shanks take to be characteristic o f humor.2 As they put it: 29 Henry Jackman The flickering essential for humor can only occur if the listener (or reader or viewer) believes that there is some point to the alternate belief patterns. That is, they must think that those patterns contain or imply some insight or "truth" about the persons, things or events in question. (LaFollette and Shanks, 1993, p. 334) Since humor requires belief, and imagining that one has a belief isn't like really having one, laughing at a racist joke can't be explained by one's merely imagining the associated racist beliefs. Tapley concludes from this: Consider now that the joke is a racist or sexist joke and that the joke elicits laughter. I don't think that there is any argument about the laugher sharing the beliefs expounded by the joke. Given what we know about belief and stereotypes as prejudice, it seems that we can conclude that the laugher at the racist or sexist joke share the beliefs of the joke. That much we can de cide. There isn't much point then to arguments that suggest we can "hypothetically hold" racist/sexist beliefs for the sake of the joke, or that we can imagine having certain beliefs for the sake of the joke. Such schemes would only allow us to "get" the joke, they would not allow us to find it funny, and laugh. Hy pothetically holding beliefs or imagining having beliefs would not meet the condition of a network of first order beliefs that were true in some sense a condition necessary to a person to be tickled enough to laugh. Hypothetical and imaginary beliefs cannot be true for a person. (Tapley, 2012, p. 91) I I certainly won't be defending the benign hypothetical/imaginatory expla nation o f racist/sexist humor here. This is largely because I don't think that hypothetical belief is the most plausible alternative to belief when one comes to explaining humor. Rather than appealing to hypothetical or imaginary beliefs, we should be appealing to what Tamar Gendler (2008; 2011) has recently referred to as aliefs.3 Aliefs are in many ways like beliefs. In particular, they can be as signed content, and in some ways can be used to explain our behavior. However, they are unlike beliefs in that they are not explicitly endorsed, and are not subject to the same degree o f rational control as our beliefs are. Indeed, aliefs can often be in conflict with our explicitly held beliefs, and our awareness o f this conflict does not lead to either the beliefs being revised or the aliefs going away. For instance, the movie Jaws came out when I was about 10 years 30 Prejudice, Humor and Alief old, and while after seeing it I certainly didn't believe that there was a large Great White Shark in my parent's swimming pool (indeed, I knew that there wasn't), there was something in my head that would periodi cally drive me (very quickly) out o f the pool. It wasn't just imagining or entertaining the hypothesis that there was a shark in the pool, those wouldn't have had nearly the same affect. This state that drove me out is an example o f what Gendler calls "alief." If I 'd believed that there were a shark in the pool, I simply wouldn't have gone in, but my belief that the pool was shark-free kept me going in, while my alief that there was a shark coming for me kept me hopping out o f it. Aliefs can explain, for instance, why we can enjoy scary movies (we have aliefs associated with the events occurring on screen, while if we actually believed any o f this was happening, there would be no enjoyment associated with the experience). In much the same way, they explain why we have trouble eating food that is presented in the form associated with something disgusting. For instance, people have trouble eating chocolate putting formed into the shape o f a dog turd, and this trouble remains even if they witness the creation o f the pudding and try out the pudding before it is put into the offensive form. They definitely believe that there is noth ing wrong with the pudding, but their aliefs keep them from enjoying it. I think that aliefs are robust enough to explain the 'flickering' associ ated humor, since at some level o f cognition, there is something that is taking those aliefs to be true. The concept o f alief has only come to the forefront of philosophical consciousness in the last few years, so it is un surprising that LaFollette and Shanks would not have considered it when making up their theory in 1993, but had it been around, they might have taken it on board as well. This is particularly so because the concept o f alief has been applied to explain precisely the sorts o f stereotypes that racist and sexist jokes ap peal to. The concept o f alief is useful in analyzing stereotypes because, contrary to Tapley's claim that "Whatever stereotypes a person might have fit in with the rest o f their views" (Tapley, 2012, p. 90),4 there is fairly extensive evidence that stereotypes remain psychologically very real, and produce very real effects, even in those whose explicit belief directly con tradict the stereotypes. Indeed, it seems that mere awareness o f the stereo type can affect one's behavior, whether one endorses it or not. As Gendler puts it: knowledge of the stereotype as measured by the subjects abil ity and willingness to produce these terms when prompted to specify traits stereotypically associated with (American) blacks 31 Henry Jackman did not correlate in any ways with measures of explicit preju dice. Study after study has shown that "highand low-prej udiced individuals d[o] not differ in theory knowledge of the stereotypes of Blacks but diverge sharply in their endorsement of the stereotype" .... Moreover, awareness of the stereotype is sufficient to give rise to the relevant associative chains. The costs with which I will be concerned below are ones that arise simply from having encoded the stereotypes, whether or not the subject endorses them. (Gendler, 2011, p. 43) Even among those who are explicitly and sincerely committed to anti-racism, the legacy of having lived in a society structured by hierarchical and hostile racial divisions retains its imprint. So, for example, White participants primed with images of Black faces tend to be faster to identify an ambiguous image as a gun, and more likely to misidentify a (non-gun) tool as a gun. (Gendler, 2011, p. 44) If this is the case, it may be that merely being aware o f a stereotype, wheth er one believes it or not, could be enough to produce the alief needed to cause the 'flickering' needed to find a particular joke funny. The resultant view isn't that far, in many respects, from what Tapley defends when she writes: "We know that finding a joke funny rests on flickering between related but different belief sets. The beliefs in these states were formed not by voluntary choice, are considered true in some sense by the believer, and are agglomerated" (Tapley, 2012, p. 90). Aliefs are not formed by voluntary choice, and given their affect on action, there is clearly "some sense" in which they are considered true by the believer (though there is also a very good sense in which they are not considered true). The only real difference is that, unlike belief proper, they do not agglomerate, and agglomeration is not essential to explaining the humor involved. Indeed, the fact that they don't agglomerate makes them well suited for producing the sorts o f inconsistencies required, so while Tapley (2012, p. 85) feels committed to insisting that "We don't usually laugh at what we think is false or wrong," the alief-based theory o f humor allows that we do often laugh at things we think are false. Now even if all this gives one reason to reject Racist/Sexist Laughing,5 it gives one even more reason to support Wrong Telling. If it is aliefs rath er than beliefs that explain why a non-racist could find a racist joke funny, that makes the telling o f such jokes, if anything, worse. Telling such jokes teaches and re-enforces the stereotypes, and associated negative behavior 32 Prejudice, Humor and Alief al traits, associated with them, and they have this effect even on those who don't endorse the stereotypes at all. Socrates argued that the only real way to harm someone was to make their soul less just, and, arguably, telling racist or sexist jokes, by creating and reinforcing these action-generating associations, harms even the non-sexist non-racist listener in just this way. Notes 1 Tapley starts her paper with the claim "The most popular question in the ethics of humor is whether or not laughing at a racist or sexist joke reveals the laugher to be racist or sexist" (Tapley, 2012, p. 85), and the gist of her paper seems to be that the answer to this question is "yes." 2 I'll just be taking for granted here that this explanation of humor works. One could, of course, argue against Tapley's conclusions by denying her underly ing explanation of how humor works, but I'm more concerned to argue that even if one accepts the LaPhollette and Shanks story about how humor works, Racist/ Sexist Laughing doesn't follow. 3 Some might wonder whether the types of cases that Gendler lumps under "alief' really form a unified psychological kind, but nothing in the appeal to alief in this paper should rely on that assumption. 4 Lafollette and Shanks also suggest something like this in a note to the pas sage from p. 339 quoted above, where they say: "By 'truth' here we do not mean external everlasting or context-independent truth. Here we merely mean truth as compatibility with the person's other beliefs. Something is capable of being humorous only if the new redescription is at least somewhat compatible with the listners's beliefs even if those beliefs are false" (1993, p. 339). 5 Of course the denial of Racist/Sexist Laughing laughing wouldn't mean that one should think that there was nothing wrong with laughing at a sexist or racist joke. Laughing at such jokes encourages the telling of them, so if telling them is wrong, one shouldn't do things to encourage people who do. Still, while one shouldn't laugh at such jokes if one can help it, if one can't help it, it shouldn't follow that one is a racist or sexist. Works Cited Gendler, T. (2008) Alief and Belief. Journal o f Philosophy 97(2): 55-81. ---------. (2011) On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias. Philosophical Studies 156: 33-63. LaFollette, H. and N. Shanks. (1993) Belief and the Basis of Humor. American Philosophical Quarterly 30(4): 332-333. Tapley, R. (2012) Humour, Beliefs, and Prejudice. Southwest Philosophy Review 28(1): 85-92.