The Origins of Laughter

<div align="justify">A philosophical study of the problem of humor. An Ontic-Epistemic Theory of the Comic is presented, in which the stimulus of laughter is described in terms of the ontology of social being, specifically the epistemological consequences of its associations, both valid and incongruous, with material states of affairs. The comic, according to this theory, is an instinctive response to an epistemological problem: the perception that social being, consisting in cultural intensions which the perceiver mentally equates with factual states of affairs, have criteria for truth and falsehood which are distinct from those of material and logical entities. Laughter then, by design, serves to anesthetize the mind during such events, to protect the social animal from the forbidden knowledge of his culture's lack of ontic foundations. <a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/161486">Softcover</a></div>