syntactical humor

This joke demonstrates the importance of the philosophy of language. Here the appropriateness of language changes relative to the linguistic framework within which it is understood. The double entendres is successful because the audience can relate to the language in more than one specific context. Communication can become very confusing if parties involved do not understand language within its intended linguistic framework. This joke also deals with the epistemological question of certain knowledge. Kant says that the phenomenological world is the only world that can be known. (Cathcart and Klein 62-65) Although most people would agree that a person is more than the sum of its sense data, the only true evidence to support the existence of a person is purely sensory. Here the linguistic switch implies that the 'shrink' is judging the guy based solely on sense data. When Kant says that we can know nothing about things as they are in themselves he collapses the posibility that the shrink can come to a conclusion about the man beyond sensory experience. The last frame of this diagram shows the fragmentation of reality for both the man (as he is operating within a realm that is well outside of the 'norm') and for the shrink (by the implication of judgement made through the sensory experience of seeing, i.e. disolving the notion that the man will know himself through reason alone [with the help of a psychiatrist]).