ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that there is an important ingredient common to comfortable human relations, humor, and psychotherapeutic change, and that this ingredient is the implicit presence and acceptance of the paradoxes. The author presents that the paradoxes are the prototypic paradigm for humor, and that laughter occurs at the moment when a circuit of that kind is completed. The study of mind through the causal approach, however, will lead us into accepting the paradoxes of thinking, which are related to humor, which are related to a freedom to change the system of thought related to humor. The convention of communication include the material of linguistics at the simplest level, but also under this heading comes material which is the field of study of psychiatry and of cultural anthropology. The implicit statements about the conventions of communication are messages about the “how” of communication, but these are messages about the fact of communication.
