SAE Laughter · I: Laughter as Tendency
SAE 笑论·一：笑的趋向
Infants and animals both laugh, yet on SAE's mapping the subject sits at 13DD, and 12DD has predictive power without subjectivity. This paper deals with laughter in this stretch and registers it as "laughter as tendency": part of the structure of construct and remainder has already appeared, but the judgment does not yet have an owner. Tendency is a cell that the Laughter Series sets up in its own right.
The main example of this paper is peek-a-boo. Perception gives "out of sight": this is the construct. The remainder is "still there", and what catches this remainder is 12DD prediction. Per the journal abstract of Parrott and Gleitman (1989), infants smile less when a different person comes back, or when the face reappears in a different place. This fits with infants' expectations tracking identity and location: laughter follows a definite relation, and smiling does not increase with the unexpected. Between separation anxiety and the laughter of peek-a-boo, this paper proposes an inference: one and the same predictive capacity takes part in two situations, one focused on the loss of the construct, the other on the remainder. 11DD is merged into this paper, because the earliest laughter as tendency depends on familiar things supplied by memory. Play openly carries a construct together with its remainder; the laughter of animals in play, and laughter in hiding, are generally also registered as tendency; species already capable of mirror self-recognition (such as chimpanzees) are considered separately (4.2). The laughter of tickling comes in two phases: when the child laughs before the hand has touched, what is predicted is another person's movement, and this belongs to 12DD tendency; the laugh after the touch belongs to 10DD perceptual laughter.
Tendency is not judgment: it has no owner, no reflexivity, and there is no question yet of its being questioned. It tracks a definite relation; whether this conflicts with Kant's account of an expectation "transformed into nothing" still has to be settled by comparison on one and the same expected content, and this paper claims no victory on that basis.
Keywords: laughter as tendency, 12DD, 11DD, prediction, peek-a-boo, separation anxiety, play, tickling, perceptual laughter, Kant
1. The Problem: What Does Laughter Without Subjectivity Count As?
The Overview holds that laughter is an expression of the power of judgment. At 12DD this claim meets its most direct pressure. Infants laugh long before mirror self-recognition, and many animals make laugh-like sounds in play. On the mapping of the SAE Psychoanalysis series, the subject sits at 13DD, the position that can carry out negation reflexively; at 12DD the law of prediction is at work, but the predictor does not know that it is a predictor (Psychoanalysis I calls this the me-without-self). What, then, does laughter without subjectivity count as?
There are two answers here that go too far, and both must be avoided.
The first is over-claiming: certifying infant laughter outright as judgment. This would leave judgment without an owner, and would also make the Overview's sixth thesis fall through at this layer: the judgment in laughter on a misjudgment can afterwards be negated by oneself, whereas 12DD has no subject able to negate its own negation.
The second is under-claiming: handing the laughter of this stretch over to the body, or to Kant's account of an expectation "transformed into nothing". This is exactly where Kant's reading has the upper hand at this layer: laughter without a self looks most like a bodily affair. But if the laughter of this stretch tracks a definite relation, and not merely the strength of a stimulus, it deserves to be discussed as a phenomenon that tracks a relation; for whether it conflicts with Kant's "nothing", see 6.2.
This series takes a middle path: it registers the laughter of this stretch as laughter as tendency. This is a cell that the Laughter Series sets up in its own right. Tendency means that part of the structure of construct and remainder has already appeared, and attention has already come to rest on the remainder, but this judgment does not yet have an owner who knows that it is the one judging. Laughter as tendency has an object that can be stated: it tracks a definite relation, such as the same face returning to the same place; and it has visible behavioural markers: change the person, or change the place, and the infant smiles less. So it is not mere lingering and exploration, but a rudiment that can be pointed out.
This paper does three things. It uses peek-a-boo to show the structure of tendency; it explains why 11DD is merged in, and how laughter in play, in animals and in hiding is registered; and it draws the line between tendency and 10DD perceptual laughter on the one side, and 13DD judgment on the other.
2. The Structure of Peek-a-boo
2.1 A Training Device
The SAE paper Education as Subject-Condition: A Philosophy of Education fixes peek-a-boo as the training device of 12DD: gone, back, gone, back, and from this the infant builds prediction. Its timeline places peek-a-boo in the "practicing prediction" column at six to eight months; as the marker of the onset of 12DD, it gives separation anxiety. The prediction the infant builds from this game is "she will come back".
2.2 Construct, Remainder, and the Prediction That Catches It
Taken apart according to the Overview's formula, peek-a-boo has three components:
- Construct: perception's "out of sight". The face is covered and does not appear in the field of view at this moment; this discrimination is not itself wrong. It belongs to the perceptual layer, close to 10DD.
- Remainder: "still there". Not appearing in the field of view at this moment, and still being there and going to come back, can be true at the same time; what perception's "out of sight" has not taken in is exactly this.
- What catches the remainder: 12DD prediction. It tracks the persistence and return of the face.
There is nothing mysterious about the remainder here. The perceptual construct says "out of sight", prediction tracks "still there", and the point between the two is exactly what the perceptual construct has not fully taken in and yet is right before one's eyes. The "still" hangs on the construct. Two present moments must be kept apart here. While the face is covered, perception's "out of sight" holds at that moment, and prediction is already tracking "still there": this is "still" in the sense of validity, and nothing is damaged (Overview, 2.2). Once the hands come away, the face is back; the perceptual state of the moment just past is carried into the present by memory (11DD; see Section 3), the construct is still present, and prediction has caught "still there". There is no reflexive look back at "I didn't see a moment ago" here (2.4): 12DD has no subject that knows it has seen. Both moments can carry laughter: the first by virtue of prediction, the second by virtue of the meeting between the construct brought along by memory and the "still there" caught by prediction. Attention rests on "still there", not on "out of sight"; if attention stays on "out of sight", what comes out is not laughter but the weeping that Section 3 will take up.
The shift from "seeing the face" to "tracking the persistence and return of the face", that is, from a grasp of visual presence to tracking across occlusion, is this paper's reading. What it explains is where the remainder comes from; it does not infer backwards from the infant's laughter that the infant holds a false belief that "the face no longer exists".
2.3 What Is Tracked Is a Relation
Parrott and Gleitman (1989) studied infants' responses to "trick" trials of peek-a-boo. The journal abstract reports that when six- to eight-month-old infants watched peek-a-boo, they smiled less if a different adult came back, or if the adult reappeared in a different location; the abstract also mentions that laughing and eyebrow-raising were observed. This fits with infants' expectations tracking identity and location. Reading this tracking as the relation of construct and remainder in this paper's sense is a further reading of this paper's own, and other mechanisms cannot yet be ruled out on this basis.
This evidence serves two purposes. First, it shows that infant laughter already follows a relation: the same face, coming back in the same place. Second, it shows that the "suddenness" of Section 4 of the Overview cannot be read as the size of the surprise: the trick rounds did not draw more smiling. This paper has checked only the journal abstract, and what it records is a difference in smiling; the full text's method, scales and statistics have not been checked, and the number of smiles is not the same thing as what this series calls inner laughter.
2.4 The Seeing Grid Does Not Apply Here
The Overview's seeing grid arranges the kinds of laughter by "who sees and who doesn't". The laughter of peek-a-boo does not enter this grid: 12DD has no subject that knows it has seen, so there is no question of an "I didn't see" a moment before. Prediction has been tracking the persistence of the face all along; what is caught is the remainder of the perceptual construct, not the laugher's own not-having-seen. The reflexive gap between seeing and not having seen has not yet appeared here. This is precisely one of the differences between tendency and judgment; see Section 6.
3. Separation Anxiety and the Contribution of 11DD
3.1 One Predictive Capacity, Two Situations (This Paper's Inference)
Education as Subject-Condition establishes separation anxiety as the marker of 12DD: the infant weeps on hearing its mother's footsteps recede, not because of pain, not because of hunger, but because it predicts "mama is leaving". That paper does not discuss it together with peek-a-boo; what follows is this paper's inference.
Separation anxiety and the laughter of peek-a-boo are two situations in which one and the same predictive capacity takes part, with different predicted content: on one side "leaving", on the other "coming back". What can be compared is focus. In peek-a-boo, attention rests on the remainder, "still there", and so there is laughter; in separation, the mother really leaves, attention stays on the loss of the construct, and so there is weeping. Section 3 of the Overview says that weeping focuses on the construct and laughter on the remainder; this distinction can already be seen at 12DD.
If this inference holds, it has a testable consequence: in the same infant, the laughter of peek-a-boo and the weeping of separation should appear in roughly the same developmental window, and should change as the same predictive capacity stabilizes. This paper has not checked the relevant research; here it is registered only as an inference.
3.2 Why 11DD Is Folded In
On the timeline of Education as Subject-Condition, birth falls at about 11DD, and 0 to 6 months is 10DD to 11DD. Sroufe and Wunsch (1972) traced laughter across the first year of life. According to its bibliographic record and secondhand accounts, the earliest laughter appears at around four months, elicited at first mostly by touch and by fairly strong sounds, and by around one year increasingly by incongruity in visual and social situations. This paper has not checked the main text.
This sequence can be read as follows. The early laughter directly elicited by touch and fairly strong sounds belongs to 10DD perceptual laughter (Section 5); the part elicited by familiar games and nursery rhymes already depends on memory. A familiar nursery rhyme reaches a certain line, a "here it comes ... got you!" game reaches a certain step, and the infant laughs; this "certain line", this "certain step", is a familiar thing supplied by memory. Without it, there would be no construct for "still there" to complete. The bridge that Psychoanalysis I §2.2 gives to 12DD is the retrospectiveness of memory, the remainder of the 11DD law of memory; prediction grows precisely on top of memory.
So the reason 11DD is merged into this paper is this: memory supplies the material of the construct, and prediction catches the construct's remainder; in the earliest laughter as tendency, both are already present together. Psychoanalysis I registers what lies below 12DD (11DD included) as a lower-bound remainder, but its §8.3 also concedes that whether the Id should cover the whole cognitive round (9DD to 12DD) is a contestable theoretical choice. This series merges 11DD in according to the grouping of Aesthetics Ray 9, The Beauty of Cognition (11DD+12DD), and the difference is noted here. As for what 11DD contributes to tendency, what this section offers is this paper's reading, and the developmental research it relies on is still to be verified.
4. Play, Animals and Hiding
4.1 Play: A Construct That Openly Carries Its Remainder
In "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" (1955) Bateson gives a famous analysis: the nip in play denotes the bite, yet does not denote what the bite would denote. In this series' terms, rough-and-tumble play is a construct that openly carries its own remainder: the shape of attack is there, the remainder "not really an attack" is there too, and both parties carry it in their movements. The laughter of animals in rough-and-tumble play can be read from here: construct (attack) and remainder (not attack) are both present, and no one loses. Once play crosses the line, the remainder "not an attack" no longer holds, and the laughter usually stops and gives way to other responses; this is this paper's reading and is not offered as empirical confirmation.
Such laughter is registered as tendency for the same reason as infant laughter: there is a construct, a remainder and the tracking of the remainder, but no owner who knows that it is the one judging. Whether the play vocalizations of different species belong to one class must be verified species by species and task by task; layer cannot be presumed from the name "laughter" or from a similarity of sound. Chimpanzees and other species already capable of mirror self-recognition have, on the reading of 4.2, entered the early stage of 13DD; at which layer their play laughter falls is considered separately, according to their standing at that moment. This paper offers only a structural reading.
4.2 Deception and Hiding
Psychoanalysis I lists chimpanzee deception as an emergence of 12DD. The structure of deception is worth a look: the other's construct is missing something I know, and I exploit this. This is isomorphic with the sly laughter that Paper III will discuss: I see, the other does not. Isomorphism does not mean the judgment of sly laughter is already there: deception can merely exploit the fact that the other hasn't seen; representing the other's not-knowing as the state of another subject is the level that the judgment of sly laughter requires (see below).
The chimpanzee case calls for a few more words. Chimpanzees can pass the mirror self-recognition test (Gallup 1970). Call and Tomasello, in their 2008 review, hold that there is reliable evidence that chimpanzees understand the goals, intentions, perception and knowledge of others; in the studies they review, there is as yet no evidence that they understand false beliefs. On this series' present reading, mirror self-recognition is an early sign that 13DD is available (Overview, 6.3), and chimpanzees have entered the early stage of 13DD; in them, "I see, he does not" can already be an elementary judgment; and their knowledge access is collateral evidence for this reading, not a counterexample. Psychoanalysis I lists this deception as an emergence of 12DD; that listing and this reading await alignment (Section 8), and this paper does not rewrite the upstream paper on its behalf.
When children play hide-and-seek, the one hiding often giggles. The seeker's construct of "searching" has a remainder, and it is me: right here, and he can't find me. This is precisely the reverse of peek-a-boo: in peek-a-boo the remainder comes back before my eyes; in hide-and-seek I am the remainder that has hidden. Very young children often cover their own eyes and think they are well hidden. One reading is that "what the other sees is not the same as what I see" has not yet been established; some research also holds that children think hiding requires that the two parties not look each other in the eye (to be verified). Neither reading is load-bearing in this paper; the above is this paper's reading.
The laughter of hide-and-seek is registered as follows. The judgment of sly laughter, "I see, he does not", requires representing the other's present not-knowing as the state of another subject, that is, the distinction between subject and other. The threshold lies in this structure, so the judgment of sly laughter comes at the earliest at 13DD. Developmental material serves only as collateral evidence: mirror self-recognition is a sign that this structure is available (in humans at roughly 18 to 24 months; Overview, 6.3); knowledge access (someone who hasn't seen doesn't know) is its expression on the side of understanding others, and comes before false belief on the developmental scale (Wellman and Liu 2004); only waiting, as Nasreddin does, for the other to believe something false requires an understanding of false belief, which comes at around four years of age (Wellman, Cross and Watson 2001). The specific ages are not load-bearing. Before this structure is available, the giggling in hide-and-seek tracks the relation "he hasn't found me yet" and is registered as a tendency of the sly-laughter structure. As for "holding it back and not telling" as an act done with laughter, that comes only once there is purpose, and belongs to Paper III (14DD).
5. The Boundary with Perceptual Laughter
Tickling makes people laugh. This series treats the laughter of tickling in two phases, and the ground for the boundary must first be made clear.
"External stimulus" cannot serve as the ground. The occasion of peek-a-boo is also created by an adult, and the occasion of a joke is also created by someone else; if "coming from outside" were the boundary, the laughter as tendency discussed in this paper would have to be excluded as well.
"Whether there is prediction" cannot serve as the ground either. The study by Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith (1998) shows that when people tickle themselves, the tickle sensation is weaker; their explanation is that the brain uses the motor command to compute in advance the sensory consequences of one's own movement, and cancels them out. What this study explains is why self-tickling does not tickle: one's own movement has been predicted. It shows that the perceptual layer has a kind of prediction of its own, but it supplies no layer assignment, nor does it explain the kind of tickling that makes people laugh. When someone else tickles you, you have precisely no movement of your own to use for prediction.
This series' ground is what the prediction is directed at, and on that basis it splits the laughter of tickling into two phases:
- Anticipatory phase: the hand has not yet touched, and the child is already laughing. What is predicted is another person's movement, "here it comes", directed at objects and relations in the world; by this paper's criterion it belongs to 12DD tendency. The "here it comes ... got you!" game of Section 3 is exactly this phase.
- Contact phase: the laugh after the touch is a response to the touch itself; it belongs to 10DD perceptual laughter and lies outside the scope (9DD being folded into 10DD).
This boundary by "what it is directed at" is a candidate account offered by this series, not a completed structural proof. One's own movement and touch are also in the world; when another person tickles, "who will touch me, and when" likewise involves objects and relations. So this paper does not draw the line by "happening in the body or in the external world", but looks case by case: is what is at work the correction for sensory consequences, or the sustained tracking of an object across occlusion and across time?
The developmental order recorded by Sroufe and Wunsch roughly fits this boundary: early laughter directly elicited by touch and fairly strong sounds belongs to perceptual laughter; only laughter elicited by familiar games and incongruous situations enters tendency. In the laughter of laughing gas this series can identify no judgment content, and it is likewise placed below the lower bound; this is not a universal assertion about its internal processing.
The boundary is drawn by "at which layer this laugh occurs", not by who the laugher is. When an adult is tickled, what is faced in the laugh at the moment of contact, and what activates this layer, is touch; this laugh is still at 10DD, and it does not become a judgment because the laugher stands at 13DD or above in other matters. The "object" here is what is faced that activates the layer, in the sense of "the object determines the layer" in Psychoanalysis IV §3.1, not the construct laughed at (Overview, 6.1). At which layer an adult's laughter in the anticipatory phase falls is considered separately.
6. Why Tendency Is Not Judgment; Kant's "Nothing"
6.1 Not Judgment
Tendency differs from judgment in three respects.
No owner. At 12DD prediction is at work, but the predictor does not know that it is a predictor. The relation of construct and remainder is caught, but there is no subject that knows "it is I who judge" to claim it. The Overview says that a laugh follows the one who laughs; at 12DD, that one is what Psychoanalysis I calls the me-without-self.
No reflexivity. The 13DD subject can negate its own negation, so the judgment in laughter on a misjudgment can be corrected afterwards. 12DD cannot do this. If in peek-a-boo a different person comes back and the infant smiles less, this is not the correction of a misjudgment; the tendency was simply never headed there in the first place. The category "laughter on a misjudgment" does not apply to tendency.
No question of being questioned. The Overview's seventh thesis says that laughter's expectation of others is openness to being questioned: I expect you to tell me your judgment. This requires that the laugher can hand over its judgment as a judgment. An infant laughing along with adults may be the contagion of tendency, but it does not yet amount to "What are you all laughing at?".
6.2 Kant's "Nothing"
Kant says that laughter arises when an expectation is suddenly transformed into nothing, and that the pleasure is conveyed through the body. At 12DD this reading is at its most attractive: there is no subject here, and laughter looks most like a bodily affair. What this paper can say is this: tendency tracks a definite relation; if a different person comes back, or comes back in a different place, the infant smiles less (Section 2). This supports this paper in discussing tendency as a phenomenon that tracks a relation, and it also constrains pure-intensity accounts that look only at the strength of the stimulus.
Whether it conflicts with Kant's explanation cannot be settled merely by "there is an object". §54 already contains a play of representations and of thoughts, and concrete objects of jokes; the transformation into nothing speaks of the frustration of a strained expectation, not of there being no face and no relation in the event. A comparison requires a joint definition on the same event and the same expected content: what is expected, what is frustrated, whether the account in §54 covers infants, and how smiling as a measure relates to the laughter under discussion. Until then, this paper does not declare this a counterexample to §54. Nor are bodily involvement and the tracking of a relation an either-or.
6.3 Why It Is Still Within Scope
If tendency is not judgment, why does this series still place it within scope? Because the structure of construct and remainder begins here. The Overview's formula, "the construct still has such a remainder", already has part of its structural material at 12DD: the construct (perception's "out of sight"), the remainder ("still there"), and focus on the remainder (laughter rather than weeping). What is still missing is not only an owner to claim it: the reflexive gap between seeing and not having seen has not yet appeared either (2.4). Only at 13DD, when the subject appears, does this structure become judgment. This paper is therefore the starting point of the Laughter Series: it shows what the laughter of judgment grows out of, and what structural material it already has before it grows into judgment.
7. Connections and Contrasts
| Point in this paper | Connection (within SAE) | Contrast (external) |
|---|---|---|
| 12DD has prediction but no subjectivity | SAE Psychoanalysis (I): the 12DD law of prediction, me-without-self | — |
| Peek-a-boo is the training device of 12DD ("practicing prediction"); separation anxiety is the marker of 12DD | Education as Subject-Condition §2.1, §3.1, §3.2 | Parrott & Gleitman 1989 (journal abstract) |
| 11DD merged in | Timeline of Education as Subject-Condition; SAE Psychoanalysis (I) §2.2 takes the retrospectiveness of memory as the bridge to 12DD; Aesthetics Ray 9 (11DD+12DD) | Sroufe & Wunsch 1972 (bibliographic record checked) |
| The cell of tendency | Set up by the Laughter Series in its own right; a draft of Aesthetics Ray 8 once had a similarly named "aesthetic tendency" cell, not kept in the final version | — |
| Play openly carries its remainder | — | Bateson 1955 |
| Deception and hiding; tendency of the sly-laughter structure; the threshold of the judgment of sly laughter lies in the structure | SAE Psychoanalysis (I): chimpanzee deception listed at 12DD (this paper reads chimpanzees as having entered the early stage of 13DD; alignment pending); SAE Psychoanalysis (II): the mirror test marks the emergence of 13DD; Overview, 6.3 | Gallup 1970; Call and Tomasello 2008; Wellman and Liu 2004; Wellman, Cross and Watson 2001 |
| Tickling in two phases; the boundary with perceptual laughter | SAE Psychoanalysis (IV) §3.1: the object determines the layer (object = what is faced that activates the layer) | Blakemore, Wolpert & Frith 1998 (explains only why self-tickling does not tickle) |
8. Remainders of This Paper
- Data to be verified: Parrott and Gleitman have been checked only against the journal abstract, and Sroufe and Wunsch only against the bibliographic record and secondhand accounts; the originals must be read before either is used anywhere load-bearing.
- Separation anxiety: reading it as the same predictive capacity focused on the loss of the construct is this paper's inference; Education as Subject-Condition does not put it this way.
- The contribution of 11DD: "memory supplies the material of the construct, and prediction catches the construct's remainder" is this paper's reading, and needs the support of developmental research.
- The tickling boundary: drawing the line by "what the prediction is directed at" is a candidate account; at which layer an adult's laughter in the anticipatory phase falls is considered separately.
- Tendency of the sly-laughter structure: when the laughter of hide-and-seek turns from tendency into judgment. The threshold lies in the structure, and mirror self-recognition and knowledge access serve only as signs; the specific ages, and research on the laughter of hide-and-seek, are to be verified.
- The layer of chimpanzees: Psychoanalysis I lists chimpanzee deception at 12DD; this paper, on the basis of mirror self-recognition, reads chimpanzees as having entered the early stage of 13DD. The cross-series alignment is pending and is for the Psychoanalysis series to settle.
- Animals: whether the play vocalizations of different species belong to one class must be verified species by species and task by task.
Conclusion
The laughter of 12DD is laughter as tendency. Perception gives "out of sight" and prediction catches "still there"; when attention rests on the remainder, there is laughter; when it rests on the loss of the construct, there is weeping. Tendency tracks a relation: change the person or the place, and smiling decreases. This constrains pure-intensity accounts, while whether it conflicts with Kant's "nothing" still requires comparison on the same case. Yet it is not judgment: it has no owner, no reflexivity, and there is no question of its being questioned. The Overview's formula already has part of its structural material here; what it still lacks is an owner to claim it, and the reflexive gap between seeing and not having seen. These two appear at 13DD, and that is where Paper II begins.
References
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · Overview: Judgment and Laughter. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23286244
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- Parrott, W. G. & Gleitman, H. "Infants' Expectations in Play: The Joy of Peek-a-boo." Cognition and Emotion 3(4), 1989, 291–311. DOI: 10.1080/02699938908412710. Journal abstract checked; full text not checked.
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