alt Hacker Newsabsurd statements are usually jokes
a joke
> "all my hats are green" - bill
> "but green hats catch fire in the sunlight" - joe
> "and thats why i dont have any hats" - bill
from the link:
> Many conversations have goals other than the exchange of information. One is amusement, which speakers often pursue by making jokes (Lepore & Stone 2015: §11.3). Because the goal is not to provide information, the maxims of Quality, Quantity, and Relation do not apply. If for any of these reasons the Cooperative Principle does not apply, reasoning based on it will be unsound.
i think i disagree - the joke is intended to say that bill doesnt have any hats, but would like one, and only a green one, and only if they didnt catch fire in the sunlight
This is why I point out that an absurd statement still points toward meaning via a metaphor or language game, which I would put wordplay/jokes under the rubric of.
In fact, in my thesis, I cited The Naked Jape, by Jimmy Carr specifically in reference to jokes (it has a one-liner on every page). On of my main arguments against Gricean conversational implicature theory was that the theory itself was a form of begging the question or no true scotsman problems, in that all of the obvious examples where a counter-factual to the cooperation principal that exist everywhere are excused as "not conversation."
https://archive.org/details/nakedjapeuncover0000carr
Again, yes, you can have wordplay, but wordplay is wordplay, and is a language game that exists and is trying to do something in a different framework.
The reason why so many folks have no issue with the puzzle is that they view it as a puzzle (a kind of language game), and not a sensible human communication. This lets them genuinely consider absurd statements and treat them as normal.