To respond to the problem of laughter in response to already known jokes, I think the guiding principle behind such reaction is in contrast of seriousness. Incongruency itself isn't funny on it's own, but when you add a grounded or serious context to it, it starts to gain shape.

In Monty Python (which this article refers to in notes), extreme care was put into making it look authentic at a glance, but they carefully break that serious setting to introduce humour. If you take a look at sitcoms, they do the same thing in principle, just focus it on different elements.

Expectation is a part of humour but not the whole story. Comedy is about contrast. Contrast between the elements and the personal experience of the individual is what allows this funny business to exist.

The problem of strict binary truth lies in the language and the principles of decision making. What I think you are saying is that at a fundamental level we reach a statement which is either true or false. And I agree. But our language and our brains do not operate in that paradigm. We operate in a paradigm of weighted probabilities that allow us to decide on how to solve real scenarios. Traditionally, computers work in strict binary logic, but they can not approach human operating capacity without emulating human neural networks. Human brains operate on connection strength, not binary predictions. They can infinitely approach truth, but can never achieve it. The third option between truth and falsehood is uncertainty. But you can not reject truth as the article suggests, because you will break the mechanisms that lead to computational function. In other words, uncertainty is a function of those two options. If we take a statement outside the context of possible thought or observable reality, there is no saying if you do have a dog or not. Because truth changes based on a subset of observable reality. What if our reality exists in a multiverse and/or consists of multiverses itself? Now you have to infinitely define which particular you has or has not a dog, which in essence makes the statement "I have a dog" infinitely verbose to exclude all other possibilities. As such, yeah, technically it can only be true or false, but determining the absolute truth is impossible.

A state of absolute truth is theoretical. Uncertainty is practical. If you remove uncertainty from thought, it will imply vast philosophical consequences such as absence of freedom of thought. Option 3 being between 1 and 2 excludes truth and untruth. You can either have 1, 2 or 3... in theory. In practice we only operate in option 3. If 0 is false and if 1 is true, uncertainty is between 0 and 1, it is quite literally a real number ;)

The problem with the authors argument lies in its over-simplified concept of truth. According to the article's own logic, instead of dismissing the concept of truth, we should instead build it into a more robust statement that deals with paradoxes and inconsistencies. And in rejecting traditional truth, the article conveniently reinvents it in different terms to stop it collapsing on itself.

Escaping the reality-to-truth link in our paradigm is only possible if you assume that our reality is a part of bigger reality we cannot observe, because the truth as we can observe it has a hierarchical nature. If we say that gravity is a force that pulls objects together, then we encounter lots of smaller branches of truth that occur when gravity itself is proven to be true. We established the truth of gravity beforehand by observing these smaller branches to conclude that there is a certain bigger branch these lead to. If we do not see the branches, we cannot establish anything.

Naturally, this tree of reality does not contain truth only. It contains a set of all possible statements regarding reality. Say apples fall from trees on Earth. But outside Earth, it is not what happens. Away from major gravity wells, the apple slowly approaches the tree instead. Same with observable reality, it is not necessary that statements keep their truth on higher levels which we can not observe.

Observation is not just a function of perception, but information including anything a human or machine computer can think of. You can not imagine a fourth fundamental color. It can exist on the EM spectrum, but knowing how it looks to a different organism is impossible. Take that analogy to the function of thought and see what happens. We do not know how to think of things we can not think. We can not imagine realities impossible to imagine. There is a limit to how far we can climb the tree of reality.

We use the concept of truth to predict future in our subset of reality. Say you know it to be true that it is cold in winter. Naturally, you have warm clothes, heating and food to prepare. Remove the notion of truth from that, and you operate as if that didn't matter. Cutting the link between truth and reality. Now how are you going to make any decision? You have no way to predict reality now and as a result you can not function.

There are lots of way to define and understand truth that are efficient concepts for operating in the universe. But to function without that concept in a meaningful way is impossible. You can't make machine or biological computers work without prediction, and the concept of truth is an inseparable part of that function.

The article does not explore any of these problems in enough detail. It dances around with terminology and the idea of radical philosophical thoughts being "more defensible". Perhaps there is merit in that, but this article is extremely unconvincing.

Quantum physics has to deal with this problem because of the issue of observation of basic particles. To observe an event you have to use a constant stream of colliding particles. To see a cup of tea on the table, the photons have to hit the cup and reflect into your eye. But what if the cup was so small or the photon is so big, that when they collide the position and velocity of the cup has already changed way before the photon comes back to the retina? This is a fundamental problem in quantum interactions as the particles used to observe are at a comparable size to the particles observed. In other words, it's hard to say if there is a way to firmly determine positions of small particles (at least for me, as I'm not a physicist), so that is your prime candidate in nature for the third option.

I would argue that your third option looks like a set of statements that could be interpreted as "having a dog" and further sets of interpretations for those statements... and further sets for those and so on ad infinitum. In the end you'd have sets within sets containing the whole universe to which you are now asked the question "is the universe true or not?" To which I would say, does a creature inside of the whole of existence have the capacity to define if such things are even applicable at that level of magnitude? What is the difference between a true and a false universe that would make the term relevant?