A wee insight into what I and my colleagues in the Philosophy department actually do for our livings.

Most Friday afternoons we have some sort of lecture, either internal and informal or an invited speaker. Today my supervisor gave a talk, which was notable for two reasons. Firstly, he managed to reference the work of (by my count) between one third and half of the people in his audience, most of whom disagreed loudly with his conclusions. (It’s exciting to work in such a fertile research community, but it’s a bit nerve-wracking when you have to present your own ideas…) The second thing notable about the talk was how prominently animals featured, and thus how difficult it was to take seriously.

First there’s the title: “What can we do with counterfactual donkeys?” (cf. transparent tigers, for Borges fans). Then there was an extended discussion about the truth conditions of the sentence “If any animal would escape from the zoo, it would be an elephant” (hinging on whether, under Robert’s analysis, an escaped zebra would magically turn into an elephant). The conclusion seemed to be that this is avoidable if the existential ranges over “bear individuals”, although I must confess to some confusion on this point.

This tendency isn’t confined to the one talk, or even to this institute. In Dunedin I worked on a dialogue system that could handle not only donkey sentences but also “Around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel”. A DIP abstract from just a few weeks ago discusses pairing epistemic possibilities and hypothetical wolves (I recall this talk also involved monkeys, although I seem to have lost the notes describing just where they fit in).

I know all this stuff has deep philosophical implications for what “meaning” is and how we should represent it, but I can’t help sitting in the back row and giggling about hypothetical wolves and counterfactual donkeys. I may be in the wrong line of work.

Update: apparently philosophers also have a fondness for parsnips.