Darwin's Dangerous Idea (76 page)

into information-processing talk, talk about rules and representations and algorithmic transformations, Chomsky had given a hostage to the reverse To put the point bluntly, in addition to its various causal relations, the engineers. Perhaps Chomsky's heritage as a Radio Engineer is coming back heart does not have any functions. When we speak of its functions, we are to haunt him:

talking about those of its causal relations to which we attach some
nor
mative
importance __ In short, the actual facts of intentionality contain normative elements, but where functional explanations are concerned, the Specifically, the evidence for universal grammar is much more simply
only facts
are brute, blind physical facts and the only norms are in us and accounted for by the following hypothesis: There is, indeed, a language exist only from our point of view.

acquisition device [LAD] innate in human brains, and LAD constrains the form of languages that human beings can learn. There is, thus, a hardware It turns out, then, that function talk in biology, like mere
as if
-intentionality level of explanation in terms of the structure of the device, and there is a functional level of explanation, describing which sorts of languages can be talk, is not really to be taken seriously after all. According to Searle, only acquired by the human infant in the application of this mechanism. No artifacts made by genuine, conscious human artificers have
real
functions.

further predictive or explanatory power is added by saying that there is in Airplane wings are really for flying, but eagles' wings are not. If one biologist addition a level of deep unconscious rules of universal grammar, and in-says they are adaptations for flying and another says they are merely display deed, I have tried to suggest that that postulation is incoherent anyway.

racks for decorative feathers, there is no sense in which one biologist is

[Searle 1992, pp. 244-45.]

closer to the truth. If, on the other hand, we ask the aeronautical engineers whether the airplane wings they designed are for keeping the plane aloft or According to Searle, the whole idea of
information processing in the brain,
for displaying the insignia of the airline, they can tell us a brute fact. So described abstractly in terms of algorithms that exhibit substrate neutrality, is incoherent. "There are brute, blind neurophysiological processes and there is consciousness, but there is nothing else" (Searle 1992, p. 228).

13. The remainder of this section draws on my review of Searle's book (Dennett 1993c).

400 LOSING OUR MINDS TO DARWIN

Searle ends up denying William Paley's premise: according to Searle, nature does
not
consist of an unimaginable variety of
functioning
devices, exhibiting design. Only human artifacts have that honor, and only because (as Locke

"showed" us) it takes a Mind to make something with a function!14 Searle CHAPTER FOURTEEN

insists that human minds have "Original" Intentionality, a property unattainable in principle by any R-and-D process of building better and better
The Evolution of

algorithms. This is a pure expression of the belief in skyhooks: minds are original and inexplicable sources of design, not results of design. He defends this position more vividly than other philosophers, but he is not alone. The
Meanings

hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy, as we shall see in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 13:
When generate-and-test, the basic move in any Darwinian
algorithm, moves into the brains of individual organisms, it builds a series of
ever more powerful systems, culminating in the defiberate, foresightful generation and testing of hypotheses and theories by human beings. This process
creates minds that show no signs of "cognitive closure," thanks to their
1. THE QUEST FOR REAL MEANING

capacity to generate and comprehend language. Noam Chomsky, who created
contemporary linguistics by proving that language was generated by an

"When
I
use
a
word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a radier scornful tone,
innate automaton, has nevertheless resisted all evolutionary accounts of how

"it means just what I choose it to mean
—
neither more nor less."

and why the language automaton got designed and installed, and has also

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you
can
make words mean so
resisted all Artificial Intelligence attempts to model language use. Chomsky
many different tilings.
"

has stood firm against (reverse) engineering, flanked by Gould on one side

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master
—

and Searle on the other, exemplifying the resistance to the spread of Darwin's
that's all."

dangerous idea, and holding out for the human mind as a skyhook.

—LEWIS CARROLL 1871

CHAPTER 14:
In chapter 8, 1 sketched an evolutionary account of the birth of
There is no topic in philosophy that has received more attention than
meaning, which will now be expanded and defended against the skeptical
meaning, in its multifarious manifestations. At the grand end of the spec-challenges of philosophers. A series of thought experiments building on the trum, philosophers of all schools have grappled with the ultimate question of
concepts introduced in earlier chapters shows not just the coherence but the
the meaning of life (and whether or not this question has any meaning). At
inevitability of an evolutionary theory of meaning.

the modest end, philosophers of the contemporary analytic school—

sometimes called "linguistic philosophy" by outsiders—have subjected the nuances of the meaning of words and whole utterances to microscopic scrutiny, in a variety of quite distinct enterprises. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the school of "ordinary language philosophy" lavished attention on 14. Given Searle's position on this, one would predict that he should be utterly opposed the subtle differences between particular words—the differences between to my analysis of the power of adaptationist thinking, as presented in chapter 9. He is. I doing something "deliberately" or "intentionally" or "on purpose," to cite a don't know whether he has expressed this view in print, but in several debates with me famous instance (Austin 1961). This gave way to a more formal and sys-

(Rutgers, 1986; Buenos Aires, 1989), he has expressed the view that my account is tematic set of investigations. Which different propositions could you mean exactly backward: the idea that one can hunt for the "free-floating rationales" of evolu-by uttering such sentences as

tionary selection processes is, in his view, a travesty of Darwinian thinking. One of us has unintentionally refuted himself; the identity of the victim is left as an exercise for the reader.

Tom believes that Ortcutt is a spy.

402 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS

The Quest for Real Meaning
403

And what theory accounts for their differences in presupposition, context, claims do not succumb to the blanket denunciation of greedy reductionism and implication? This sort of question is pursued by the subschool that has that was heaped on Skinner and all behaviorists by die ascendant cognitiv-sometimes been called the "prepositional attitude task force," of which some ists, under the direction of Chomsky and Fodor.
l
Sellars, the father of "func-exemplary recent efforts are Peacocke 1992 and Richard 1992. A different set tionalism" in the philosophy of mind, said all the right things, but in difficult of investigations was inaugurated by Paul Grice's (1957, 1969) theory of language that was largely ignored by the cognitivists. (See Dennett 1987b,

"non-natural meaning." This was the attempt to specify the conditions under ch. 10, for a historical account.) Earlier, John Dewey made it clear that which a bit of behavior had not just natural meaning (where there's smoke, Darwinism should be assumed to be the foundation of any naturalistic theory there's fire; when somebody cries, there's sadness), but the sort of meaning of meaning.

that a speech act has, with its element of conventionality. What has to be the No account of the universe in terms
merely
of the redistribution of matter state of a speaker's (or hearer's) mind for the utterance act to mean anything in motion is complete, no matter how true as far as it goes, for it ignores at all, or to mean a particular thing? Or, in other words, what is the the cardinal fact that the character of matter in motion and of its redistri-relationship between an agent's psychology and the meaning of an agent's bution is such as cumulatively to achieve ends—to effect the world of words? ( The relations between these two enterprises is perhaps best seen in values we know. Deny this and you deny evolution; admit it and you admit Schiffer 1987.)

purpose in the only objective—that is, the only intelligible—sense of that An assumption shared by all these philosophical research programs is that term. I do not say that in addition to the mechanism there are other ideal there is one sort of meaning—perhaps divided into many different sub-causes or factors which intervene. I only insist that the whole story be told, sorts—that is language-dependent. Before there were words, there were no that the character of the mechanism be noted—namely, that it is such as to
word
meanings, even if there were other sorts of meanings. The further produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. [Dewey 1910, p. 34]

working assumption, particularly among English-speaking philosophers, has Note how carefully Dewey wended his way between Scylla and Charyb-been that until we get clear about how words can have meaning, we are dis: no skyhooks ( "ideal causes or factors" ) are called for, but we must not unlikely to make much progress on the other varieties of meaning, especially suppose that we can make sense of an
uninterpreted
version of evolution, an such staggering issues as the meaning of life. But this reasonable assumption evolution with no functions endorsed, no meanings discerned. More recently, has typically had an unnecessary and debilitating side effect: by several other philosophers and I have articulated specifically evolutionary concentrating first on linguistic meaning, philosophers have distorted their accounts of the birth and maintenance of meaning, both linguistic and vision of the minds these words depend on, treating them as somehow
sui
prelinguistic (Dennett 1969, 1978, 1987b, Millikan 1984, 1993, Israel 1987,
generis,
rather than as themselves evolved products of the natural world. This Papineau 1987). Ruth Millikan's account is by far the most carefully is manifest especially in the resistance philosophers have shown to articulated, bristling with implications about the details of the other evolutionary theories of meaning, theories that purport to discern that the philosophical approaches to meaning mentioned above. Her differ-ences with meaning of words, and all the mental states that somehow lie behind them, is my position have loomed larger for her than for me, but the gap is closing grounded ultimately in the rich earth of biological function.

fast—see especially Millikan 1993, p. 155—and I expect the present book to On the one hand, few if any philosophers have wanted to deny the obvious close the gap further, but this is not the place to expose our remaining fact: human beings are products of evolution, and their capacity to speak, and differences, for they are minor in the context of a larger skirmish, a battle we hence to mean anything (in the relevant sense ), is due to a suite of specific have not yet won: the battle for
any
evolutionary account of meaning.

adaptations not shared with other products of evolution. On the other hand, philosophers have been reluctant to entertain the hypothesis that evolutionary thinking might shed light on their specific problems about how it is that words, and their sources and destinations in people's minds or brains, have 1. Like the misguided fear among evolutionists that the Baldwin Effect commits the sin of meaning. There have been important exceptions. Willard Van Orman Quine Lamarckism, and Darwin's own precipitous flight from Catastrophism, the indiscriminate (I960) and Wilfrid Sellars (1963) each developed function-alistic theories of rejection of anything that smacks of behaviorism by the "thoroughly modern mentalists"

(Fodor 1980) is an instance of misfiltered memes. See R. Richards 1987 for an excellent meaning that had their roots firmly if sketchily planted in biology. Quine, account of the distortions of such guilt-by-association in early evolutionary thinking, and however, hitched his wagon too firmly to the behaviorism espoused by his Dennett (1975; 1978, ch. 4) for attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff of friend B. F. Skinner, and has been dogged for thirty years with the problem behaviorism.

of persuading philosophers—with scant success—that his 404 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS

The Quest for Real Meaning
405

Opposed to us stand an eminent if unlikely bunch of bedfellows: Jerry eters of the two-bitser's transducing machinery. In other words, it follows Fodor, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Saul Kripke, Tyler Burge, and Fred just as directly from the laws of physics that objects of kind K would put the Dretske, each in his own way opposed both to evolutionary accounts of device into state
Q
as that quarters would. Objects of kind K would be good meaning and to AI. All six of these philosophers have expressed their res-

"slugs"—reliably "fooling" the transducer.

ervations about AI, but Fodor has been particularly outspoken in his denun-If objects of kind
K
became more common in the two-bitsers normal ciation of evolutionary approaches to meaning. His diatribes against every environment, we would expect the owners and designers of two-bitsers to naturalist since Dewey (see especially Fodor 1990, ch. 2) are often quite develop more advanced and sensitive transducers that would reliably dis-funny. For instance, in ridiculing my view, he says (p. 87): "Teddy bears are criminate between genuine U.S. quarters and slugs of kind
K.
Of course, artificial, but
real bears are artificial too.
We stuff the one and Mother trickier counterfeits might then make their appearance, requiring further Nature stuffs the other. Philosophy is
full
of surprises."2