Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

402 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS The Quest for Real Meaning 403
And what theory accounts for their differences in presupposition, context,
and implication? This sort of question is pursued by the subschool that has
sometimes been called the "prepositional attitude task force," of which some
exemplary recent efforts are Peacocke 1992 and Richard 1992. A different set
of investigations was inaugurated by Paul Grice's (1957, 1969) theory of
"non-natural meaning." This was the attempt to specify the conditions under
which a bit of behavior had not just natural meaning (where there's smoke,
there's fire; when somebody cries, there's sadness), but the sort of meaning
that a speech act has, with its element of conventionality. What has to be the
state of a speaker's (or hearer's) mind for the utterance act to mean anything
at all, or to mean a particular thing? Or, in other words, what is the
relationship between an agent's psychology and the meaning of an agent's
words? ( The relations between these two enterprises is perhaps best seen in
Schiffer 1987.)
An assumption shared by all these philosophical research programs is that
there is one sort of meaning—perhaps divided into many different subsorts—that
is language-dependent. Before there were words, there were no
word meanings, even if there were other sorts of meanings. The further
working assumption, particularly among English-speaking philosophers, has
been that until we get clear about how words can have meaning, we are
unlikely to make much progress on the other varieties of meaning, especially
such staggering issues as the meaning of life. But this reasonable assumption
has typically had an unnecessary and debilitating side effect: by
concentrating first on linguistic meaning, philosophers have distorted their
vision of the minds these words depend on, treating them as somehow sui
generis, rather than as themselves evolved products of the natural world. This
is manifest especially in the resistance philosophers have shown to
evolutionary theories of meaning, theories that purport to discern that the
meaning of words, and all the mental states that somehow lie behind them, is
grounded ultimately in the rich earth of biological function.
On the one hand, few if any philosophers have wanted to deny the obvious
fact: human beings are products of evolution, and their capacity to speak, and
hence to mean anything (in the relevant sense ), is due to a suite of specific
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
meaning. There have been important exceptions. Willard Van Orman Quine
(I960) and Wilfrid Sellars (1963) each developed function-alistic theories of
meaning that had their roots firmly if sketchily planted in biology. Quine,
however, hitched his wagon too firmly to the behaviorism espoused by his
friend B. F. Skinner, and has been dogged for thirty years with the problem
of persuading philosophers—with scant success—that his
claims do not succumb to the blanket denunciation of greedy reductionism
that was heaped on Skinner and all behaviorists by die ascendant cognitivists,
under the direction of Chomsky and Fodor. l Sellars, the father of "functionalism"
in the philosophy of mind, said all the right things, but in difficult
language that was largely ignored by the cognitivists. (See Dennett 1987b,
ch. 10, for a historical account.) Earlier, John Dewey made it clear that
Darwinism should be assumed to be the foundation of any naturalistic theory
of meaning.
No account of the universe in terms merely of the redistribution of matter
in motion is complete, no matter how true as far as it goes, for it ignores
the cardinal fact that the character of matter in motion and of its redistribution
is such as cumulatively to achieve ends—to effect the world of
values we know. Deny this and you deny evolution; admit it and you admit
purpose in the only objective—that is, the only intelligible—sense of that
term. I do not say that in addition to the mechanism there are other ideal
causes or factors which intervene. I only insist that the whole story be told,
that the character of the mechanism be noted—namely, that it is such as to
produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms. [Dewey 1910, p. 34]
Note how carefully Dewey wended his way between Scylla and Charybdis:
no skyhooks ( "ideal causes or factors" ) are called for, but we must not
suppose that we can make sense of an uninterpreted version of evolution, an
evolution with no functions endorsed, no meanings discerned. More recently,
several other philosophers and I have articulated specifically evolutionary
accounts of the birth and maintenance of meaning, both linguistic and
prelinguistic (Dennett 1969, 1978, 1987b, Millikan 1984, 1993, Israel 1987,
Papineau 1987). Ruth Millikan's account is by far the most carefully
articulated, bristling with implications about the details of the other
philosophical approaches to meaning mentioned above. Her differ-ences with
my position have loomed larger for her than for me, but the gap is closing
fast—see especially Millikan 1993, p. 155—and I expect the present book to
close the gap further, but this is not the place to expose our remaining
differences, for they are minor in the context of a larger skirmish, a battle we
have not yet won: the battle for any evolutionary account of meaning.
1. Like the misguided fear among evolutionists that the Baldwin Effect commits the sin of
Lamarckism, and Darwin's own precipitous flight from Catastrophism, the indiscriminate
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
account of the distortions of such guilt-by-association in early evolutionary thinking, and
Dennett (1975; 1978, ch. 4) for attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff of
behaviorism.