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

406 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS
count as slugs, as inducers of error, misperception, misrepresentation, just as
much as objects of kind K do. After all, back in the United States a
Panamanian quarter-balboa is a kind of slug.
Once our two-bitser is resident in Panama, should we say that the state we
used to call Q still occurs? The physical state in which the device "accepts"
coins still occurs, but should we now say that we should identify it as
"realizing" a new state—call it QB instead? At what point would we be
entitled to say that the meaning, or the function, of this physical state of the
two-bitser had shifted? Well, there is considerable freedom—not to say
boredom—about what we should say, since after all a two-bitser is just an
artifact; talking about its perceptions and misperceptions, its veridical and
nonveridical states—its intentionality, in short—is "just metaphor." The twobitser's
internal state, call it what you like, doesn't really (originally,
intrinsically) mean either "U.S. quarter here now" or "Panamanian quarterbalboa
here now." It doesn't really mean anything. That's what Fodor, Putnam,
Searle, Kripke, Burge, and Dretske (inter alia) would insist.
The two-bitser was originally designed to be a detector of U.S. quarters.
That was its "proper function" ( Millikan 1984 ) and, quite literally, its raison
d'etre. No one would have bothered bringing it into existence had this
purpose not occurred to them. This historic fact licenses a way of speaking:
we may call the thing a two-bitser, a thing whose function is to detect
quarters, so that relative to that function we can identify both its veridical
states and its errors.
This would not prevent the two-bitser from being wrested from its original
niche and pressed (exapted) into new service—whatever new purpose the
laws of physics permit and circumstances favor. It could be used as a K-
detector, or a slug-detector, a quarter-balboa-detector, a doorstop, or a deadly
weapon. In its new role there might be some brief period of confusion or
indeterminacy. How long a track record must something accumulate before it
is no longer a two-bitser but a quarter-balboa-detector (a "q-balber," we
might call it)? On its very debut as a q-balber, after ten years of faithful
service as a two-bitser, is the state it goes into when presented with a quarterbalboa
a veridical detection of a quarter-balboa, or might there be a sort of
force-of-habit error of nostalgia, a mistaken acceptance of a quarter-balboa as
a U.S. quarter?
As described, the two-bitser is ludicrously too simple to count as having
the sort of memory we have of our past experiences, but we might take the
first step in the direction of providing it with one. Suppose it has a counter on
it, which advances each time it goes into its acceptance state, and which
stands, after its ten years of service, at 1,435,792. Suppose the counter is not
reset to zero when it is moved to Panama, so that after its debut acceptance of
a quarter-balboa, it reads 1,435,793. Does this tip the balance in favor of the
claim that it has not yet switched to the task of identifying quarter-
The Quest for Real Meaning 407
balboas? (We could go on adding complications and variations, if it might
make a difference to our intuitions. Should it?)
One thing is clear: there is absolutely nothing intrinsic about the two-bitser
considered narrowly all by itself (and its internal operations) that would
distinguish it from a genuine q-balber, made to order on commission from
the Panamanian government. What must make the difference, of course, is
whether it was selected for its capacity to detect quarter-balboas (agreeing
with Millikan 1984). If it was so selected (by its new owners, in the simplest
case), then even if they forget to reset the counter, its maiden move is the
veridical acceptance of a quarter-balboa. "It works!" its new owners might
exclaim delightedly. If, on the other hand, the two-bitser were sent to Panama
by mistake, or arrived by sheer coincidence, then its maiden move would
mean nothing, though it might soon come to be appreciated by those in the
vicinity for its power to tell quarter-balboas from the indigenous slugs, in
which case it could come to function as a q-balber in the fullest meaning of
that term, via a less official route. This, by the way, already makes a problem
for Searle's view that only artifacts can have functions, and those are the
functions its creators endow it with by their very special mental acts of
creation. The original designers of the two-bitser may have been entirely
oblivious of some later use to which it was opportunistically exapted, so their
intentions count for nothing. And the new selectors may also fail to formulate
any specific intentions—they may just fall into the habit of relying on the
two-bitser for some handy function, unaware of the act of unconscious
exaptation they are jointly executing. Recall that Darwin, in Origin, already
drew attention to unconscious selection of traits in domestic animals;
unconscious selection of traits in artifacts is no stretch at all; it is rather a
frequent event, one might suppose.
Presumably, Fodor and company will not want to disagree with this
treatment of artifacts, which have, they claim, no smidgen of real intentionality,
but they may begin to worry that I have maneuvered them onto a
buttered slide, for now let's consider the exactly parallel case of what the
frog's eye tells the frog's brain. In Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch, and Pitts'
classic article (1959)—another Institute of Radio Engineers masterpiece—
they showed that the frog's visual system is sensitive to small moving dark
spots on the retina, tiny shadows cast in almost all natural circumstances by
flies flying by in the vicinity. This "fly-detector" mechanism is appropriately
wired to the hair trigger in the frog's tongue, which handily explains how
frogs feed themselves in a cruel world and thereby help propagate their kind.
Now, what does the frog's eye tell the frog's brain? That there is a fly out
there, or that there is a fly-or-a-"slug" ( a fake fly of one sort or another ) or a
thing of kind F (whatever kind of thing reliably triggers this visual gadget)?
Millikan, Israel, and I, as Darwinian meaning theorists, have all discussed
this very case, and Fodor pounces on it to show what is wrong, by