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

410 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS The Quest for Real Meaning 411
hypothesi, schmorses are not beasts of that kind; they are not of the same
species at all, but just conveniently indistinguishable by you from horses. So,
according to this line of thought, you make unwitting errors every time you
(mis)classify a schmorse perceptually or in reflection ("Wasn't that a fine
horse I saw gallop by my window yesterday!").
But there is another way of thinking of the same example. Nothing forces
us to suppose that your concept of a horse wasn't more relaxed in the first
place, rather like your concept of a table. (Try telling the story of Twin Earth
with the suggestion that the tables there aren't really tables, but just look like
tables and are used for tables. It doesn't work, does it?) Horses and schmorses
may not be the same biological species, but what if you, like most Earthlings,
have no clear concept of species, and classify by appearance: living thing that
looks like Man-o-War. Horses and schmorses both fall into that kind, so,
when you call a Twin Earth beast a horse, you're right after all. Given what
you mean by "horse," schmorses are horses—a non-Earthly kind of horse,
but a horse just the same. Non-Earthly tables are tables, too. It is clear that
you could have such a relaxed concept of horses, and that you could have a
tighter concept, according to which schmorses are not horses, not being of the
same Earthly species. Both cases are possible. Now, must it be determinate
whether your horse concept (prior to your move ) meant the species or the
wider class? It might be, if you are well read in biology, for instance, but
suppose you are not. Then your concept— what "horse" actually means to
you—would suffer the same indeterminacy as the frog's concept of fly (or
was it all along the concept small airborne food item?).
It might help to have a more realistic example, something that could
happen right here on Earth. I have been told that it once was the case that the
Siamese had a word for, well, "cat" but had never seen or imagined any other
cats than Siamese cats. Let's suppose their word was "kat"—it doesn't matter
what the actual details were, or even whether this particular tale is true. It
could be. When they discovered that other varieties existed, they had a
problem: did their word mean "cat" or "Siamese cat"? Had they just
discovered that there were other, rather different-looking, sorts of kats, or
that kats and those other creatures belonged to a supergroup? Was their
traditional term the name of a species or a variety? If they lacked the
biological theory that made this distinction, how could there possibly be a
fact of the matter? (Well, they might discover that peculiarities of appearance
were really very important to them—"That just doesn't look like a kat, so it
isn't one!" And you might discover that you similarly resisted the suggestion
that Shetland ponies were horses.)
When a Siamese person saw a ( non-Siamese ) cat walking by and thought
"Lo, a kat!" would this be an error or the simple truth? Perhaps the Siamese
person wouldn't have any opinion about how to answer this question, but
could there nevertheless be a determinate fact about whether this was an
error, something we might never be able to discover, but a fact nonetheless?
The same thing could happen to you, after all: imagine that a biologist told
vou one day, that coyotes are in fact dogs—members of the same species.
You might find yourself wondering whether the biologist and you had the
same concept of dog. How strong was your allegiance to the view that "dog"
was a species term and not the name for a large subspecies of domestic dogs?
Does your heart of hearts tell you loud and clear that you had already ruled
out "by definition" the hypothesis that coyotes are dogs, or does it silently
allow that your concept has all along had the openness to admit this
purported discovery? Or would you find that now that the issue has been
raised, you would have to settle, one way or the other, something that had
simply not been fixed before because it had never come up before?
Such a threat of indeterminacy undermines the argument in Putnam's
thought experiment. To preserve its point, Putnam tries to plug this gap by
declaring that our concepts—whether we know it or not—refer to natural
kinds. But which kinds are natural? Varieties are just as natural as species,
which are as natural as genera and higher classifications. Essentialism with
regard to the meaning of the frog's mental state and the two-bitser's inner
state Q (or QB) was seen to evaporate; it must evaporate just as surely for us.
The frog would have zapped just as readily at pellets in the wild, had any
come its way, so it certainly was not equipped with anything that discriminated
against pellets. In one sense, fly-or-pellet is a natural kind for frogs;
they naturally fail to discriminate between the two. In another sense, fly-orpellet
is not a natural kind for frogs; their natural environment has never
made that classification relevant before. Exactly the same is true for you.
Had schmorses been secretly brought to Earth, you would have just as
readily called them "horses." You would have been wrong if it was somehow
already fixed that what your term meant was the species, not the lookalikes,
but if not, there would be no grounds at all for calling your classification an
error, since the distinction had never before come up. Like the frog and the
two-bitser, you have internal states that get their meanings from their
functional roles, and where function fails to yield an answer, there is nothing
more to inquire about.
The tale of Twin Earth, if we read it through Darwinian spectacles, proves
that human meanings are just as derived as the meanings of two-bitsers and
frogs. This is not what it was intended to show, but any attempt to block this
interpretation is forced to postulate mysterious and unmotivated doctrines of
essentialism, and to insist, point-blank, that there are facts about meaning
that are utterly inert and undiscoverable, but facts all the same. Since some
philosophers are ready to swallow these bitter pills, I need to provide a few
farther persuasions.
The idea that our meanings are just as dependent on function as the
meanings of the states of artifacts, and hence just as derivative and potentially
indeterminate, strikes some philosophers as intolerable because it fails