Is there room for meaning in nature

A talk originally given to the UCLan Humanist Society to mark Darwin Day in 2020 and varied at the Kendal U3A philosophy group on 02.02.2022

The original 11 slides are here.

Here's a reading that I will not discuss but will draw on.

Does meaning depend on humans?

According to Brian Cox, eliminating humanity might eliminate meaning itself from the natural world.

Speaking at the launch of his new BBC Two series Universe, the physicist and presenter Professor Brian Cox said:
“I would say if our civilisation doesn’t persist, for whatever reason, and it might be an external event or it might be our own action, nuclear war, whatever it is we decide to inflict on ourselves, it is possible that whoever presses that button eliminates meaning in a galaxy for ever. And I think that’s something I would think world leaders might need to know. It might actually be quite an important act.” (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/19/earths-demise-could-rid-galaxy-of-meaning-warns-brian-cox-ahead-of-cop26)

Humanity might be the only sentient life in the galaxy. And if so, eliminating humanity would eliminate the only witness to the physical nature of the world, its fundamental physics. But Cox did not say that eliminating humanity would eliminate physical properties, just meaning. Nor did he say it would eliminate the only witness to meanings, but rather meaning itself. Why?

I suggest that the heart of the issue is that our scientists do not find any trace of meaning in nature. We gave up the idea that the book of nature contains meaning in the C17. We no longer think that a root that looks like testicles might cure impotence because that look just means potency. Nothing naturally means anything! Nature isn't that spooky, we think (falsely, I think!). So if meaning isn't there in physics and chemistry, how does it get into nature? One idea is that it gets into nature via human psychology and this through the idea of biological functions.

Here is the basic idea

Darwin’s gift to Humanism is a way to undermine an argument from design (from the design of nature to the existence of a divine creator) by appeal instead to evolutionary theory. The apparent purposes visible in nature – of eyes, to see; of the giraffe’s long neck, to reach the leaves at the top of tall trees – do not need a divine designer (whether or not there is one) but can result from blind causal historical processes. The world need not be spooky to explain the apparent purposes of eyes and giraffe necks.

At the heart of this is the idea of biological function. Such functions have a foot in the teleological, normative and spooky and a foot in the merely causal. If the function of the eye is to see, if that is what it is for, or its purpose, or what it ought to do, then an eye that does not see is not performing its function, is not functioning correctly. But such natural functions do not need to appeal to the intentions of a designer. They drop out of evolutionary theory. Ancestors’ eyes granted such ancestors greater fitness than non-eyed ancestors in virtue of being able to see (to detect features of the world via vision). What a natural function is for is what explains the maintenance of a biological feature across generations because of the survival value it grants.

Biological function might also be pressed into service to show how meaning fits into nature. But why might fitting meaning into nature seem tricky in the first place?

Intuitively, nature comprises what is, not what ought to be. Since the C17, the natural sciences have successfully described nature using regularities and laws but have rejected the idea that the book of nature contains meanings or purposes. Things just happen blindly. Meanings, by contrast, are normative, prescriptive, purposive. Words or utterances or beliefs are correct or not. They ought to be used or held in the right circumstances. They carry logical implications for other utterances or beliefs. Let us call this structure of logical connections and implications the ‘space of meaning’. Assuming nature comprises what is, not what ought to be, then meaning, understood in this broad way, looks supernatural or spooky.

(If it is not obvious that meaning is spooky, think of this:

We use arbitrary words to represent the idea that Socrates is a man. And also that all men are mortal. But once we have done that and accept that they are true then we ought to accept that Socrates is mortal. We set up the rules of the game - eg that ’Socrates’ refers to Socrates - but then they seem to have an autonomous action at a distance. Who said that Socrates had to be mortal? Us? God? Nature? Not just that he is but that he has to be. It seems to be a further fact that follows automatically and autonomously once we have set up the meanings of the word.

Likewise, it is a local human convention that '2' stands for 2, '5' for 5, '7' for 7 '+' for + etc. But once we've agreed all that, is it a further and independent convention that '2+5=7'? Intuitively not: it seems to follow autonomously of us that, given the first conventions, then 2+5=7 just has to follow. No fresh convention is needed.

But equally, once we have set up the convention that the word ‘red’ applies to red things, no further convention is needed to say what we ought to call some new red object: ‘red’! It is implied by the original convention, the action at a distance of meaning. This structure of implications/ action at a distance is the space of meaning. )

Hume's discussion of moral ‘oughts’ suggests one source of the difficulty.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. [Hume, D. (1739) Treatise… §3.1.1 italics added]

If the world comprises what is, rather than what ought to be, and if further one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, how can meaning fit into nature?

And yet, contra Hume it seems that meaning and its ‘oughts’ must be reducible to the the world comprises what is not what ought to be. This is what Jerry Fodor argues:

I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see... how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with... properties that are neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. [Fodor 1987: 97]

Since meaning is not described by basic physics, then - according to Fodor - if meaning is a genuine feature of the world, it must be reducible to or explicable via basic physics.

(NB the conclusion of my talk implies that Fodor is wrong that the only measure of what is real is physics.)

Note also that there are facts about meaning. Evidence might be given in a court as to what someone meant by their words, or what those words meant in a language, or what someone believed or thought. Meanings seem real even though ought-laden.

Note, too, that the meaning of words and the content of thoughts are related. Just as one ought to use the word 'red' of red things, so one ought to think that they are red, (if their colour is an issue). The contents of thoughts can be put into words. We can think of ‘meaning’ as applying to both words and thoughts. Both need explanation.)

Although not Fodor’s own approach, biological functions promise a way to make space for meaning in non-spooky nature because, for example, eyes ought to be able to see whether or not a particular eye performs this function. So, similarly, the idea that a belief can be about something, or mean it, can be explained as a biological function, itself explained as Darwin suggests. The philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan develops this idea extensively. But a basic animal behavioural example she gives helps set the scene:

[C]onsider beavers, who splash the water smartly with their tails to signal danger. This instinctive behavior has the function of causing other beavers to take cover. The splash means danger, because only when it corresponds to danger does the instinctive response to the splash on the part of the interpreter beavers, the consumers, serve a purpose. If there is no danger present, the interpreter beavers interrupt their activities uselessly. Hence, that the splash corresponds to danger is a normal condition for proper functioning of the interpreter beavers' instinctive reaction to the splash. (It does not follow, of course, that it is a usual condition. Beavers being skittish, most beaver splashes possibly occur in response to things not in fact endangering the beaver.) [Millikan 1989: 288]

The idea is that the tail splashing behaviour has a meaning: danger. Equally, being able to think that something is red, or edible or dangerous conferred fitness on our ancestors. The meaning of a thought - or perhaps a brain state - can thus be explained as its function as given in Darwinian terms. A thought can retain this function or meaning even if it is sometimes entertained falsely (akin to a defective eye not actually being able to see). And from this, word meaning can be explained as deriving from the meaning or aboutness of thoughts.

Overall, it can seem that meaning - and all the connections in the space of meaning - is a natural biological phenomenon, this less basic than physics and dependent on us. And if so, perhaps Brian Cox is right and if we, and our evolutionary history, vanishes, then so does meaning. The space of meaning depends on us.

But there are two possible uses of biological functions here. I connect these to Plato’s Euthyphro paradox. Do the gods love what is good because it its good? Or is it good because the gods love it?

One use of biological functions is to say how it is that we have evolved to respond to meaning and its implication, assuming that it already existed. The other is to explain the ought-laden space of meanings – of implication and logic – itself in more basic causal and Darwinian terms. Millikan thinks that the latter can be done, that even logic reduces to evolutionary theory, but I will suggest it fails (see below for more on this).

I think that Darwin does not explain how there is space for meaning in nature. At best, he shows how, if one already assumes that the world contains ‘oughts’ as well as ‘is's, we might have evolved to track, or detect, or perceive these objective ‘oughts’. In other words, we must start from the assumption that the world is already spookily meaning laden.

So Brian Cox is wrong: the space of meaning would survive without us because it is objective and independent of us, even if no one remained to witness it. Contrary to Cox, Fodor and much of post C17 science, there is more to nature than can be captured in physics, chemistry etc. The world is spooky!

The following is another attempt to explain one basic idea behind the talk - applying the Euthyphro paradox to meaning - in other words

Imagine that my young son Little Ludwig is happy to use an oscilloscope to 'measure' pop songs. He can see that they have particular frequency mixes, durations, even rhythms. But he's really confused by the idea - on which I insist - that pop songs can be better or worse, good or bad. That cannot be measured by his oscilloscope and so he's confused by the idea that songs can have some measurable properties (eg frequency mixes) but also real objective but unmeasurable non-physical properties such as (aesthetic) goodness.

It might be, however, that he can embrace the following bit of metaphysics (which I do not hold). The goodness of a song depends on - just means or is - how many votes it gets on the TV show Pop Idol. Understood like this, Little Ludwig doesn't have to admit that goodness of pop songs is part of their make up or the make up of the world. It is fully reducible to people voting. Now this will only work if we can describe people voting on pop songs in a way that doesn't itself rely on the idea that they are judging objective goodness. (Compare with the idea that length just is what people measure lengths to be. If one's account of measuring lengths explains it as an objective judgement of a physical dimension then one has not reduced the property of length to people's judgements of it.) But suppose people vote for the songs that make them happy and happiness is a chemical state - or whatever! - then we can achieve a reduction. What the world really contains is frequencies, rhythms, durations and happiness chemicals. So-called facts about goodness just reduce to that.

I mention the Euthyphro paradox in the talk and that connects to this. The gods love (morally) good things. But which comes first? Are the gods good at spotting the morally good things? Or are things made good by the gods voting in a moral version of Pop Idol? If the former, then the world really and basically contains the property of (moral) goodness. If the latter, then, weird though it may be to introduce gods into our world picture, they would at least enable us to do away with objective goodness as well. Invoking the gods would explain away goodness (as in the pop song example).

Darwinian functions could shed light on the space of meaning in either of two ways, corresponding to the two views of the Euthyphro paradox. (In the analogy, biological functions stand in for the gods and the space of meaning stands in for goodness.) Let's start with what I think works. How could creatures like us evolve who are able to track the implications of our meanings (eg logical and arithmetic truths) - truths linking meanings - even without a god-designer? Well here's a Darwinian answer. Being able to reason logically means that you never go from true premises (eg what you see) to false conclusions (eg about what's round the corner). Being equipped with true rather than false beliefs has survival fitness. And that's why we are able to reason in accord with the norms of logic. Our logical ancestors did better than their illogical rivals. But in telling that story, I assume the truths of logic. Ditto maths. Ditto the structure of oughts in general. (That's the bit you shouldn't trust me! I'm playing a bit fast and loose with analogies between aesthetic goodness of pop songs, moral goodness as seen by greek gods and logic. Sorry!) So this version of Darwin is like saying: the gods are very good at tracking the objective moral goods. Those 'goods' exist independently and the gods learn to make judgements about them. Darwin shows how this can happen - for logic at least - without a designer.

But if that's the case (re the gods and goodness) then the world already contains facts about moral goodness. And so in the Darwinian analogy, the world already contains a structure of logical, mathematical, meaning-based truths and oughts: the space of meaning.

What we might have wanted - exactly as my son Little Ludwig wants - is an account of the apparently weird sort ‘facts’/oughts that make up logic, maths, moral and aesthetic goodness which reduces them to more basic things via Darwinian functions. (I've put 'fact' in scare quotes because, on my story, these are 'oughts' not 'is's and it may be that we should reserve the word 'fact' for what is.) The philosopher Ruth Millikan thinks this can work. Starting with a Darwinian approach to meaning and mental content (called ‘teleosemantics’), she thinks it will also yield up logic (as the structure of connections between meanings: the space of meaning). The truth of the scheme: "if p; and if p then q; then q" is made true not by a universal logical structure - part of an objective space of meaning - but by what drops out of evolutionary theory. Ditto maths. But this stronger reading of the Euthyphro paradox isn't plausible. Using the truths of logic, we can explain how humans evolved but we cannot explain the truths of logic using facts of human evolution.

Why not? Well the former is necessarily true - it could not have been other - while the latter is contingent, it could have been other. And, second, logic is timeless whereas evolutionary fitness is a bit of past history. So ancestors who reason according to a logic that will change in the future (eg 2023) would have enjoyed as much fitness as ancestors who use ordinary timeless logic. Evolutionary theory cannot tell the difference. But surely logic just is timeless? We would be wrong, not just less biologically successful, if we started drawing all sorts of illogical conclusions in 2023.

I like this argument for meanings, logic and maths. It is less clear that it works - as I will imply in the talk it did work by a sleight of hand - for forms of goodness. Still, that's the shape of the argument. One way of reading the Euthyphro paradox explains how we can make judgements about particular weird matters but doesn't explain the weird matters themselves, how they come to be. The other looks to explain the weird matters too - by reducing them to something more basic - but fails (I think).

Further reading

Fodor's argument for reductionism is set out in the appendix to Fodor, J.A. (1987) Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Millikan's claim that we can use functions to reduce logic is given in Millikan, R.G. (1984) Language, thought and other biological categories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Her account of natural functions is presented more briefly in Millikan, R.G. (1998) In defence of proper functions. In Nature’s purposes: analyses of function and design in biology, ed. C. Allen and G. Lauder. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. See also her (1989) 'Biosemantics' Journal of Philosophy: 281-97.

John McDowell's 'diagnosis' of the underling scientism in Fodor's naturalism is given in McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. He gives an argument that the world itself contain irreducible aesthetic and other non-physical properties in McDowell, J. (1983) ‘Aesthetic value, objectivity, and the fabric of the world’ In Pleasure Preference and Value, ed. Schaper, E. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I describe the difference between Fodor's reductionist naturalism and McDowell re-enchanted anti-reductionist naturalism in the introduction to my book on McDowell here. ((2019) John McDowell, second edition, Abingdon: Routledge). I also discuss McDowell's book.

Although it may not be obvious, I use the same argument from the talk to criticise a reductionist account of mental illness in this chapter and I set out how the Euthyphro dilemma applies to functions (Thornton, T. (2021) ‘Naturalism and dysfunction’ for Forest, D. and Faucher, L. (eds) Defining Mental Disorders- Jerome Wakefield and his Critics MIT Press).