Original versus Derived Intentionality

Original versus Derived Intentionality

If the words FREE BEER appeared in traces of different minerals in a cliff face on Mars, it would not (“in itself”) be an announcement about an alcoholic beverage, no matter how eager earthling readers were to interpret it that way. The shape wouldn’t be about anything, in spite of first appearances. If some complicated events and objects in the world are about other things, it must be that they derive their aboutness somehow from being in the service of representing, interpreting intentional systems whose states (beliefs, desires, brain states) already have intentionality somehow.

The question then is whether anything has original intentionality! And at first blush it might seem obvious that something has to have original intentionality, since derived intentionality has to be derived from something. And then the obvious candidates for things with original intentionality would be human minds. So not surprisingly, some very eminent philosophers who otherwise disagree sharply with Searle on many issues—for instance, Jerry Fodor and Saul Kripke—nevertheless agree with him about this. They, and the many who concur, think that human minds (or their mental states) have original intentionality and are radically unlike robot control systems in this regard.

They are all flat-out mistaken. Yes, mistaken. I mean it. Given the undeniable appeal of the distinction between original and derived intentionality, any attempt to discredit it runs the risk of being subverted by misplaced charity: “He can’t seriously be saying that we’re wrong about that! He must mean something else, some esoteric philosophical point he has unwisely dressed up in these preposterously provocative clothes!” Probably the best way to convince people that I really do mean it is to trot out as vivid and clear a case of derived intentionality as I can find, and then show that the beloved contrast between that case and human minds as cases of original intentionality evaporates on closer examination. It’s a tall order, but here goes. I will need three linked intuition pumps to accomplish the feat.

1. The Wandering Two-Bitser

Consider a standard soft-drink vending machine, designed and built in the United States, and equipped with a transducer device for accepting and rejecting U.S. quarters. Let’s call such a device a two-bitser.1 Normally, when a quarter is inserted into a two-bitser, the two-bitser goes into a state, call it Q, which “means” (note the scare quotes; it sorta means) “I perceive/accept a genuine U.S. quarter now.” Such two-bitsers are quite clever and sophisticated, but hardly foolproof. They do “make mistakes.” That is, unmetaphorically, sometimes they go into state Q when a slug or other foreign object is inserted into them, and sometimes they reject perfectly legal quarters—they fail to go into state Q when they are supposed to go into state Q. No doubt there are detectable patterns in these cases of “misperception.” And no doubt at least some of the cases of “misidentification” could be predicted by someone with enough knowledge of the relevant laws of physics and the design parameters of the two-bitser’s transducing machinery. It could follow quite directly from various applications of physical laws that not only legal U.S. quarters but also objects of some kind K trigger state Q, but objects of kind J (too heavy) or kind L (magnetic, unlike quarters) do not. Objects of kind K, then, would be good slugs—reliably “fooling” the transducer. (Look how many times I’ve used the sorta operator in this paragraph, so that I can use the intentional stance when giving you the specs of the two-bitser. Try to rewrite the paragraph without using the intentional stance and you will appreciate how efficient it is, and how well-nigh indispensable the sorta operator can be for such purposes.)

If objects of kind K became more common in the two-bitser’s normal environment, we would expect the owners and designers of two-bitsers to develop more advanced and sensitive transducers that would reliably discriminate between genuine U.S. quarters and slugs of kind K. Of course, trickier counterfeits might then make their appearance, requiring further advances in the detecting transducers, and at some point such escalation of engineering would reach diminishing returns, for there is no such thing as a foolproof mechanism. In the meantime, the engineers and users are wise to make do with standard, rudimentary two-bitsers, since it is not cost-effective to protect oneself against negligible abuses.

The only thing that makes the device a quarter-detector rather than a slug-detector, or a quarter-or-slug-detector, is the shared intention of the device’s designers, builders, owners, and users. Only in the environment or context of those users and their intentions can we single out some of the occasions of state Q as “veridical” and others as “mistaken.” It is only relative to that context of intentions that we could justify calling the device a two-bitser in the first place.

I take it that so far I have Searle, Fodor, Kripke, and others nodding their heads in agreement: that’s just how it is with such artifacts; this is a textbook case of derived intentionality, laid bare. And so it embarrasses no one to admit that a particular two-bitser, straight from the American factory and with “Model A Two-Bitser” stamped right on it, might be installed on a Panamanian soft-drink machine, where it proceeded to earn its keep as an accepter and rejecter of quarter-balboas, legal tender in Panama and easily distinguished (by human beings) from U.S. quarters by the design and writing stamped on them, but not by their weight, thickness, diameter, or material composition.

I’m not making this up. I have it on excellent authority—Albert Erler of the Flying Eagle Shoppe, Rare Coins—that standard vending machines cannot distinguish between U.S. quarters and Panamanian quarter-balboas minted between 1966 and 1984. Small wonder, since they were struck from U.S. quarter stock in American mints. And—to satisfy the curious, although it is strictly irrelevant to the example—the then-current (2011) exchange rate is one balboa equals $.98, so at that quoted rate a quarter-balboa would be ever so slightly less valuable than a U.S. quarter.

Such a two-bitser, whisked off to Panama, would still normally go into a certain physical state—the state with the physical features by which we used to identify state Q—whenever a U.S. quarter or an object of kind K or a Panamanian quarter-balboa is inserted into it, but now a different set of such occasions count as the mistakes. In the new environment, U.S. quarters count as slugs, like objects of kind K, as inducers of error, misperception, misrepresentation. 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 identify that physical state as “realizing” a new state, QB, instead? Well, there is considerable freedom about what we should say, since after all a two-bitser is just an artifact, and talking about its perceptions and misperceptions, its veridical and non-veridical states—its intentionality, in short—is “just metaphor.” The two-bitser’s internal state, call it what you like, doesn’t really (originally) mean either “U.S. quarter here now” or “Panamanian quarter-balboa here now.” It doesn’t really mean anything—so Searle, Fodor, and Kripke (inter alia) would insist. Its internal state only sorta means something, but that will be enough to raise some problems that can also arise for us enjoyers of original intentionality. Let’s look at the details.

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’être, its reason for existing. No one would have bothered bringing it into existence had not this purpose occurred to them. And given that this historical fact about its origin licenses a certain way of speaking, such a device may be primarily or properly characterized as a two-bitser, a thing whose function is to detect quarters, so that relative to that function we can identify both its veridical states (when it gets things right) and its errors.

This would not prevent a two-bitser from being wrested from its home niche and pressed into service with a new purpose—whatever new purpose the laws of physics certify it would reliably serve—as a K-detector, a quarter-balboa-detector, a doorstop, a deadly weapon. In its new role there might be a brief period of confusion or indeterminacy. How long a track record must something accumulate before it is no longer a two-bitser, but rather a quarter-balboa-detector (a q-balber)—or a doorstop or a deadly weapon?2 On its very debut as a q-balber, after ten years of faithful service as a two-bitser, is its state Q already a veridical detection of a quarter-balboa, or might there be a sort of force-of-habit error of nostalgia, a mistaken identification of a quarter-balboa as a U.S. quarter?

As described, the two-bitser differs strikingly from us in that it has no provision for memory of its past experiences—or even sorta memory of its past sorta experiences. But this could easily be provided, if it was thought to make a difference. To start with the simplest inroad into this topic, suppose the two-bitser (to refer to it by the name of its original baptism) is equipped with a counter, which after ten years of service stands at 1,435,792. Suppose it is not reset to zero during its flight to Panama, so that on its debut there the counter turns over to 1,435,793. Does this tip the support in favor of the claim that it has not yet switched to the task of correctly identifying quarter-balboas? (After all, it sorta misclassifies the event as yet another one of those q events—detections of U.S. quarters—it was designed to detect.) Would variations and complications on this theme drive your intuitions in different directions? (Turn all the knobs on the intuition pump to see what happens to your intuitions.)

We can assure ourselves that nothing intrinsic about the two-bitser considered narrowly all by itself and independently of its prior history would distinguish it from a genuine q-balber, made to order on commission from the Panamanian government. Still, given its ancestry, is there not a problem about its function, its purpose, its meaning, on this first occasion when it goes into the state we are tempted to call Q? Is this a case of going into state Q (meaning “U.S. quarter here now”) or state QB (meaning “Panamanian quarter-balboa here now”)? I would say (along with Millikan, 1984) that whether its Panamanian debut counts as going into state Q or state QB depends entirely on whether, in its new niche, it was selected for its capacity to detect quarter-balboas—literally selected, for example, by the holder of the Panamanian Pepsi-Cola franchise. If it was so selected, then even though its new proprietors might have forgotten to reset its counter, its first “perceptual” act would count as a correct identification by a q-balber, for that is what it would now be for. It would have acquired quarter-balboa-detection as its proper function. If, on the other hand, the two-bitser was sent to Panama by mistake, or if it arrived by sheer coincidence, its debut would mean nothing, though its utility might soon—even immediately—be recognized and esteemed by the relevant authorities (those who could press it into service in a new role), and thereupon its subsequent states would count as tokens of QB. But until it was selected for the job, no matter how good it was at detecting quarter-balboas, its acceptance state wouldn’t mean (in its artifactual, derived, sorta sort of way) “Panamanian quarter-balboa here now.” Presumably Searle and colleagues would be content to let me say this, since, after all, the two-bitser is just an artifact. It has no original intentionality, so there is no “deeper” fact of the matter we might try to uncover. They would say that this is just a pragmatic question of how best to talk, when talking metaphorically and anthropomorphically about the states of the device.

Now that we have a good firm grip on derived intentionality, let’s see what is supposed to be different about underived, original intentionality, our intentionality. Here is where Searle, Fodor, Kripke, and many others disagree with not just me, but also philosophers Ruth Millikan, Paul and Patricia Churchland, cognitive scientists Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and just about everybody else in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). After more than thirty years of wrangling, feelings still run high. What, then, is at issue?

2. Twin Earth

Suppose some human being, Jones, looks out a window and thereupon thinks he sees a horse. There may or may not be a horse out there for him to see, but the fact that he is in the mental state of thinking he sees a horse is not at all a matter of interpretation (Searle and company say); it is a brute fact, an instance of original intentionality. Let’s see what happens, then, when we construct a thought experiment exactly parallel to the Panama caper. (Hint: this will be a reductio ad absurdum argument.) Suppose then that the planet Twin Earth was just like Earth, save for having schmorses where we have horses.3 Schmorses look like horses, and are well-nigh indistinguishable from horses by all but trained biologists equipped with DNA test kits, but schmorses aren’t horses any more than dolphins are fish. Twin Earthians call a schmorse a “horse,” or “cheval,” or “Pferd,” or some other name—remember, Twin Earth is exactly like Earth except for having schmorses.

Suppose we whisk Jones off to Twin Earth, land of the schmorses, without his realizing it. (We drug him for the trip and arrange for him to wake up in his counterpart bed on Twin Earth.) When we then confront him with a schmorse, he’ll naturally say, and think, “Look! A horse.” When he does this, either he really is, still, provoked into the state of believing he sees a horse (a mistaken, non-veridical belief) or he is provoked by that schmorse into believing, for the first time in his life (and veridically), that he is seeing a schmorse. Which is it, and how could we tell? Is his schmorse-provoked belief true or false? If his first thought was a mistaken belief that he’d just seen a horse, how long would it take him, living among schmorses and talking with Twin Earthians about schmorses, to adjust the meaning of the sound “horse” in his language (without realizing it!)? If he raised some children on Twin Earth, would their word “horse,” learned at their father’s knee, mean horse or schmorse? They’ve never seen a horse, remember. Only schmorses.

This is obviously a bizarre, extreme example, but it does raise a good issue: What determines what our terms mean, and how? Does history count for everything, and always, or can current use overcome or overrule history? In this case, Jones has no privileged insight to offer us; he has no idea he’s no longer on Earth, so he would presumably insist that his word “horse” meant horse. His word, the word on his lips, derives its meaning from his perceptual belief, and he knows what he believes: he’s looking at a horse. That’s why he said, “Look! A horse.” (“What could be more obvious?” he might add.) But then suppose we told him about his journey, and the subtle but important difference between horses and schmorses. What would he say then, or what should he say then, and, more fundamentally, is there a good reason to think that whatever he says is decisive? Isn’t he just doing what the rest of us would be doing, theorizing about a case in which neither he nor we have privileged information? Suppose he says his word “horse” now means schmorse—when he sees a schmorse and calls it a horse, he’s not making a mistake. When in Rome, and all that.

Can he just declare what his words mean, and have that settle the issue? What if he later forgot what he had declared? We sometimes do things like this: “Henceforth, by ‘jubjub’ I will mean table salt! Please pass the jubjub!” In the context of scientific theorizing, such stipulative definition is an important and well-established practice, but it relies on a cooperative community of communicators. If Jones has original intentionality, presumably, then there should be a fact of the matter about the meaning of his terms under any circumstances, but it appears that Jones himself isn’t able to consult his own original intentionality any better than we outsiders can. Suppose, for instance, we lie to Jones about our having taken him to Twin Earth, and he believes our lies (people in philosophers’ intuition pumps can be mighty gullible). If he then tells us his word “horse” now means schmorse, will he be right? Perhaps what he ought to say is that he has no idea what his word “horse” means now. But then, since for all we know we too may have been whisked off to Twin Earth, shouldn’t we all admit that we have no idea what we mean by “horse” either?

Those of us who are dubious about the whole idea of original intentionality have ready answers to all these questions, but it takes a third thought experiment to make it clear enough to have a fighting chance against traditional intuition. (So caveat lector! I’m going to try to cajole you into abandoning a precious hunch.)

3. The Giant Robot

Suppose you decided that you wanted to experience life in the twenty-fifth century, and suppose that the only known way of keeping your body alive that long required it to be placed in a hibernation device of sorts, where it would rest, slowed down and comatose, for as long as you liked. You could arrange to climb into the support capsule, be put to sleep, and then be automatically awakened and released in 2401.

Designing the capsule itself is not your only engineering problem, for the capsule must be protected and supplied with the requisite energy (for refrigeration or whatever) for almost four hundred years. You will not be able to count on your children and grandchildren for this stewardship, for they will be long dead before the year 2401, and you cannot presume that your more distant descendants, if any, will take a lively interest in your well-being. So you must design a supersystem to protect your capsule and to provide the energy it needs for four hundred years.

There are two basic strategies to consider. On one, you should find the ideal location, as best you can foresee, for a fixed installation that will be well supplied with water, sunlight, and whatever else your capsule (and the supersystem itself) will need for the duration. The main drawback to such an installation, or “plant,” is that it cannot be moved if harm comes its way—if, say, someone decides to build a freeway right where it is located. The second alternative is much more sophisticated, but it avoids this drawback: design a mobile facility for your capsule along with the requisite sensors and early-warning devices so that it can move out of harm’s way and seek out new energy sources as it needs them. In short, build a giant robot and install the capsule (with you inside) in it.

These two basic strategies are obviously copied from nature: they correspond roughly to the division between plants and animals. A third option from nature, a hardened spore or seed that can survive indefinitely inside its armor, is not available to you, since your life-support system has high energy demands, and spores are as inert and low energy as nature can make them. Since the animal strategy fits our purposes, we shall suppose that you decide to build a robot to house your capsule. You should try to design it so that above all else it “chooses” actions that will further your best interests. Bad moves and wrong turns would tend to incapacitate it for the role of protecting you until 2401—which is its sole raison d’être. This is clearly a profoundly difficult engineering problem, calling for the highest level of expertise in designing a “vision” system to guide its locomotion, and other “sensory” systems. And since you will be comatose throughout and thus cannot guide and plan its strategies, you will have to design it to generate its own plans in response to changing circumstances. It must “know” how to “seek out” and “recognize” and then exploit energy sources, how to move to safer territory, how to “anticipate” and then “avoid” dangers. With so much to be done, and done fast, you had best rely on economies whenever you can: give your robot no more discriminatory prowess than it will probably need to distinguish what needs distinguishing in the world.

Note once again that I’ve put all the intentional or “mentalistic” terms, such as “sensory” and “seek out” and “anticipate” in scare quotes, to indicate that this is a specific kind of sorta intentionality, derived intentionality, intentionality that is entirely dependent on your human purposes. This is your artifact, and whatever intentionality it has, it owes to you, its author. If I had left off the scare quotes, I could be accused of sneaking in some ideology, relying on the fact that engineers and others routinely use such language—without scare quotes—to talk about the specs of an information-handling device (like the elevator-controller). I am deliberately not making that move; I am granting, for the sake of argument, that any use of intentional language to describe or prescribe artifact talents is merely metaphorical. Note as well that, like the two-bitser, the robot’s machinery is subject to economic considerations: it needs to “detect” or “discriminate” many things, but its “discriminators” will not be foolproof. It can make mistakes, but what counts as a mistake depends ultimately on its author’s needs and desires. If the author wanted to make a droll robotic clown that apparently blundered about the world “misidentifying” things, then some of these “mistakes” would be cases of getting it right, triumphs of clown-control.

Back to the intuition pump: Your task will be made more difficult by the fact that you cannot count on your robot being the only such robot around with such a mission. If your whim catches on, your robot may find itself competing with others (and with your human descendants) for limited supplies of energy, fresh water, lubricants, and the like. (See chapter 67 for a brief discussion of the importance of the presence of other agents.) It would no doubt be wise to design your robot with enough sophistication in its control system to permit it to calculate the benefits and risks of cooperating with other robots, or of forming alliances for mutual benefit, but again, any such calculation must be a “quick and dirty” approximation, arbitrarily truncated by time pressure.

The result of this design project would be a robot capable of exhibiting a kind of self-control, since you must cede fine-grained, real-time control to your artifact once you put yourself to sleep. As such, it will be capable of deriving its own subsidiary goals from its assessment of its current state and the import of that state for its ultimate goal (which is, still, to preserve you). These secondary goals may take it far afield on century-long projects, some of which may be ill-advised, in spite of your best efforts during the design phase. Your robot may embark on actions antithetical to your purposes, even suicidal, having been “convinced” by another robot, perhaps, to subordinate its own life mission to some other.

Note too that at this point, even though all the robot’s intentional states and acts are derived from your purposes, they are beginning to become detached somewhat from your purposes. Since you designed the robot to “think for itself” to some degree, its “thinking” may escape your anticipated boundaries. For a real-world, nonfictional example of such an artifact, consider a chess-playing computer that can beat its creator at chess. It is true that the only reason we can say that the computer is currently “investigating” queen-side rook options and “deciding” not to castle is that it is an artifact designed by a human artificer to do just that sort of thing. But it is also true that given the artificer’s goal of making a good chess-playing computer, many of the artificer’s decisions concerning what the computer’s states are (derivedly) about are forced on the artificer: given the fact that a chess player needs accurate information about the rules and the state of the game, there must be states that concern each bishop and each pawn, and states that involve an evaluation of the game if the computer’s queen captured the opponent’s knight on the current move, and so forth. And no amount of authorial fiat could make a state of the computer be (derivedly) about the number of pawns remaining on the board if that state wasn’t appropriately linked to locating each and every pawn on the board. Once a designer’s largest goal is fixed (make a chess player, make a giant robot, make a hurricane simulator), cruel nature takes over and dictates what will work and what won’t, and hence which states of which system count as mistaken or inaccurate. Poets may be able to get away with a declaration that a poem that seems to be about horses is actually about professors—William Blake tells us that the “tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”—but computer engineers cannot similarly impose their intentions on their creations.

Let’s take stock. The giant robot’s simulacrum of mental states would be just that—not real deciding and seeing and wondering and planning, but only as if deciding and wondering and planning. We should pause to make sure we understand what this claim encompasses. The imagined robot is certainly much more sophisticated than the humble two-bitser; we have granted it the power to “plan” new courses of action, to “learn” from past errors, to “form allegiances,” and to “communicate” with its competitors. Moreover, to do all this “planning” and “learning” and “communicating,” it will have to be provided with control structures that are rich in self-reflective, or self-monitoring, power. In other words, it will have a human-like access to its own internal states and be capable of “reporting,” “avowing,” and “commenting upon” what it “takes” to be the import of its own internal states (when it “decides” it doesn’t “want” to “lie” to us). It will have “opinions” about what these states mean, and we should no doubt take those “opinions” seriously as very good evidence—probably the best evidence we can easily get—on what those states “mean” metaphorically speaking (remember: it is only an artifact and has no original intentionality; we’re considering its derived intentionality, which will be no more obvious to observers than the intentionality of us “real” agents). The two-bitser was given no such capacity to sway our interpretive judgments by issuing apparently confident “avowals” to the effect that it had no idea it was now in Panama or that it was surprised to learn about quarter-balboas.

There are several ways one might respond to this intuition pump, and we will examine them shortly, but first I want to draw out the most striking implication of standing firm on our initial presumption: no artifact, no matter how much AI wizardry is designed into it, has anything but derived intentionality. If we cling to this view, the conclusion forced on us is that our own intentionality is exactly like that of the robot, for the science-fiction tale I have told is not new; it is a variation on Richard Dawkins’s (1976) vision of us and all other biological species as “survival machines” designed to prolong the futures of our selfish genes. We are artifacts, designed over the eons as survival machines for genes that cannot act swiftly and informedly in their own interests. Our interests as we conceive of them and the “interests” of our genes may well diverge—even though were it not for our genes’ “interests,” we would not exist. Their preservation is our original raison d’être, even if we can learn to ignore that goal and devise our own summum bonum, thanks to the intelligence, the capacity to learn, that our genes have installed in us. So our intentionality is derived from the intentionality of our “selfish” genes. They are the Unmeant Meaners, not us!

Of course our genes’ intentionality is not intrinsic in any sense; the “meaning” of any gene is dependent on the whole evolved “alphabet” system of ACGT codons, protein synthesis, and development, for a start. But it is original in the sense that it is the first of many representational systems that have evolved. All the later systems have agents—intentional systems—whose representations get their intentionality from the goals they further (just like the intentionality of the giant robot).4

This vision of things, while it provides a satisfying answer to the question of whence came our own intentionality, does seem to leave us with an embarrassment, for it derives our own intentionality from entities—genes—whose intentionality is a paradigm case of mere as if intentionality. How could the literal depend on the metaphorical? Moreover, there is surely this much disanalogy between my science-fiction tale and Dawkins’s story: in my tale I supposed that there was conscious, deliberate, foresighted engineering involved in the creation of the robot, whereas even if we are, as Dawkins says, the product of a design process in which our genes are the primary beneficiaries, that is a design process that utterly lacks a conscious, deliberate, foresighted engineer. But this is not a good objection, as we shall see.

The chief beauty of the theory of natural selection is that it shows us how to eliminate the intelligent artificer from our account of origins. And yet the process of natural selection is responsible for designs of great cunning. It is not the genes that are the designers; genes themselves could not be more stupid; they cannot reason or represent or figure out anything. They do not do the designing themselves; they are merely the beneficiaries of the design process—the clients, you might say. (In our story, they could be put in parallel with a very stupid, very rich client who hires the best engineers to build him a survival machine. If it weren’t for him, the engineers would not have a well-funded assignment, and it is his survival that pays for the artifact they create.) Who or what does the designing? Mother Nature, of course, or more literally, the long, slow process of evolution by natural selection.

To me, the most fascinating property of the process of evolution is its uncanny capacity to mirror some properties of the human mind (the Intelligent Designer) while being bereft of others. There will be much more on this topic in part VI, on thinking about evolution, but in the meantime, I want to make clear the very strong link I am proposing between any acceptable theory of meaning and the theory of evolution. While it can never be stressed enough that natural selection operates with no foresight and no purpose, we should also not lose sight of the fact that the process of natural selection has proved itself to be exquisitely sensitive to rationales, making myriads of discriminating “choices” and “recognizing” and “appreciating” many subtle relationships. To put it even more provocatively, when natural selection selects, it can “choose” a particular design for one reason rather than another, without ever consciously—or unconsciously!—“representing” either the choice or the reasons. Hearts were “chosen” for their excellence as blood-circulating pumps, not for the captivating rhythm of their beating, though that might have been the reason some other thing was “chosen” by natural selection.

Just as the Panamanian Pepsi-Cola franchise-holder can select the two-bitser for its talent at recognizing quarter-balboas, can adopt it as a quarter-balboa-detector, so evolution can select an organ for its capacity to oxygenate blood, can establish it as a lung. And it is only relative to just such design “choices” or evolution-“endorsed” purposes—raisons d’être—that we can identify behaviors, actions, perceptions, beliefs, or any of the other categories of folk psychology.5

The idea that we are artifacts designed by natural selection is both compelling and familiar; some would go so far as to say that it is quite beyond serious controversy.6 Why, then, is it resisted not just by creationists and “Intelligent Design” ideologues, but also (somewhat subliminally) by the likes of Searle, Fodor, and company? My hunch is that it has two rather unobvious implications that some find terribly unpalatable. First, if we are “just” artifacts, then what our innermost thoughts mean—and whether they mean anything at all—is something about which we, the very thinkers of those thoughts, have no special authority. The two-bitser turns into a q-balber without ever changing its inner nature; the state that used to mean one thing now means another. The same thing could in principle happen to us, if we are just artifacts, if our own intentionality is thus not original but derived. (Jones, for instance, is not authoritative about whether he is thinking about horses or schmorses.) Second, if we are such artifacts, not only have we no guaranteed privileged access to deeper facts that fix the meanings of our thoughts, but there are no such deeper facts. Sometimes functional interpretation is obvious (the heart is obviously a pump; the eye is obviously for seeing), but when it is not, when we go to read Mother Nature’s mind, there is no text to be interpreted. When “the fact of the matter” about proper function is controversial—when more than one interpretation is well supported—there simply is no fact of the matter.

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1 I probably shouldn’t have used this obsolete slang term for a quarter-detector when I first created this intuition pump, but I did, and the term has had a fair amount of, well, currency, so let’s stay with it. The obscure origin of the term “two bits” for a U.S. quarter takes us back to “pieces of eight” and doubloons and other such relics of pirate days.

2 A sad iron—like the one your great grandmother used to press the family clothes—makes a fine doorstop. If you hunt for one in antique shops and “collectibles” websites, make sure you get an authentic one, not a replica; some for sale are just iron doorstops, cast in the shape of antique sad irons. A hundred years from now somebody may manufacture quaint doorstops that look just like two-bitsers—you know, the devices your great grandparents used back when coins were used for money.

3 Philosopher Hilary Putnam (1975) invented Twin Earth many years ago, and my intuition pump is carefully modeled to reproduce the relevant details of his. My two-bitser tale is really just an elaborate resetting of the knobs of his intuition pump. There have been dozens or maybe even hundreds of other variations discussed by philosophers in the last thirty-five years. In its original telling, Putnam chose water on Earth and ersatz water (composed of XYZ, not H 2 O) on Twin Earth, but this raises complications not relevant to our use of the intuition pump, so let schmorses be the quarter-balboa analogues in this telling.

4 Tecumseh Fitch’s important paper “Nano-Intentionality: A Defense of Intrinsic Intentionality” (2008) proposes that eukaryotic cells—but not their ancestors, prokaryotic cells—were the first evolved entities with “intrinsic” intentionality, because their self-protective talents were, he claims, strikingly more advanced than their ancestors’. His emphasis on the autonomy, the agency, of individual cells strongly influenced the revisions to my homuncular functionalism (see chapter 20), but I disagree with his attempt to stop the finite regress at eukaryotes. Prokaryotes can no more be “replaced by a machine” than eukaryotes; the agency goes all the way down to the proteins, bottoming out at the selfish genes.

5 For an adamant and passionate denial of everything in this paragraph, see Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Either the book you are reading is dead wrong, or that one is. For a more detailed defense of the view in this book, see part VI, and my “Evolution of Reasons” (forthcoming).

6 Ruth Millikan has developed this claim in greater detail than I, in a series of brilliant books beginning in 1984. See the new volume Millikan and Her Critics (Ryder et al., 2013) for the discussion at that time.