From Darwin to Derrida

"David’s an evolutionary biologist who’s also, in the very best sense of the word, an amateur philosopher. He’s an insightful and imaginative reader of the history of philosophy and texts, and his book is a rollercoaster ride of insights and excellent ideas. I had an amazing thought just a couple of days ago about this. I wrote to David and asked him if he’d ever read Word and Object . I don’t think he has. We’ve never talked about it. But he’s doing what Quine was trying to do. Here he is, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, and he is fleshing out a lot of the details in Quine’s project of finding a place for meaning in the world without elevating it into magic. It’s consonant with and contributory to the sort of work that Ruth Milliken’s done, and what I’ve tried to do. He wrote an article called “Making Sense,” which is also a chapter in the book. It’s one of my favorites. Here’s a sentence from it: “Information is what could have been otherwise before observation. Meaning is what would have been otherwise, had the observation been different.” Absolutely. “The non-living world,” he says, “is a repository of unintended information useful for living interpreters.” Yes. And, of course, the philosophy of language crowd won’t have anything to do with it. I’ve tried. I wrote an article framing Haig’s “Making Sense” article, called “Haig’s Strange Inversion of Reason.” We sent both papers to Mind & Language , the British journal that is the current citadel of the traditional view. Due to a mechanical problem with the submission process, they got David’s paper before they got mine. My article was supposed to introduce them to David’s ideas, so that they wouldn’t dismiss them outright. As luck would have it, they read David’s first and rejected it because they didn’t understand it. When mine came in, they said, ‘No point publishing this because this is a framing piece for a piece we’ve already rejected.’ I suggested that since they didn’t read them in the right order, they might consider reading them in the right order and see if they still wanted to reject them. They wouldn’t do it. I have to say that I appreciate the fear and anxiety that leads them to treat David this way, but I don’t respect it. Absolutely. It is fear of having to do that strange inversion and realizing that comprehension—intelligence—is not the source but the effect, the outcome of a lot of mindless mechanistic activity. Competence comes first and then comprehension. Comprehension is not perfect, it’s not Cartesian certainty, it’s not guaranteed by God. When we do the strange inversion, we can understand how we can be the knowers that we are without being magical. There are two kinds of people. There are people that want magic tricks explained to them, and those that don’t—or they want to figure it out for themselves. I know quite a bit about magic, and some of my good friends, advisors, and mentors are magicians. Sometimes when I ask, ‘Do you want to know how that trick’s done?’ people reply, ‘No, no. I don’t want to know.’ There are the people who don’t want to know. And there are the people like me, who are nosy and troublesome, and we want to know. We’re going to try to figure out the explanations. What I want to say at the end is, ‘Look how wonderful it is!’ The explanations we get from science are so much more ravishingly beautiful, ingenious, and complex than anything from the know-nothing tradition. How they can prefer myth and magic and ignorance to scientific understanding is, to me, astonishing. They’re easier. H. L. Mencken said, “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Some people would rather cling to what is, by their light, a self-evident truth, than go to all the trouble of having to learn some initially difficult and upsetting ideas."