The Selfish Biosphere

The gene is selfish with respect to whole organisms: it replicates itself by using organisms as survival machines that might have to sacrifice themselves for the genetic good, as in raising young. Genes bear the same kind of relation to individual organisms that people used to think applied to the relation between species or groups and individual organisms (acting “for the good of the species”). However, it doesn’t follow from this that genes are not themselves subject to a similar type of selfishness. Elsewhere I have argued that genes act as survival machines for the process of natural selection; here I will expand on this idea.[1] In the case of so-called artificial selection just such a relation holds: the human breeder may literally survive (make a living) by the intentional selection of genes and hence whole organisms. The genes are selected by the breeder in such a way as to sell the maximum numbers of dogs (say). This may even be accomplished by chemical analysis and advanced genetic technology. In such a case the gene is the entity that serves the interests of its designer, thus maximizing the designer’s survival prospects. Likewise, in the case of so-called natural selection, where no such conscious designer is present, that impersonal process generates genes that enable it (that process) to continue in existence and even to spread far and wide. What I want to add to this picture now is the suggestion that we can refer to the selfish entity (a process or mechanism or pattern of relations) as the “biosphere”. The term is variously defined, sometimes meaning the regions of the earth occupied by life forms and sometimes meaning the totality of all earthly life forms; I wish to mean by it the fundamental processes or mechanisms or traits of life forms. It translates directly as “life-sphere” and this is helpful for my purposes: I mean the sphere of reality in which living processes are manifested. We might coin the abstract term “life-ness”, to be contrasted with non-living objects and systems (rocks, atoms). It is the idea of the biological as such—the vital, the animate. Then the claim is that it is the biosphere in this sense that is the ultimately selfish biological reality. The biosphere constructs genes as its survival machines via natural selection, which in turn construct whole organisms (as well as the external products of organisms such as webs or burrows). It is what survives and prospers when genes survive and prosper in virtue of the survival machines they build. The processes of life are the ends of the biological line, the final beneficiaries of biological activity. Life itself is “selfish”.

Let me be more specific about what these processes are. We can certainly cite natural selection as a life process—the main engine of life creation. It is a biological mechanism or procedure. But we can also list certain universal traits of life that survive because of the excellence of the genes they produce (in a certain sense of “produce”): reproduction, respiration, digestion, growth, maturation, embryogenesis, locomotion, and no doubt others. These traits are responsible for the success of organisms, which leads to the success of genes, which leads to these traits continuing in existence, i.e. their success. The biosphere is the totality of these traits, processes, mechanisms, and events—life elements, we might say. So the biosphere is what benefits from excellent genes (hence excellent organisms): it thrives and expands when effective genes exist, and it would wither and die if it started manufacturing lousy genes (ones that produced short-lived non-reproducing organisms). So we can say, for instance, that the trait or process of reproduction is what survives when genes survive—they enable it to survive. The biosphere is to genes what dog breeders are to genes: except that it is a mindless cause of differential survival not an intentional agent. If we imagine that the entire biosphere was invented by a super-scientist, precisely in order to create living processes, with genes brought in just in order to bring about that end, then this super-scientist would be the equivalent of a dog breeder. As it is, the biosphere acts like a dog breeder, i.e. it keeps going because of what it creates–hence “the selfish biosphere”. Dawkins called his book The Selfish Gene, but other titles would have been possible: The Successful Gene, The Megalomaniac Gene, The Ruthless Gene, The Predatory Gene, The Immortal Gene, etc. Likewise, we can transfer these titles to the biosphere: it is what fits these (mostly metaphorical) descriptions—the apex beneficiary and mastermind. And just as we might correspondingly refer to the individual organism as “the exploited organism”, “the slave organism”, “the victim organism”, or “the employee organism” in relation to its genetic masters, so we could speak of the gene as “the exploited gene”, “the slave gene”, etc. in relation to the biosphere. It is the ultimate boss, controller, and beneficiary. The point of a gene, for the biosphere, is to act as a means for its own survival and flourishing; and indeed the genes have served the biosphere well over the eons, as witness its extent and richness. Just as we are the “lumbering robots” of the genes (to use Dawkins’ phrase), so the genes are the lumbering robots of the biosphere—or perhaps better its faithful nanobots. The gene master has its servants in the form of organisms, but the master is in turn a servant to a super-master, viz. the life process.[2] The biosphere is the ultimate employer, creator, and beneficiary, logically speaking. Of course, neither genes nor biosphere get to enjoy their dominance, not being conscious beings, but they are the de factomasters of the biological universe: they are the things that organisms (those moist plebian units) labor to maintain. What comes as a shock to the genes’ egotism is that they are exploited too—or perhaps we should say they are in existence only because of the process of natural selection and should therefore be grateful (as organisms should be grateful to genes for creating them at all). If you are happy to exist, then you can thank those tiny scheming selfish genes, and ultimately the life force that brought them into existence (i.e. natural selection with its host of life-promoting traits). Your mind and brain exist only because the biosphere was desperate to keep itself in existence, if I may put it so. Remember, when organisms go, it goes (and that, we are told, is just a matter of time). The extinction of all species is the extinction of the biosphere, as well as the extinction of all genes. The days of the biosphere are numbered, but meanwhile the genes labor to keep it in existence.

One might wonder whether there is an analogue in the biosphere of competition among genes. Genes don’t just build survival machines; they build survival machines that are better than those of their genetic rivals. Natural selection is selective–picky, discriminating. The gene that survives best is the gene that outperforms its rivals. Is there anything similarly competitive at the level of the biosphere? Indeed there is, as we may see by considering the fate of the dinosaurs. As everyone knows, the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of a cataclysmic event, soon to be replaced by a burgeoning mammal population, leading eventually to us. The biosphere underwent a convulsion, altering its composition. This can be described as follows: the section of the biosphere consisting of dinosaur traits was replaced by mammalian traits in accordance with natural selection, since the post-cataclysmic environment was more hospitable to mammals than to dinosaurs. In other words, the genes that produce dinosaurs were not as effective as contributors to the biosphere as the genes that produce mammals: the biosphere did better under one genetic dispensation than the other. Traits that characterize mammals became more numerous than traits that characterize dinosaurs in the competition for survival. Living processes did better with mammals as their vehicles than with dinosaurs: better reproduction, respiration, locomotion, etc. Traits compete as genes compete (indeed genes compete in virtue of the traits they produce). The biosphere fluctuates over time as new traits and processes replace old ones, and it survives better under changing conditions according to the genes it produces. Particular types of life compete with other types of life under natural selection, just as particular types of genes so compete. So sections of the biosphere not only survive; they survive by competing with other sections. Life forms outperform other life forms.[3]

We might reasonably say that the central fact of biology is reproduction and inheritance. This is what distinguishes the biological world from the non-biological world (mountains don’t have baby mountains). Reproduction is the biological process par excellence. The primary job of the gene is to enable effective reproduction—to make sure the next survival machine is born.[4] Given that, it is the reproductive process in all its variety that is maximized by effective genes: the job of genes is to produce successful acts of reproduction, lots of them. Genes are reproduction maximizers. Not all reproduction is sexual, but most of it is, so we can say that genes operate to generate fruitful sexual acts. This means that the section of the biosphere that is most benefitted by good genes is the sexual section: good genes lead to an active sex life. So genes are sex maximizers: they act as they do so as to maximize the amount of sex in the biosphere. Less anthropomorphically, it is a de facto consequence of good genes that sex is maximized in the biosphere. The less sex there is, the less reproduction there is, and hence the less inheritance there is, which means the less transmission of genes there is. Genes and sex go hand in hand. The gene is really a sex machine—a device for bringing sex about. Thus the genes act as machines for generating sex in the biosphere. They are obsessed with it, dedicated to it. The ultimate rationale of genes is maximizing sex in the biosphere, because sex is required for reproduction, and reproduction is the basic fact of biological existence (the biosphere is the reproduction-sphere).[5]

Colin McGinn

[1] See “The Selfless Machine”; also my “Trait Selection” in Philosophical Provocations (2017).

[2] We could refer to this as “process biology” as distinct from “object biology”: processes are taken to be theoretically basic not objects like organisms and genes. This would bring biology closer to physics in some respects.

[3] The biosphere is usually limited to life on earth, but we can extend the notion to life elsewhere in the universe—so there can be many biospheres. In principle these could compete with each other for survival, though that would require tremendous feats of relocation or undreamt of forms of travel. There could be competition for natural resources as well as direct conflict. In such an eventuality the genes would act as competitive weapons in the struggle for biosphere survival; they would be means of preservation for biospheres. We would then have the analogue of competition among genes (and organisms) at the level of biospheres: the intergalactic selfish competitive mindless biosphere.

[4] If we ask what are the reproductive organs of the body, we quickly see that the genitals are just part of the story. In addition to the womb, we can say that the whole animal body is geared towards reproduction: the overall anatomy as well as the brain and mind. The animal needs to be able to mount its mate correctly, find its mate, entice its mate, and then carry out the necessary actions. The whole animal is involved in reproductive activity, this being the central biological imperative (you eat so you can mate). Looked at this way, the whole animal is a reproductive organ—a device for transmitting its genes into future generations. The entire biosphere is taken up with reproductive machinery and reproductive behavior, conceived broadly. The body is a survivalist sex machine dedicated to genetic reproduction.

[5] Let me put it cheekily as follows (we need not remain stone-faced about this): the DNA is a device for filling the biosphere with sex, a veritable libertine. And the amount of sex in it has increased exponentially as the population of living beings has increased. The biosphere is now having a lot of sex (courtesy of the genes and their bodily appendages). If the whole system had been set up by a superhuman erotomaniac, she would no doubt feel as if her work has been done, since planet Earth is pullulating with sex. Sex, you see, is what is preserved by biological activity. Before there was a sexless universe; then the biosphere came along and lo! sex was born. Sex has been going strong ever since, aided by genes and their bodily assistants. Selfish sex, as we might say.

Truth and Meaning

What have truth and meaning got to do with each other? A dominant view has it that the two are deeply connected—specifically, meanings are truth conditions.[1] The view comes in several varieties, but the central thought is that the meaning of a sentence consists of the state of affairs that would make it true. Alternatively, meaning is given by the conditions of the world that would render the corresponding sentence true. Thus the meaning of “snow is white” can be identified with the condition of snow being white, i.e. the state of affairs consisting of snow being white, i.e. snow being white. Truth conditions can hold or fail to hold (as with “snow is black”), so that false sentences can still be meaningful; but when they do hold they coincide with facts (otherwise they are merely possible states of affairs). Meanings are accordingly to be identified (generally) with non-psychological states of the world—states that could exist without the existence of minds. There were states of affairs (truth conditions) before there were minds and language. Language hooks onto these antecedent states of affairs and thereby becomes meaningful. Meanings are thus an extra-mental matter—combinations of objects and properties, according to a standard position (sets of possible worlds in one version).

There is a fundamental difficulty with this doctrine (as well as several non-fundamental difficulties): meanings are always for someone but truth conditions are not necessarily for anyone. No sentence is meaningful except in relation to a speaker or hearer; there is no such thing as a meaningful sentence that no one understands or could understand. Some sentences are difficult to understand, but no sentence has a meaning that transcends human understanding, i.e. contains concepts that no one possesses. A sentence to be meaningful must be meaningful to someone. Meanings are inherently graspable things; they are essentially human. They are objects of apprehension. But the same is not true of truth conditions: being objective aspects of the world, there is no guarantee that they are grasped by humans. They may not be humanly graspable at all. Certainly many states of affairs eluded human knowledge for a long time, and no doubt there are many that still do: they existed but were not apprehended by us. None of these constituted meanings. They can only enter the realm of meaning if they are grasped—and they may not be. Some speakers may not even grasp the state of affairs of snow being white, so the sentence “snow is white” will not have a graspable truth condition for them; the sentence is not meaningful tothem. But then meanings can’t be truth conditions: for meanings are essentially graspable while truth conditions are not. Truth conditions are the wrong kind of thing to constitute meanings—too divorced from a speaker’s understanding. Meanings are speaker-relative, but truth conditions are speaker-independent. Intuitively put, meanings are necessarily things that speakers know, but truth conditions are not necessarily things that speakers know. This is why it is possible to be a skeptic about truth conditions but not about meanings: maybe we don’t know what states of affairs there are in the world, but we surely know what our words mean. Then how could the latter be the former? In short, meanings are psychological, but truth conditions are not.

Here we see a sharp contrast between truth conditions and every other factor that meanings have been identified with. Verification conditions are not speaker-independent in the way truth conditions are, since they depend on attributes of the speaker, viz. his powers of knowledge acquisition. A sentence is always verifiable (or not) for a speaker. Similarly for the use of a sentence: this too is an attribute of the speaker—his ability to perform acts of speech with the sentence. Equally in the case of image theories: images are items existing in people’s minds not realities that can exist independently of human consciousness. Ditto for intentions and beliefs. It is generally assumed that whatever meaning is it had better relate to the speaker’s mind or behavior or brain, but truth conditions theories locate meaning in the extra-mental world, where it can possibly transcend human knowledge. But even when the states of affairs are known, they are logically of the wrong nature to constitute meaning, since meanings are meanings for someone but truth conditions are not truth conditions for anyone. To be a state of affairs is not to be a state of affairs to someone, but meanings are always meanings to someone. Meanings are always meaningful to someone, but states of affairs are not always meaningful to anyone—they are not intrinsicallyaccessible to the mind. Meanings are things that are communicable or usable in thought, but states of affairs are not subject to this constraint; they exist independently of the human subject. They can’t be meanings because they are too objective.

It might be replied that meanings should not be identified with truth conditions themselves but with mental representations of truth conditions. Truth conditions are admittedly too mind-independent to constitute meaning, but the same cannot be said of mental representations of them. Two questions arise about this reply. First, what is the nature of these mental representations? Perhaps they are senses construed as modes of presentation: this is obscure for many meanings, but in any case the suggestion threatens to make truth conditions redundant in the theory of meaning—why not just make do with the mental representations themselves? Second, the question must arise as to what constitutes the meaning of these mental representations: won’t this lead to the same problem as before? If their meaning is constituted by truth conditions, then we have chosen the wrong kind of thing for meaning to be; but if not, we have moved to another theory of meaning altogether. This is very clear if the mental representation is a sentence in the language of thought: it either has a truth conditions type of meaning or it does not—the former is untenable, while the latter amounts to abandonment. No, the theory must be that meanings aretruth conditions; but then we are faced with the objectivity problem. We are locating meaning too far “outside the head”, making it hostage to ignorance and skepticism. To repeat: states of affairs are (generally) extra-mental in nature and bear no necessary relation to a speaker’s understanding, while meanings are necessarily objects of understanding. Identifying the two cannot then be correct. What a speaker means by an utterance is not what obtains in the world when that utterance is true. The two are subject to quite different epistemic constraints.

What then is meaning? I have no pat answer: none of the alternative theories strikes me as adequate for one reason or another. But that’s okay: maybe we just don’t know what meaning is (lord knows it has been a problem). Wittgenstein repudiated the truth conditions theory of the Tractatus in the Investigations, but he put no new theory in its place; and he was Wittgenstein. Certainly the considerations adduced in the Investigations are far more psychological and speaker-centered than the abstract truth conditions theory of the Tractatus, but they don’t add up to a nice neat theory of what meaning really us. Wittgenstein saw that human meaning cannot emerge from objective states of affairs, but he also rejected both image theories and simple behaviorist theories. His solution, in effect, was to question the hunt for a theory. I prefer to say simply that I don’t know. What I would accept is that truth conditions are connected to meaning in some way: we do often grasp the truth conditions of our sentences. We know that “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white, and this fact is somehow connected to the meaning we grasp. So we can say that meaning somehow involves or leads to or points to truth conditions, but we can’t say how. Meaning serves to bring truth conditions into view, rendering them visible to us: we see that the sentence is true under certain conditions. Meaning makes truth conditions apparent to us, but not because it is identical to truth conditions. If meaning were use (whatever exactly that means) we could say that the use of a sentence renders its truth conditions manifest to us: we see the relevant state of affairs in the use. But this is horribly obscure and leaves us none the wiser. Still, one can appreciate how the truth conditions theory gained its popularity: truth conditions are connected to meaning somehow and in certain cases (but not when they transcend human knowledge); we just can’t see how. Indeed, it is problematic how this can be so, given that truth conditions are external to the human subject: how can we apprehend objective truth conditions in virtue of any fact about our inner nature? It’s not as if we literally perceive them with our senses, or snub our toe against them. So we not only don’t know what meaning is; we also don’t know how meaning brings truth conditions into the picture, as it apparently does. But if I am right, we at least know that it isn’t truth conditions—we have some negative knowledge. And of course our not knowing what meaning is explains a lot about the history of the subject (all that floundering and fighting).

I began by asking what truth and meaning have to do with each other. I just argued that truth conditions cannot constitute meaning as a matter of deep principle, putting aside questions of extensionality and so on. But there is another line of attack that is far more obvious and well trodden, namely that many meaningful sentences are not true at all, such as imperatives. The limitation of this style of argument is that it is open to ingenious response: it might be contended that imperatives are really disguised indicatives, or that the spirit of the truth conditions theory can be preserved by switching to obedience conditions. However, in the light of what I argued above these maneuvers look suspiciously ad hoc: for the thrust of the present objection is simply that the concept of truth plays no obvious role in the theory of the meaning of non-indicative sentences. If a language consisted solely of imperatives, the truth conditions theory would look like a non-starter. What does the meaning of thesesentences have to do with whether states of affairs obtain? They command actions; they don’t describe states of affairs. Or suppose a language was totally expressive of emotions with no world-directed assertions in it at all: wouldn’t it contain meaningful sentences with nary a hint of truth conditions? There is just nothing in the concept of meaning as such to entail that truth conditions are necessarily involved. So long as there is communication there is meaning, but communication can take many forms. If truth conditions constitute meaning for indicative sentences, that is a special case by no means generalizable to other sentence types. But even in that case there is a principled problem about identifying meaning with truth conditions—the objectivity problem. It is noteworthy that such a theory only gained traction relatively recently with the work of Frege, early Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski,[2] and Davidson: before that it had no defenders. Earlier theorists took a far more psychological approach, preferring images, ideas, feelings, thoughts, or behavior. Did they tacitly sense that truth conditions place meaning too far beyond the human subject? Did they realize that states of the world are not intrinsically meaningful or meaning conferring? Meaning is always meaning to someone, but the world doesn’t point to the human subject in this way. Meaning refers itself to us, as it were, but the world makes no such reference—so how could it be meaning? How can facts be meanings given that facts bear no essential relation to the beings that grasp meanings? The fact that snow is white is not a fact for us, but the meaning of “snow is white” is a meaning for us. Identifying the two looks like a category mistake. Alternately put, possible worlds are not worlds for subjects, but meanings are intrinsically subject-directed. As Wittgenstein would say, meanings are part of our form of life, but objective states of affairs are external to that (they constitute the form of the world). Meaning can certainly be about the objective world, but it isn’t the same thing as that world.[3]

Here is another way to put the same basic point. Meaning essentially attaches to symbols: no symbols, no meaning. If I say, “’Snow is white’ means that snow is white”, this is by no means equivalent to any statement that omits reference to the symbols “snow is white”. But notoriously, if I say, “’Snow is white’ is true”, this is equivalent to a statement that omits reference to those symbols, viz. “snow is white”. Statements about truth are equivalent to statements about the world, but statements about meaning are not thus equivalent. So statements about truth point directly to the world whereas statements about meaning do not. Meaning has to do with symbols, but truth has to do with reality. How then could truth conditions constitute meaning? How, in particular, could the statement “’snow is white’ means that snow is white” be analyzable by the statement “’snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”? The word “true” cancels quotation, but the word “means” does not. Truth takes you to the world, but meaning keeps you within the domain of symbols. Thus meaning and truth are logically different kinds of concepts. Accordingly, we cannot hope to explain meaning by invoking truth: truth belongs out in the non-symbolic world while meaning belongs with symbols grasped by the mind.

[1] See, for example, Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning”.

[2] It is very much a moot point whether Tarski’s theory of truth qualifies as a truth conditions theory in the classic sense. He does not speak of truth conditions or states of affairs in the development of his definition, and it is not unreasonable to take it that the notion amounts to nothing more than a sentence of the meta-language. He is not referring to states of affairs or anything of the kind but simply using meta-language sentences on the right-hand-side of biconditionals referring to object language sentences. It is quite unclear that he is advancing a truth conditional semantics in the classical sense (in fact, I think he is not).

[3] Is there some kind of use-mention confusion at work here?

Criteria of Meaningfulness

The positivists created a question that had not existed before, viz. what is the criterion for whether a string of words is meaningful? Their proposal was that such a string is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable (with due allowance made for analytic sentences). The intention was to place metaphysical sentences on the wrong side of the line—to declare sentences that seemed meaningful not to be meaningful at all. They were trying to expose illusions of meaning—sentences with pseudo meanings. As there is fake jewelry, so there is fake meaning. Verifiability was to be the test of authentic meaning. As is well known, their efforts came to naught for a whole series of reasons (mainly the criterion kept ruling out too much); but the enterprise itself was not cast into doubt. The positivists simply had the wrong criterion—some other criterion would do better. Accordingly, other criteria were mooted: falsifiability, truth conditions, use, inferential role, grammaticality, language-games, etc. Without going into detail all these proposals ran into problems of one kind or another: the existence of meaningful non-indicative sentences, excessive narrowness, vagueness of formulation, lack of selective bite, and so on. Perhaps most instructive is the grammaticality criterion: it sounds eminently reasonable at first but quickly comes to grief. A sentence is meaningful just if it is grammatical, i.e. is well formed according to the rules of grammar. This is generous enough to let in what intuitively counts as meaningful (including metaphysical sentences) but strict enough to rule out nonsense strings and things like rocks. But two questions can be pressed: (a) what makes a word meaningful and (b) by which grammatical rules exactly. Can’t there be meaningless words (“brillig” and the like)? And can’t grammars vary from language to language? What is grammatical in one language may not be grammatical in another. Even if there is a common basic grammar to all natural human languages, what about invented languages or languages spoken by aliens—can’t they be meaningful too? So this proposal also flops. The question seems hard to answer, like many philosophical questions, despite the plethora of attempted answers. Is this one more puzzle to be added to an already long list? The mind-body problem and the problem of meaningfulness—both are resistant to solution.

An array of possible responses to the difficulty suggests itself. Maybe the property of meaningfulness is a primitive property, like Moore’s simple indefinable good; maybe “meaningful” is a family resemblance term with no property shared by all instances of the meaningful; maybe we just haven’t found the answer yet but should keep trying; maybe it is a bona fide philosophical mystery like the mind-body problem; maybe the whole idea of meaning is an illusion and should be eliminated from our thought. Again, I will not discuss these options, noting merely that they all seem like using a sledgehammer to crack nuts. Instead I will defend my own answer: the question is not a sensible question—not as philosophers intend it anyway. It has no interesting philosophical answer. It is an illusory question. We can certainly distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless: words and sentences are meaningful but rocks and mountains are meaningless. It would be odd to say of a mountain that it is meaningless—it isn’t even a candidate for being meaningful. A mountain isn’t made up of symbols or even of purported symbols: it’s just a big lump of stuff. It isn’t verifiable or falsifiable or grammatical simply because it isn’t symbolic at all. Most things aren’t—they are devoid of meaning, meaning-less. But this distinction is not what philosophers were getting at who sought a criterion of the meaningful—of course rocks and mountains are not meaningful! Whoever thought they were? They give no impression of meaning, no illusion of it; no one is tempted to regard them as meaningful. So the genuine distinction illustrated by the difference between words and rocks is irrelevant to the philosopher’s quest; the philosopher is interested in the distinction as it applies within the class of symbols. But that is exactly where the project runs aground: for anything that counts as a symbol is already meaningful. Recall Grice’s theory of speaker meaning: an utterance is meaningful if it is used to induce in an audience a belief by way of the audience’s recognition of an intention to do just that. But any symbol can be used to achieve that aim just by being a symbol: metaphysicians can certainly induce beliefs in others by using metaphysical strings of symbols. They could even do this by using a system of whistles or hand gestures or even heads on platters (to use Grice’s own example). It is only too easy to be meaningful given that there are speakers intent on communicating thoughts. That’s all there is to it really—what is meaningful is what people treat as meaningful, i.e. use to communicate. What kind of speech acts did the positivists think the metaphysicians were performing as they talked to each other? Obviously they were getting things across to each other, so they must have been speaking meaningfully. And the same for all the other interesting criteria proposed by philosophers. In so far as the question has any answer, it is entirely trivial. The sentences are meaningful because you can mean things by them, i.e. communicate thoughts.

But wait: can’t we reformulate our question to focus on beliefs and thoughts? What is the criterion for having a contentful thought? Now we have created a new concept (and a new word)—the concept of the contentful—and raised the question of when it is satisfied. When does a belief have content and when does it not? Certainly we can sensibly report that some things have content and some do not—again, states of mind do but rocks and mountains do not. But that doesn’t give us any sense in which the distinction applies within the class of beliefs and thoughts—as it might be, beliefs that give the illusion of having content but don’t really have it. And that distinction is barely intelligible: to lack content is to lack a condition necessary for being a belief. What did metaphysicians have according to the positivists—fake beliefs, non-beliefs masquerading as beliefs, illusions of introspection? That is absurd: of course they had beliefs with content just by having beliefs. They reasoned with them, disputed each other’s, and abandoned them under argumentative pressure. But then their sentences were meaningful by Gricean standards, since they served to communicate such beliefs to each other. The idea of a belief just is the idea of something that is contentful, as the idea of a symbol just is the idea of something meaningful (given its employment in an act of communication). So the notion of a criterion of meaningfulness, as sought by philosophers, is an incoherent notion, a kind of displacement of a genuine distinction into an area in which it can’t properly apply.

It is rather like trying to find a criterion of the humorous. It is true that some things are humorous and some things are not: jokes are but funerals are not (or rocks and mountains). But it would be folly to try to find a criterion within the class of jokes: jokes are funny qua jokes—some funnier than others perhaps—but it would be bizarre to suggest that a certain class of things that are regarded as jokes are not really jokes. A joke is a joke and a sentence is a sentence. A joke can lack in humor as a sentence can lack in significance, but that is not to say that either can belong to a class of the literally non-humorous or non-meaningful. It might be said that a joke can be in bad taste or tedious or crappy in some other way, as a sentence uttered by a metaphysician can be trivial or absurd or crappy in some other way; but that is not a matter of being an illusory joke or an illusory meaning—something that someone might be tempted to wrongly classify in these ways. What is humorous is what makes people laugh, as what is meaningful is what makes people believe (according to Grice). It would be strange to say that a metaphysician’s humor is not real humor by some tendentious standard, as a metaphysician’s meaning is not real meaning, or a metaphysician’s belief is not real belief. One might wish to say that such humor or meaning or belief is a waste of time, or is nothing like science, or is totally obscure, or is a mere game with words—but not that it isn’t even humor or meaning or belief at all.

Another way to see what is wrong with the search for a criterion of meaningfulness is to note that it treats meaningfulness as an evaluative notion: it is supposed to be good to be meaningful and bad to be meaningless. The positivists didn’t think that metaphysics is perfectly fine but entirely meaningless! But this attitude is clearly mistaken with regard to things that really are meaningless—like rocks and mountains. These things are not defective through lack of meaning; they simply are not the kind of thing for which we expect meaningfulness. What are supposed to be defective are symbols that lack meaning, since they purport to mean something. It is the illusionof meaning that they present that is deemed deplorable not the mere fact that they lack meaning. That would no doubt be a bad thing—a kind of deceptiveness—but it is not really possible, as I argued above. On the other hand, real lack of meaning is perfectly possible—most things not being symbols to start with—but this is not what the seeker after a criterion of meaningfulness is looking for. There is all the difference in the world between denouncing the metaphysician’s words as meaningless and remarking that his bowtie is meaningless (or the soles of his feet). The philosopher should never have taken the concept of meaningfulness as evaluative in the first place; that notion simply marks a natural division between two kinds of fact, semantic and non-semantic. If the metaphysician were simply practicing elocution by uttering his metaphysical sentences, he would not be disturbed by the allegation that his words are meaningless; what hurts is that he intends thereby to speak deep truths. But this whole idea is misguided because there cannot be a criterion of meaningfulness of the kind the philosopher seeks. A grammar book will tell you that a sentence is a part of speech that serves to convey a complete thought: that is quite correct, and the condition is easily satisfied. No criterion of meaningfulness can be acceptable that entails that sentences in this sense can fail to be meaningful. The concept of meaningfulness is not a philosophically interesting concept, at least as philosophers approached it in the first half of the twentieth century (perhaps the question of whether life is meaningful is a real question). This could be why it was not a topic of philosophical interest before that time (contrary to some projective history of philosophy).[1]

Colin McGinn

[1] For instance, it would be quite wrong to interpret Hume in this way, as some positivists were inclined to do. One might try to claim that Heidegger’s “Nothing noths” is literally meaningless, but (a) Heidegger offers a gloss on that sentence that gives it a kind of sense and (b) if it is meaningless that is because it is ungrammatical not because it is unverifiable. In any case, it is hardly representative of the class of metaphysical sentences (if indeed there is such a class). I note that it is hard to find anything in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that can be construed as an attempt to give a criterion of meaningfulness, in contrast to the Tractatus. That whole project was pretty much dead by the latter half of the twentieth century, though the idea of it lingered and was never fully repudiated.

Manners and Morals

The topic of manners, good or bad, is neglected in philosophy, receiving scant attention in moral philosophy.[1]Perhaps it is felt to be trivial compared to the weighty matters of morality. But I think the topic is not without philosophical interest and I propose to explore it programmatically. First, what is meant by “manners”? The OEDprovides some useful hints: “manners” is defined as “polite or well-bred social behavior”. Turning to “polite” we find “respectful or considerate of other people” (with the word deriving from a Latin word meaning “polished or smooth”). Then “respect” is rendered as “due regard for the feelings and rights of others”.[2] Clearly the notion is normative and redolent of moral notions: good manners consist of correct actions in relation to other people concerning their feelings and their rights—actions of respect and consideration. For example, it is good manners not to interrupt people when they are speaking: this is something that a well-mannered person does not do, because he should not do it. It is good manners to greet people when you meet them and to signal to them when you are leaving, not to raise your voice unnecessarily, and to consider their feelings with respect to their appearance and deportment. In some cultures bowing is considered good manners, in others smiling is regarded as polite. Not to act in such ways is regarded as reprehensible, mildly or strongly. Children are therefore taught to behave politely.

Moving beyond the dictionary, I would say that acting politely involves three main elements: it is theatrical, symbolic, and self-referential. By “theatrical” I mean that good manners are a type of performance akin to acting on a stage: this is why they are often ritualized and stylized, and people can vary in their ability to act politely. You have to put on a good performance—it is no use giving a half-hearted bow or emitting an inaudible “hello”. In previous ages good manners were often quite elaborate, requiring much training and practice, especially court manners, or how to “treat a lady”. Even now people being presented to the Queen have to execute a series of theatrical maneuvers in order to conform to protocol. Professional actors can be expected to have excellent manners. Manners often require pretense, since one may not particularly like or approve of the person towards whom good manners are expected. The polite action may not be sincere; indeed good manners are supposed to counter the effects of social hostility or coolness. Good manners are a front we present to the world akin to the theatrical self, as explored by certain writers (Shakespeare, Erving Goffman). The smooth operator is above all a talented thespian. By “symbolic” I mean that the polite act is intended to signify something, namely that the agent is a trustworthy and safe person to deal with. The hearty handshake and accompanying steady eye contact are intended to symbolize a person who is respectful and considerate, not a shifty customer who can’t be trusted with the family jewels. Again, this is why good manners tend to be stylized and codified, like a kind of language of respect and consideration. The bow performs no genuine service, but it indicates a certain kind of reliable and deferential individual: it is symbolic. It needs to be decoded, and will not be if the recipient is unfamiliar with the culture in which it occurs. Good manners are signs, signals, messages, declarations. Third, polite behavior is self-referential in the sense that it is intended to be perceived as such: the agent wants the audience of his performance to understand that he acting politely. I don’t just intend to act in a well-mannered way but also to be seen to be so acting. Moreover, I intend that my audience should recognize this intention (shades of Grice): I want my audience, before whom I am symbolically acting, to grasp that I am intending to treat them politely. It is not necessarily so with moral action: here it is not essential that the recipient should grasp that the action was intended morally (he may not even know that he is the beneficiary of any moral action). Thus the polite person must act conspicuously politely (it’s no use bowing behind a curtain) so as to make his intention plain. Good manners thus require the ability to project good manners—to make them evident, salient. So manners require a fairly complex set of intentions as well as theatrical skill and a grasp of symbolism. We are not born knowing these things but need to have them inculcated—hence all those etiquette textbooks of yore and costly lessons in the art of behaving in “polite society”. Miss Manners earns her keep as an instructor in the Theater of Symbolic Good Impressions. Good manners are not for ignoramuses.[3]

Moral action does not have these characteristics: it isn’t essentially theatrical, symbolic, and self-referential. When one person benefits another or keeps a promise or tells another the truth this is not a theatrical performance intended to symbolize something meritorious about the agent: it is the fulfillment of a duty, an act with real consequences, an instance of practical reason. It is not a type of play-acting calculated to create a favorable impression (this is not to say that agents never do this in the guise of acting morally). It is not merely good manners to give money to charity or to treat other people fairly. An unethical person is not one who needs to improve her manners (her manner isn’t the problem). This connects with two other features of manners that distinguish it from morality. First, good manners are not appropriate for animals and small children: we don’t have to treat our pets and babies courteously. Why? Because they don’t understand the symbolic theater of manners: good manners are lost on them. By all means treat them kindly, but there is no need to worry about hurting their feelings by social snubs or snobbish behavior (or even by leaving the house without saying goodbye). Good manners require the recognition of good manners, but moral behavior does not. We don’t need to be instructed in how to treat a dog politely at a social event. Second, good manners do not extend to ourselves: I don’t need to watch my behavior in connection with myself in case I offend myself by a lapse of politeness. Good manners are essentially other-directed: they concern social behavior not solitary behavior. I don’t need to be taught the correct way to address myself.[4] Personal hygiene may be a courtesy issue in interaction with others, but it is not impolite of me to eschew deodorant on a lone trip. I don’t have to avoid being rude to myself. Again, morality is different: I do have duties to myself as one person among many, not merely to other people. Prudence may be understood as self-directed morality. When I act so as to benefit my future self I am acting rationally and morally, but it would not be rational or moral to put on a good performance to myself of consideration and respect. Good manners are an effort to give a positive impression of myself to others and to make them feel at ease, but I don’t need to convince myself that I am a solid sort of chap; I don’t need to manage my perception of myself by deft indications of decency. I can interrupt myself in mid-sentence without incurring any self-censure regarding my manners.

Now I can discuss the question of the relation between manners and morality. I suspect I am not alone in being ambivalent about the claims of proper etiquette. On the one hand, it seems like a pretty suspect sort of business: all that contrivance, self-consciousness, self-advertising, insincerity, and brand promotion. And correct etiquette is certainly no substitute for sound morality. Just think of its associations with social rank, snobbery, the caste system, sexism, etc. Hasn’t the emphasis on good manners done more harm than good? Hasn’t it had a tendency to displace real morality? Who wants to go back to the days of, “Kind sir, may I have the honor of extending to you an invitation to partake of a libation?” and suchlike rigmarole? Must ladies be stood up for whenever they enter a room and be deemed incapable of opening doors? Must the rude rustic be condemned as a lesser being because of his rough country manners? The whole artifice can seem like a relic from the past that we could well do without. Isn’t a more relaxed view of manners more conducive to human happiness? And wasn’t it always more about social acceptance and self-advancement than genuine concern for others? Away with manners! Let morality suffice to govern human interactions—doing your duty, maximizing happiness, that sort of thing. No more bowing and scraping, but plenty of helping and giving. On the other hand, isn’t the core concept of good manners really an instance of sturdy morality? How could it be wrong to respect the feelings and rights of other people? Isn’t politeness a means to that end? It might be objected that it is really just putting on a show of such respect, a kind of pantomime, not actually making sure that those feelings and rights are respected and protected. How does bowing ensure that someone is not assaulted or wrongly imprisoned or slandered? But isn’t the show itself a valuable thing? Don’t we need to see that people care about us as beings with feelings and rights? Isn’t this a kind of social cement enabling us to function harmoniously together? Good manners are a kind of assertion of the importance of morality without themselves being morality. When you behave politely you are saying “I am a moral being” and people need to hear that. Of course, such statements can be deceptive, which is why manners can aid the villain, but they are nevertheless important ingredients in a social network. Good manners are pleasing precisely because they reassure us that morality is still in force (even if deceptively in some instances). When you stand up when a lady enters the room are you not indicating by your action that you would not sit idly by if she were in mortal danger? When you say hello to someone aren’t you letting him know that you respect him as a human being—that he is not just a piece of furniture to you? This may not be the same as actually doing something just and good, but it’s something—it’s a step in the right direction. At least you are acknowledging that you have duties towards the person in question. So manners may not be morality but they are an indicator of it—they are not an entirely separate sphere of human activity.[5] If someone shows you consideration by politely welcoming you in, they may show you consideration when things get challenging. So we shouldn’t jettison etiquette just because of its abuses and absurdities; it plays an important moral role as a symbolic recognition of the claims of morality. You may feel slighted when someone doesn’t remember your name or ignores you at a party, despite knowing that no material harm has been done to you thereby; but this isn’t irrational oversensitivity because such impoliteness indicates a person who is unlikely to treat you considerately in the event of a fire or a fight. It may not be true that “manners maketh the man”—only morality can do that—but it is true that manners indicateth the man. At least the solid core of manners has that function, putting aside all the silly rituals that are used to put down one sort of person in order to elevate another. Immoral etiquette does not rule out a morality-driven etiquette. Looking down on a stranger who doesn’t know our mannerly ways is no doubt deplorable—a case of really bad manners on our part—but it isn’t wrong to teach good manners as a token of good morals. It is just that manners should never become detached from morals, a kind of elaborate theatrical game designed to weed out the not “clubbable”; manners should be the servant of morals, never its rival. In other words, manners are a tool to be wielded responsibly, not a hammer with which to crush people socially. The ambivalence I mentioned is not unreasonable, but it is possible to preserve what is valuable in good manners while rejecting its worst excesses. I myself am fond of the bright and graceful hello, as well as the slightly melancholy but hopeful goodbye. I also like to see to it that my guest is seated comfortably without the sun in her eyes, and I make a point of not interrupting her verbal flow. It’s not much, I know, but it serves to convey my respect for the guest’s feelings and rights. So on balance I am an enthusiast of good manners, though I am sensitive to its pitfalls, and would never prefer it to morals.[6]

[1] How would the standard types of normative ethics treat manners? Presumably the utilitarian would say that manners are good or bad according as they increase or decrease total utility or something of the sort. On this account they may turn out to be immoral, since poor manners (by some standard) often lead to unjust discrimination and consequent suffering. Deontological ethics would need to include a specific set of duties listing all the forms of politeness that exist. Interestingly, no such thing is ever attempted, and standard theories don’t even include manners as belonging to our moral duties. Generally, normative ethics steers clear of the ethics of politeness (though I am sure someone must have talked about it).

[2] The word “courteous” is defined as “polite, respectful, and considerate”, and we learn that it derives from a Middle English word meaning “having manners fit for a royal court”. Today the word has lost its royal connotations but survives in humbler environs such as shops and buses. The vocabulary surrounding this universal human institution seems notably thin and lacking in descriptive power (the French word “etiquette” had to be adopted rather late in the game).

[3] There is no name for the field of study that focuses on good manners, politeness, or etiquette—nothing analogous to “ethics” or “morality”. My suggestion for such a name is “politics” but pronounced like “polite-ics”. Admittedly the written form is easily confused with another field of studies with that name, but we can remind ourselves that the words “polite” and “politic” have different roots: the former comes from a Latin word meaning “polish” or “smooth”, while the latter comes from a Greek word for “city” (“polis”). In any case, we do well to have a name for this neglected field of study and I think “politics” will do nicely, properly pronounced (po-light-ics). We can then form derivatives such as “politically correct”, using the recommended pronunciation.

[4] A lot of etiquette concerns the proper rules governing polite speech—not too loud, no profanity, no mumbling, speaking only when you are spoken to, etc. But inner speech is subject to no such prohibitions—the idea of impolite inner speech sounds like a category mistake.

[5] Might it be that we are far less polite than we should be—as it has been argued that we are far less moral than we should be? Is a form of skepticism possible that questions our normal politeness assumptions? Is our perception of the norms governing polite behavior radically mistaken? The idea seems preposterous, but perhaps something can be made of it. Maybe we should be far more attentive to our guests than we are.

[6] I was tickled to discover recently that Philip Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, shared my view of laughter as bad manners, especially when loud and “merry”; we both, however, thoroughly approve of smiling as an instance of good manners. See his Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman(1774).