Ink on a page is just ink. So how did that sentence come to be about your mother?
Pick up a book and look at a single word. Physically, it is a smear of pigment in a shape. Nothing about the chemistry of that pigment points anywhere. And yet the word means something. It reaches out past itself and lands on a thing in the world — a person, a place, an idea — and it does that so reliably that you can read a sentence written by a dead man in a language he never heard you speak and know exactly what he had in mind.
Philosophers have a technical name for that reaching-out. They call it intentionality, which is an unfortunate word because it has nothing to do with intending. It means aboutness. The property some things have of being about other things.
And it is a much harder problem for a purely material account of the world than most people realize — harder, in some ways, than consciousness, and quite different from the more familiar argument that a mind produced by blind chemistry could not be trusted to reason. This is not a question about whether your thoughts are reliable. It is a question about whether, on materialism, they can be thoughts about anything at all.
The Problem, Stated Carefully
Take any purely physical object and ask what it is about. A rock is not about anything. A river is not about anything. A hydrogen atom is not about anything. Physical things have mass, charge, position, momentum. Nothing in that inventory is a pointing-relation to something else.
Now consider your thought about your mother. That thought is unmistakably about her — about that specific woman, not about a woman who looks like her, not about the concept of motherhood in general. It reaches her. And it reaches her even if she died forty years ago, which is a strange thing for a physical relation to do, since physical relations require something on the other end.
Your thoughts can also be about things that never existed at all. You can think about a unicorn. There is no unicorn for a chain of neurons to be causally hooked to. Whatever aboutness is, it is not a physical link between two objects, because one end of it can be missing entirely and the aboutness works fine.
The Standard Answer, and Why It Circles
The usual naturalistic reply is that meaning is a matter of representation. A pattern of neurons carries information about the world the way tree rings carry information about rainfall, or the way a thermostat represents room temperature. Aboutness is just reliable correlation, refined by evolution into something useful.
That answer deserves a fair hearing, because correlation is genuinely real and evolution genuinely does tune organisms to their environments. But look closely at the examples, because every one of them has the same silent passenger.
Tree rings are not about rainfall. Tree rings are just rings. They become about rainfall when a person who knows the correlation looks at them and reads them. The same is true of the thermostat: a bimetallic strip bends at a temperature, and it means “too cold” only because an engineer assigned that meaning and a homeowner receives it. Smoke does not mean fire to the smoke. Take every mind out of the universe, and the tree rings keep forming and mean nothing whatsoever.
This is the distinction that does all the work. Philosophers call it derived versus original intentionality. Words, maps, thermostats, and photographs have derived aboutness — borrowed, assigned to them from outside by a mind. Your thoughts have original aboutness. Nobody assigned your thought its subject. It just is about her.
So when a materialist explains the mind by comparing it to a map or a computer, he has explained the borrowed case by appealing to the very thing he needed to account for. Every one of those analogies is a mind smuggled in wearing a lab coat. You cannot get original meaning by stacking up derived meaning, any more than you can pay a debt with an infinite chain of IOUs.
Two More Difficulties Worth Being Honest About
Two further problems tighten the case, and both come from inside secular philosophy rather than from apologists.
Indeterminacy. Suppose a physical state in your brain reliably fires when there is a cow in front of you. Is that state about cows? Or is it about large mammals, or cow-shaped light patterns, or cows-or-horses-on-a-dark-night, since it would fire for those too? Every one of those descriptions fits the physical facts equally well. Physics alone does not pick out a single subject — but your actual thought is perfectly determinate. You were thinking about a cow, and you know which one.
Malfunction. A thought can be about a thing and be wrong about it. That combination is hard to build out of correlation, because correlation has no notion of error — a thermometer that reads badly is not lying, it is simply doing what its parts do. Being mistaken requires that the state was already aimed at a target and missed. The aiming has to come first, and aiming is exactly what needed explaining.
None of this is an argument from ignorance, and it should not be presented as one. The claim is not “science has not figured it out yet, so God did it.” The claim is structural: the resources materialism allows itself — particles, forces, correlations — are the wrong kind of thing to yield original aboutness, because every proposed mechanism turns out to require an interpreter standing outside it.
What the Christian Says Instead
The Christian answer is not a patch applied at the point of difficulty. It is there in the first sentence of the book.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
John 1:1–3 (KJV)
Read that as an answer to the question of this article and it is startling. Materialism begins with matter and tries to squeeze meaning out of it at the end. Scripture begins with meaning — the Logos, the Word, reason and speech and intelligibility itself — and says the matter came out of that.
On the Christian account, aboutness is not a late accident that had to be assembled from parts that did not have it. It is fundamental to reality, because reality was spoken. Genesis 1 does not describe a universe that congealed. It describes a universe that was said: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light (Genesis 1:3, KJV). The world is not a brute fact that we later decorate with meaning. It is an utterance.
And that is why a creature can have thoughts that are genuinely about things. Not because chemistry crossed a threshold, but because a mind was made in the image of the Mind that spoke.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 1:27 (KJV)
The image of God is not a compliment paid to human beings. It is, among other things, an explanation. It says the reason you can mean something is that you are the kind of creature you are, made by the kind of God He is.
The Point Where This Stops Being Abstract
You can follow all of that and still ask why it matters at seven o’clock on a Tuesday. Here is why.
A worldview that cannot ground aboutness cannot, in the end, ground significance either. If nothing is really about anything, then your life is not about anything — not in any sense the universe underwrites. Meaning becomes something you paint on top of a canvas that does not care, and you will feel that on the day the painting will not hold.
The gospel says the opposite, and says it at the highest possible cost. You are not a pattern that happens to persist. You are known — the subject of a thought held by God, which is precisely the relation materialism cannot manufacture.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)
As also I am known. Somebody’s thought is about you, specifically, right now — not about a type you belong to. That is not a sentiment. It is a claim about the structure of reality, and it is the same claim that explains why the word on the page in front of you can carry anything at all.
The skeptic across the table from you is using original aboutness in every sentence he speaks against it. His objection is about Christianity. He cannot make his case without borrowing the thing his worldview cannot account for — and he certainly cannot mean what he says by accident.
He is standing in a world that was spoken, using speech, to argue that nothing was ever said.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist