Your Thoughts Are About Things. Nothing Made Only of Matter Is About Anything.
There is a grocery list on your counter. Somewhere on it is the word milk.
Now go find the milk on the paper. Scrape the ink off and analyze it. You will get carbon, pigment, a binding agent. You will not find any milk, and you will not find any reference to milk, because reference is not a chemical property. Those four letters have nothing in them that points at a gallon in a refrigerator. They point only because a mind reads them that way. Hand the same list to someone who cannot read English and the pointing stops cold, while every molecule stays exactly where it was.
Fine. Ink borrows its meaning from a reader. Everyone agrees.
Here is the question that has no comfortable naturalist answer: where does the reader get his?
The Thing Philosophers Call Aboutness
Your thought about your wife is about your wife. Not about a woman in general, not about the photons that hit your retina in 1998 — about her, the specific person, including on days when she is four states away and nothing physical connects the two of you at all. You can think about things that do not exist. You can think about last Thursday, which no longer exists anywhere. You can think about the number seven, which never existed anywhere in the sense that a rock does.
Philosophers call this feature intentionality — an old word that has nothing to do with intending to do something. It means directedness. Being of or about or toward. It is the most ordinary feature of your mental life and the hardest one to build out of parts.
Because consider what a purely physical state is. A neuron fires or it does not. A pattern of ions moves. Those are events with causes and effects, and causes and effects are not the same thing as reference. Smoke is caused by fire; smoke is not about fire. A thermostat’s bimetallic strip bends because the room is warm; the strip is not thinking about the temperature. A tree ring correlates with a dry summer and has no opinion of it. Correlation and causation are everywhere in the physical world. Aboutness is not.
Two Arguments This Is Not
Let me fence this off carefully, because two better-known arguments live in the neighborhood and this is neither of them.
It is not the argument that blind processes cannot produce reliable reasoning. That one is about whether your beliefs are likely to be true. Set it aside entirely. Suppose for the sake of argument your faculties are perfectly reliable. The question here is prior and stranger: how does a lump of tissue manage to have a belief about anything in the first place, true or false?
Nor is this the argument from consciousness — the redness of red, the felt quality of a toothache. That is about how experience seems. Intentionality is about what thought refers to. You could imagine a being with vivid inner feelings and no concepts, and a being with concepts and no feelings. They are two separate bills, and naturalism has been handed both.
I am pressing only the second one. Matter in motion, left to itself, is not about anything.
The Best Naturalist Answers, Stated Fairly
This problem is not news to naturalist philosophers. Serious people have worked on it for forty years and the proposals deserve a real hearing, not a cartoon.
The first answer is covariance. A brain state is about cows because it reliably fires when cows are present — meaning just is lawful correlation. It is a clean idea, and it runs straight into what philosophers named the disjunction problem. Consider a frog whose neurons fire at small dark moving objects, so it snaps. It will snap at a fly. It will also snap at a thrown pellet. So is that state about flies, or about small dark moving things, or about flies-or-pellets? Correlation alone cannot say. And worse, it cannot make room for error. If the state means whatever causes it, then when you mistake a mannequin for a man you did not get anything wrong — you simply had a mannequin-or-man thought, correctly. But misrepresentation is real. A theory of meaning that cannot produce a false belief has not described thinking.
The second answer is biological function. Content comes from what a mechanism was selected to do: the frog’s detector is about flies because catching flies is what got that circuitry passed on. This is the strongest proposal on the table and I want to grant its force. But notice what it has quietly imported. Natural selection does not assign purposes; it is a bare statistical fact about which organisms left more offspring. To say a mechanism is for detecting flies is already to read a goal into a history that contains no goals — and the history underdetermines the reading, just as the correlation did. Ancestral frogs that ate flies also ate things-that-looked-like-flies. Function talk in biology is enormously useful and, on a consistently naturalist accounting, is a description we lay over the data rather than something we find in it. Which puts the interpreter back in the room.
The third answer is the most candid: give up original aboutness. On this view, treating a system as having beliefs is simply a stance we adopt because it predicts behavior well — the same way we say a chess program "wants" the center of the board. No real aboutness anywhere, just a useful posture.
That is a consistent position. Follow it home. If nothing is really about anything, then the sentence naturalism is true is not really about naturalism, and the theory that explains aboutness away cannot itself be a claim about how the world is. It becomes a noise we find convenient. A man is free to hold that. He is not free to hold it and go on arguing as though his words reach reality.
Borrowed Meaning Needs a Lender
Here is the shape of the whole thing in one distinction.
Some things mean by permission. Ink, road signs, smoke signals, the letters on this screen — every one of them points only because a mind assigns the pointing. That is borrowed meaning. Other things mean on their own account: your thought needs no outside reader to be about what it is about. That is original meaning.
Every naturalist account above offers resources of the borrowed kind — correlations that have to be interpreted, functions that have to be assigned, stances that somebody has to take. And borrowed meaning is parasitic by definition. You cannot build the first lender out of borrowers. Somewhere the chain has to start with something that means without being read.
Scripture starts there. Not with particles that later get interpreted, but with a Speaker whose speech is the origin of everything there is to interpret.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1, KJV)
Read that against the problem and see how exactly it answers. The universe does not begin with stuff that meaning is later laid over. It begins with meaning — a Word, a Person, speaking. And the first creative act in Genesis is not a collision. It is a sentence.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Genesis 1:3, KJV)
Which is why it is no accident that the creature made in His image is the creature who refers. You think about things because you were made by Someone who speaks, in the image of Someone who speaks. Aboutness is not a late, awkward byproduct of chemistry in your skull. It is a family resemblance.
How Much Weight Should This Carry?
Believers divide on how to use an argument like this, and both sides have a point worth hearing.
Some hold that this is where apologetics must begin: unbelief cannot account for the tools it argues with, so the only honest move is to show a man he is standing on borrowed ground. Others answer that a gap in current philosophy of mind is still a gap, and that stacking a case on what naturalism has not yet explained risks the same embarrassment that has visited other arguments from what we do not know.
I think the second caution is fair and I will say so plainly: this is not a proof that closes the subject. What it is, is a bill. For four decades the best naturalist work on meaning has either smuggled in an interpreter or denied that meaning is real. Those are the two available exits, and both of them cost more than the problem did. A reasonable man is entitled to notice that.
The One Who Reads You
Let me land this where it belongs, because you did not come here for philosophy of mind. You came because somewhere in you is the suspicion that your inner life is just weather in a machine — and if that is all it is, nobody is home and nothing you think matters.
Here is the answer to that, and it is better than an argument. The God who made the referring creature reads the references.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. (Psalm 139:2, KJV)
Not infers. Understands. The thought you have not said out loud, the one you could not put into words if you tried — He reads it without translation, including the ones you would rather He did not, which is the frightening half and the hopeful half of the same verse. The writer of Hebrews calls the Word of God a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. You are not opaque matter. You are legible.
And the Word that made you did not stay at a distance to be studied. He was made flesh and dwelt among us. The One who is Himself the meaning of everything came into the world He had spoken, took the guilt that the legible heart was hiding, and died for it — so that being fully read by God is no longer the worst news you could receive, but the best.
So the next time someone tells you your thoughts are nothing but chemistry, ask him the small question. What is that sentence about?
If it is about something, he has more than chemistry. If it is about nothing, he has not said anything at all.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist