Question Does nature have any meaning? I guess the scientists who like to study the stars and the physical chemists who like to study things at the quantum level find something meaningful in nature. But those people usually say that their isn't any kind of ultimate purpose found in nature.

Accepted:
August 11, 2010

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In "Brains in a Vat," the first essay of his book, Reason, Truth, and History, the philosopher Hilary Putnam considers a thought experiment, according to which an ant crawling along the sand produces what would appear to be an image of Winston Churchill. He asks whether this image would count as a depiction of Churchill, and claims that it would not: it would not count as a depiction or representation of Churchill, because the ant has never seen Churchill, and therefore could not have the intention to depict Churchill. The image, therefore, is not intrinsically meaningful: it would take an observer to notice that the ant's tracings resemble Churchill, and to conclude that s/he has seen a representation of Churchill traced in the sand, thereby endowing the ant's tracings with meaning. Nature as a whole, like the ant, does not seem capable of producing meaning: in order to produce meaningful representations (including pictures or words), there must be an agent who knows how to manipulate those signs. Whereas astrologists consider the order of nature to be meaningful, this seems to be an instance of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake': the ascription of meaning to the wrong sort of thing to be a producer of meaning. If this is correct, then it should be concluded that nature itself doesn't have meaning. Now what distinguishes astronomy from astrology is that in astronomy, the study of the heavens is undertaken in order to explain the nature of the heavens, whereas astrology seeks to interpret the heavens. The astrologer's investigation thus seems to presuppose that the heavens themselves are meaningful, whereas the astronomer's investigation presupposes no such thing. While the astrologer need not--anymore than the astronomer--believe that there is any kind of ultimate purpose to be found in nature--in this case, in the heavens--the astrologer's attribution of meaning to the heavens does seem to presuppose that there is some kind of meaning-producing entity behind their configurations, and thus may--although I think it need not--lead naturally to the view that there is some source of purposiveness, of intention, of meaning, behind the stars that endows them with their significance. The astronomer makes no such assumptions, and so the astronomer's investigation, unlike that of the astronomer, does not attribute any meaning to the heavenly phenomena that s/he studies, and, therefore, does not presuppose that nature itself has any ultimate purpose. This need not imply, of course, that the working astronomer cannot share with the astrologer the belief that there is some ultimate purpose to nature, but only that such beliefs do not figure crucially in the astronomer's (or, for that matter, any contemporary scientist's) investigation of nature itself, quâ scientist.