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Letters
Letters
Mary Midgley’s Meanings • Good or Nutter? • Social Survival • The Evolution of Stupidity • Cosmological Dispute Continues • More Probably • What Do You Call A Collection Of Solipsists? A Contradiction • Cleanliness Next To Evil? • Person Holding Forth
Mary Midgley’s Meanings
DEAR EDITOR: Mary Midgley’s article ‘Purpose, Meaning & Darwinism’ (Issue 71) is disappointingly confused and tendentious, especially so as it is from the author of Beast and Man. Surely (in the spirit of the admirable article on philosophical study byWayne Buck in the same issue, though he does not touch on the specific topic of definition) all philosophical writing should begin by defining terms. Yet Midgley does not define ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’ or ‘teleological’, even though two of these terms are in the title of her article and the third term is hovering around throughout. I would have thought that whereas ‘teleological’ (ie goal-driven) behaviour could include non-conscious phenomena like biological growth (eg the acorn which eventually becomes a tree without much outside help), the notion of ‘purpose’ does entail a degree of consciousness or at least mind, because our usual understanding of the word does involve things like motives and intentions. No doubt Midgley might agree with this unexciting distinction, but why does she not discuss such a distinction herself? ‘Meaning’ is something else again, with an inevitably subjective connotation that must make it wider and more passive than ‘purpose’; the music analogy Midgley uses supports this since there is nothing purposeful or teleological about music, however ‘meaningful’ it may be subjectively.
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