Introduction: A Category Error Disguised as Depth
At a certain point, biological explanation is asked to do something it cannot do: explain meaning. Norms, intentions, reasons, preferences, and values are treated as if they could be derived from non-semiotic resources such as genes, neural circuits, or selection histories.
This post argues that this move is not merely incomplete but category‑confused. Biology is repeatedly promoted from a science of constraint and enablement into an account of meaning itself — and explanation collapses as a result.
1. What Biology Can Explain — and What It Cannot
Biology explains:
material organisation,
functional constraints,
energetic and structural enablements,
historical persistence.
What it does not explain is why something counts as a reason, why a norm binds, or why an intention is intelligible as such.
These are not additional facts layered on top of biology. They belong to a different explanatory register altogether.
2. Why Selection Pressures Are Not Meanings
Selection pressures are often invoked as if they could stand in for reasons:
We value X because it was adaptive.
But adaptiveness is not a reason. Selection does not justify, recommend, or obligate. It merely filters.
A pressure can eliminate forms that fail to persist. It cannot explain why a practice makes sense, why a norm ought to be followed, or why an action counts as meaningful.
To confuse selection with meaning is to confuse survival with intelligibility.
3. Intention Without Intending
Biological accounts frequently speak as if intentions could be explained by underlying mechanisms:
neural activations,
inherited dispositions,
evolved decision heuristics.
But intention is not a mechanism. It is a relational phenomenon:
oriented toward possible futures,
answerable to reasons,
situated within normative fields.
Mechanisms may enable intentional action. They do not constitute intention itself.
4. The Echo of Internalism
Readers will recognise the pattern from earlier series. Where psychology located meaning inside the individual, biology relocates it:
beneath the individual (brains, genes), or
behind the individual (evolutionary pasts).
The explanatory reflex is identical. Meaning is displaced away from relations and treated as something that can be possessed, stored, or produced without coordination.
Once again, explanation ends where meaning should begin.
5. Why the Error Persists
The error persists because biology carries enormous authority. When meaning is grounded in biology, it appears:
objective rather than negotiated,
inevitable rather than contingent,
natural rather than normative.
But this apparent solidity is purchased at the cost of intelligibility. Meaning is explained away, not explained.
Conclusion: Keeping Meaning Where It Lives
Meaning lives in relations: in practices, norms, coordination, and shared orientations. Biology enables these relations. It does not replace them.
When biology is asked to explain meaning, explanation fails not because biology is weak, but because it is misused.
In the next post, we will draw together the threads of this series, showing how biology becomes myth when promoted beyond its explanatory domain — and how restoring its proper place reopens inquiry rather than closing it.
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