Abstract: In Book Three of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Cleanthes, frustrated with Philo's resistance to his version of the argument from design, objects that Philo is demanding too high of a standard of empirical evidence. He there presents a thought experiment meant to rebut Phil that depicts a world in which books are naturally occurring phenomenon in the way that plants and animals are in the actual world. Since books are obviously the product of intelligence, Cleanthes' reasoning goes, if books were natural products, then we would have to concede that the world was created by some intelligence. Our world contains items even more obviously the product of intelligence, therefore Cleanthes would have us conclude that it too was created by a divine intelligence.

Borges's story "The Library of Babel" ("La bilbioteca de Babel") also features a set of naturally occurring books. In Borges' story, the world itself is an infinite library that contains every possible permutation of books of a certain length, using certain orthographical symbols, and of a certain format. The inhabitants of this library reason that somewhere in it there must be a book that contains a perfect index of all the other books in the library, and therefore containing all truths about the world, and perhaps a person who has read it, and go off in pilgrimage to find that book or that person.

An important moral of Borges' story is that meaning is imparted to a text not from the act of writing, but instead from that of reading. In themselves, the books of the library are neither sensical nor nonsensical, and the denizens do not even speculate about the intention behind their creation. They are mere ink on paper. The meaning that the books of the library have for its residents derives from the sense that they can make of them through interpreting the symbols therein. They develop a rubric for interpreting these symbols, and test that rubric against what they find elsewhere in the library. They interpret the symbols with more or less success by comparing their proposed interpretation against the empirical facts found in the library to the best of their ability.

Supposing that something like this lesson is right, then what are we to make of Cleanthes' argument? Well, it would appear to undermine at least one line of support for his claim that we must suppose that the naturally occurring books from his thought experiment are the product of intelligence. As Demea notes, one reason for thinking that books must be the product of intelligence is that because in reading a book we, "enter into the mind and intention of the author [...] and have an immediate feeling and conception of those ideas, which revolved in his imagination, while employed in that composition"(D 3.11; KS 155-6) As "The Library of Babel" portrays it, Demea's position represents a drastic misunderstanding of meaning and interpretation, and insofar as Cleanthes might have been relying on a similar line of reasoning to support his position, so much the worse off would his position be.