My favourite philosopher recently gave this talk at the superb annual TED symposium.
The inversion of logic that Dennett explains here, is one of the more subtle consequences of adopting a evolutionary outlook on life, one that most people fail to appreciate. Design without a designer seems fine when talking about nature's feats of engineering, like the wing or the eye. But when the Darwinian lens is trained on human thought, people are surprised by the implications.
Responses to Dennett's line of argument are generally more or less complicated versions of this: "But....um....I experience my experiences. Thats what gives them meaning, you reductionist fool!". The design of our subjective experiences seem to need a meaning attached to them. And while we can accept design without a designer, the concept of meaning without a 'meaner' is harder to grasp.
Obviously, I have glossed over a lot here, but I suspect this point underpins much of constructivist approaches to understanding society. Why must patriarchy have a function? Why do we need a 'death of the author' to justify alternative readings of literature? Why is political language inevitably a form of social control? The answers to these post-structuralist (or whatever) questions are only really crucial if one is unable to grasp that collective trends can simply emerge from the ebb and flow of individual behaviour.
Decoupling design from a designer should imply something similar for meaning. We should look inwards to find out how we attach meaning to things, rather than appeal to some wispy holism. Dennett channels Darwin to give a possible solution to this existential conundrum.