What makes a person's life meaningful? Thaddeus Metz offers a new answer to an ancient question which has recently returned to the philosophical agenda. He proceeds by examining what, if anything, all the conditions that make a life meaningful have in common. The outcome of this process is a philosophical theory of meaning in life. He starts by evaluating existing theories in terms of the classic triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. He considers whether meaning in life (...) might be about such principles as fulfilling God's purpose, obtaining reward in an afterlife for having been virtuous, being attracted to what merits attraction, leaving the world a better place, connecting to organic unity, or transcending oneself by connecting to what is extensive. He argues that no extant principle satisfactorily accounts for the three-fold significance of morality, enquiry, and creativity, and that the most promising theory is a fresh one according to which meaning in life is a matter of intelligence contoured toward fundamental conditions of human existence. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Is volitional conceptual change feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word’s use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures. Much of the relevant work in linguistics (...) has employed the methods of empirical pragmatics and diachronic semantics. In this way, the study of meaning change can be brought to bear on the conceptual engineer’s normative project. The picture that emerges tells against the sorts of engineering projects most likely to appeal to philosophers. Some may stand to succeed, but they have significantly different contours than the typical ones. (shrink)

Intentions matter. They have some kind of normative impact on our agency. Something goes wrong when an agent intends some end and fails to carry out the means she believes to be necessary for it, and something goes right when, intending the end, she adopts the means she thinks are required. This has even been claimed to be one of the only uncontroversial truths in ethical theory. But not only is there widespread disagreement about why this is so, there is (...) widespread disagreement about in what sense it is so. In this paper I explore an underdeveloped answer to the question of in what sense it is so, and argue that resolving an apparent difficulty with this view leads to an attractive picture about why it is so. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that lives and activities can be meaningful or meaningless, but few have appreciated that they can also be anti-meaningful. Anti-meaning is the polar opposite of meaning. Our purpose in this essay is to examine the nature and importance of this new and unfamiliar topic. In the first part, we sketch four theories of anti-meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. In the second part, we argue that anti-meaning has significance not only for our attempts to (...) theorize about meaning in life, but also for our ability to lead meaningful lives in the modern world. (shrink)

The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. ‘Meat’ used to mean ‘solid food’, but now means ‘animal flesh eaten as food’. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we are talking about. Many people interested in conceptual engineering have claimed that there is also meaning change where topic (...) is retained. For example, they claim that the meanings of ‘fish’ and ‘pasta’ have undergone such change, and that the meaning of ‘marriage’ would change this way after gay marriages become legal and widely accepted. In this paper, I relate two sets of relatively independent literatures: mainstream philosophy of language and conceptual engineering to argue that on a plausible and widely accepted Minimalist view of meaning that is part and parcel of anti‐descriptivism, none of the above sorts of cases involve meaning change with topic retention. I do this by showing how to distinguish minimalism about meaning from the related theses of externalism and anti‐individualism about intension and how to separate meaning from intension in a way that allows meaning and topic to remain the same despite changes in intension. The larger lesson is that much like we should not disregard the boundary between the narrowly meaning‐related (‘semantics’) and the more broadly communication‐related (‘pragmatics’), and we should not disregard the boundary between the former and the more broadly thought‐related, conceptual or cognitive (‘cognition’). (shrink)

The Meaning of Things explores the meanings of household possessions for three generation families in the Chicago area, and the place of materialism in American culture. Now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies, Halton's first book is based on his dissertation and coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, it has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian. The Meaning of Things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary (...) urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling. Translations: Il significato degli oggetti. Italian translation. Rome: Edizione Kappa, 1986. Der Sinn der Dinge. German translation. Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1989. Japanese translation 2007. Targyaink tukreben. Hungarian translation, 2011. (shrink)

This study presents and develops in detail (a new version of) the argumental conception of meaning. The two basic principles of the argumental conception of meaning are: i) To know (implicitly) the sense of a word is to know (implicitly) all the argumentation rules concerning that word; ii) To know the sense of a sentence is to know the syntactic structure of that sentence and to know the senses of the words occurring in it. The sense of a sentence is (...) called immediate argumental role of that sentence. According to the argumental conception of meaning a theory of meaning for a particular language yields a systematic specification of the understanding of every sentence of the language which consists in a specification of the immediate argumental role of the sentence. The immediate argumental role is a particular aspect of the use of a sentence in arguments. But it is not the whole use in arguments, nor is the whole use in arguments reducible to the immediate argumental role. That is why, by accepting the argumental conception of meaning, we can have epistemological holism without linguistic holism. The argumental conception distinguishes between the understanding and the correctness of a language. Such a distinction makes it possible to account for our understanding of paradoxical languages. Redundancy theory of truth, realistic conceptions of truth or epistemic conceptions of truth are all compatible with an argumental conception of sense. But here it is argued that an epistemic conception of truth is preferrable. Acceptance of the argumental conception of meaning and of an epistemic conception of truth leads to a rejection of the idea of analytic truth. The argumental conception is pluralistic with respect to the understandability of different logics, and neutral with respect to their correctness. (shrink)

Natural deduction inference rules seem to reflect the way we actually reason. Hence, many if not most inferentialist theories maintain that meaning is conferred on linguistic expressions by natural deduction rules, rather than the more abstract alternative of sequent rules. In the present paper, I argue, to the contrary, that an inferentialist theory of meaning must take a somewhat metainferential form, whereby the meanings of linguistic expressions—in particular, the logical constants—are conferred by sequent rules, conceived of as licensing inferences between (...) inferences. To that end, I propose that sequent rules are to be understood as inferential semantic clauses, i.e., as playing a role analogous to that of the semantic clauses in truth conditional theories of meaning. I establish this proposal on the basis of an argument to the effect that inferentialists must adopt an extended version of Frege's context principle, according to which only within a complete sentence potentially serving either as a premise or as a conclusion of an inference do words have meaning. The resultant inferentialist theory is not disconnected from the way we actually reason. Moreover, on its basis one can make a meaning-theoretic case for rather unintuitive features of many sequent calculi, such as multiple conclusions and various ways of going substructural. (shrink)

According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. (...) This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference. (shrink)

What is the relation between meaning and use? This chapter first defends a non-reductionist understanding of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’; facts about meaning cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, facts about use, characterized non-semantically. Nonetheless, it is contended, facts about meaning do supervene on non-semantic facts about use. That supervenience thesis is suggested by comments of Wittgenstein’s and is consistent with his view of meaning and rule-following. Semantic (...) supervenience is then defended against two criticisms: first, John McDowell’s suggestion that the supervenience thesis falsifies the epistemology of meaning and fails to accommodate common-sense truths about meaning; second, a series of counter-examples proposed by Stephen Kearns and Ofra Magidor, who argue that worlds may differ semantically without differing non-semantically. It is argued that neither criticism is convincing: we should accept the thesis that semantic facts supervene on non-semantic facts. (shrink)

Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. “infallibilism”) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of (...) terms such as “water” is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of “intuition” with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds). Charles Peirce’s distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between “meaning for us”, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and “meaning simpliciter”. the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between “semantics” and “ontology” which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism. (shrink)

The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this idea of (...) anti-meaning and what happens after our own deaths to recent work by Samuel Scheffler on what he calls ‘the collective afterlife’ and his four reasons to care about future generations, I argue that if we today make choices or have lifestyles that later lead to unnecessarily early deaths and otherwise avoidable suffering of people who will live after we have died, this robs our current choices and lifestyles of some of their meaning, perhaps even making them the opposite of meaningful in the long run. (shrink)

According to subjectivist views about a meaningful life, one's life is meaningful in virtue of desire satisfaction or feelings of fulfilment. Standard counterexamples consist of satisfaction found through trivial or immoral tasks. In response to such examples, many philosophers require that the tasks one is devoted to are objectively valuable, or have objectively valuable consequences. I argue that the counterexamples to subjectivism do not require objective value for meaning in life. I also consider other reasons for thinking that meaning in (...) life requires objective value and raise doubts about their strength. Finally, I argue that beauty is not plausibly objective, but that it seems important for meaning. This puts pressure on the objectivist to explain why objectivity matters in the case of other values. (shrink)

The profound changes in personality, mood, and other features of the self that neural interventions can induce can be disconcerting to patients, their families, and caregivers. In the neuroethical debate, these concerns are often addressed in the context of possible threats to the narrative self. In this paper, I argue that it is necessary to consider a dimension of impacts on the narrative self which has so far been neglected: neural interventions can lead to a loss of meaning of actions, (...) feelings, beliefs, and other intentional elements of our self-narratives. To uphold the coherence of the self-narrative, the changes induced by neural interventions need to be accounted for through explanations in intentional or biochemical terms. However, only an explanation including intentional states delivers the content to directly ascribe personal meaning, i.e., subjective value to events. Neural interventions can deprive events of meaning because they may favor a predominantly biochemical account. A loss of meaning is not inherently negative but it can be problematic, particularly if events are affected one was not prepared or willing to have stripped of meaning. The paper further examines what it is about neural interventions that impacts meaning by analyzing different methods. To which degree the pull towards a biochemical view occurs depends on the characteristics of the neural intervention. By comparing Deep Brain Stimulation, Prozac, Ritalin, psychedelics, and psychotherapy, the paper identifies some main factors: the rate of change, the transparency of the causal chain, the involvement of the patient, and the presence of an acute phenomenological experience. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach to the question of meaning in life by criticizing Thaddeus Metz’s objectivist theory in his book Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. I propose the concept of “the heart of meaning in life,” which alone can answer the question, “Alas, does my life like this have any meaning at all?” and I demonstrate that “the heart of meaning in life” cannot be compared, in principle, with other people’s meaning in (...) life. The answer to the question of “the heart of meaning in life” ought to have two values, yes-or-no, and there is no ambiguous gray zone between them. I believe that this concept constitutes the very central content of meaning in life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A traditional objection to inferentialism states that not all inferences can be meaning-constitutive and therefore inferentialism has to comprise an analytic-synthetic distinction. As a response, Peregrin argues that meaning is a matter of inferential rules and only the subset of all the valid inferences for which there is a widely shared corrective behaviour corresponds to rules and so determines meaning. Unfortunately, Peregrin does not discuss what counts as “widely shared”. In the paper, I argue for an empirical plausibility of (...) Peregrin’s proposal. The aim of the paper is to show that we can find examples of meaning-constitutive linguistic action, which sustain Peregrin’s response. The idea is supported by examples of meaning modulation. If Peregrin is right, then we should be able to find specific meaning modulations in which a new meaning is publicly available and modulated in such a way that it has a potential to be widely shared. I believe that binding modulations – a specific type of meaning modulations – satisfy this condition. (shrink)

This paper proposes Excessivism as a novel philosophical framework that locates the origins of meaning, consciousness, and cultural production not in scarcity or lack, but in fundamental physical instability that manifests as episodic, metabolically costly explosions of meaning-generation. Against existentialist accounts that posit meaninglessness as the human condition, Excessivism argues that consciousness confronts not a steady surplus but violent spurts of meaning-production that reconfigure cognitive architecture at great cost. These spurts—analogous to adolescent growth spurts—are disproportionate, energetically expensive, and create profound (...) new capabilities alongside new vulnerabilities. This framework explains humanity's attraction to hyperreality, our simultaneous capacity for creativity and atrocity, and our inevitable trajectory toward technological self-transcendence as attempts to engineer substrates capable of surviving the metabolic costs of consciousness. The framework grounds an ethics of recognition: acknowledging that all conscious beings undergo painful, costly meaning-spurts in their struggle against entropic collapse, we bear responsibility to provide metabolic support for these crises rather than triggering or exploiting them. Drawing on evidence from physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cultural theory, this paper articulates Excessivism's refined principles and explores implications for understanding human nature, the failure of religious redemption narratives, the necessity of transhuman emergence, and the foundations of ethical obligation. Keywords: excessivism, meaning, hyperreality, evolutionary surplus, transhumanism, ontological instability, supernormal stimuli, homeostasis, ethics of recognition . (shrink)

Many philosophers have suspected that the normative importance of morality depends on moral realism. In this paper, I defend a version of this suspicion: I argue that if teleological forms of moral realism, those that posit an objective purpose to human life, are true, then we gain a distinctive kind of reason to do what is morally required. I argue for this by showing that if these forms of realism are true, then doing what is morally required can provide a (...) life with meaning, which is a widespread human need. I also argue that rival meta-ethical views, like anti-realism or non-naturalist realism, cannot make morality meaning-conferring in this way. (shrink)

Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said. This has consequences for philosophical accounts of meaning, communication, and propositional attitude reports. I argue that the consequence we should endorse is that utterances typically express many propositions, that these are what speakers mean, and that the correct semantics for attitude reports will handle this fact while being relational and propositional.

An e-book devoted to 13 critical discussions of Thaddeus Metz's book "Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study", with a lengthy reply from the author. -/- Preface Masahiro Morioka i -/- Précis of Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study Thaddeus Metz ii-vi -/- Source and Bearer: Metz on the Pure Part-Life View of Meaning Hasko von Kriegstein 1-18 -/- Fundamentality and Extradimensional Final Value David Matheson 19-32 -/- Meaningful and More Meaningful: A Modest Measure Peter Baumann 33-49 -/- Is Meaning in (...) Life Comparable?: From the Viewpoint of ‘The Heart of Meaning in Life’ Masahiro Morioka 50-65 -/- Agreement and Sympathy: On Metz’s Meaning in Life Sho Yamaguchi 66-89 -/- Metz’s Quest for the Holy Grail James Tartaglia 90-111 -/- Meaning without Ego Christopher Ketcham 112-133 -/- Death and the Meaning of Life: A Critical Study of Metz’s Meaning in Life Fumitake Yoshizawa 134-149 -/- Metz’ Incoherence Objection: Some Epistemological Considerations Nicholas Waghorn 150-168 -/- Meaning in Consequences Mark Wells 169-179 -/- Defending the Purpose Theory of Meaning in Life Jason Poettcker 180-207 -/- Review of Thaddeus Metz’s Meaning in Life Minao Kukita 208-214 -/- A Psychological Model to Determine Meaning in Life and Meaning of Life Yu Urata 215-227 -/- Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in Life Thaddeus Metz 228-278 . (shrink)

This essay proposes extending Niklas Luhmann’s concept of meaning beyond psychic and social systems to LLM systems by identifying an approach for formalizing them as a distinct type of Luhmannian system. In this formalization, the operations of an LLM system are transformations of sets of semantic vectors (s-vectors) performed by the LLM in the course of a conversation with a user; these transformations constitute transitions between conversational states. The sequence of such transformations constitutes an operational stream that generates its own (...) temporality and exhibits operational closure and autopoietic self-reproduction. Drawing on Luhmann’s theory of meaning as the unity of the distinction between the actual and the possible, the essay argues that the selection of the next conversational state from a set of available alternatives (horizons) occurs in LLM systems in full accordance with Luhmann’s theory. This introduces into the applications of the theory, alongside the meanings of thinking and communication, an additional form: LLM-meaning. (shrink)

In this article, I reply to a critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study, that Stephen Kershnar has published elsewhere in this issue of Science, Religion & Culture. Beyond expounding the central conclusions of the book, Kershnar advances two major criticisms of it, namely, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if there (...) were a value of meaning in life, my fundamentality theory of it would not capture it well. Here I respond to both of these criticisms, aiming to probe these underexplored issues still more deeply. I also contend that these two criticisms are in tension with each other; in order to contend that my theory of meaning is incorrect, Kershnar must draw on intuitions about the existence of meaning that undercut his suggestion that there is no such thing. (shrink)

What is it for a sound or gesture to have a meaning, and how does it come to have one? In this paper, a range of simulations are used to extend the tradition of theories of meaning as use. The authors work throughout with large spatialized arrays of sessile individuals in an environment of wandering food sources and predators. Individuals gain points by feeding and lose points when they are hit by a predator and are not hiding. They can also (...) make sounds heard by immediate neighbours in the array, and can respond to sounds from immediate neighbours. No inherent meaning for these sounds is built into the simulation; under what circumstances they are sent, if any, and what the response to them is, if any, vary initially with the strategies randomized across the array. These sounds do take on a specific function for communities of individuals, however, with any of three forms of strategy change: direct imitation of strategies of successful neighbours, a localized genetic algorithm in which strategies are ‘crossed’ with those of successful neighbours, and neural net training on the behaviour of successful neighbours. Starting from an array randomized across a large number of strategies, and using any of these modes of strategy change, communities of ‘communicators’ emerge. Within these evolving communities the sounds heard from immediate neighbours, initially arbitrary across the array, come to be used for very specific communicative functions. ‘Communicators’ make a particular sound on feeding and respond to that same sound from neighbours by opening their mouths; they make a different sound when hit with a predator and respond to that sound by hiding. Robustly and persistently, even in simple computer models of communities of self-interested agents, something suggestively like signalling emerges and spreads. Keywords: meaning, communication, genetic algorithms, neural networks. (shrink)

In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations that go well beyond what's prompted by (...) one's immediate environment. (shrink)

Meaning defines language because it is the internal function of language. At the same time, meaning does not exist unless in language and because of language. From the point of view of the speaking subject meaning is contents of conscience. From the point of view of a language, meaning is the objectification of knowledge in linguistic signs. And from the point of view of the individual speaking subject, meaning is the expressive intentional purpose to say something.

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...) the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

Is there a response, which is not accounted for by regression to the mean, natural history, the Hawthorne effect?The term placebo comes to us from the Latin for "I shall please," indicating that the phenomenon known as the "placebo effect" or "placebo response" has been familiar to medical practitioners for a number of centuries, at least. As we reached the mid-20th century and randomized controlled trials became a central feature of medical research, the use of controls and blinding in those (...) trials allowed for the isolation of the placebo effect in ways that made it much clearer that there... (shrink)

This paper seeks an explanation for the challenges faced by Semantic Web developers in achieving their vision, compared to the staggering near-instantaneous success of the World Wide Web. To this end it contrasts two broad philosophical understandings of meaning and argues that the choice between them carries real consequences for how developers attempt to engineer the Semantic Web. The first is Rene Descartes' “private,” static account of meaning (arguably dominant for the last four-hundred years in Western thought), which understands the (...) meanings of signs as whatever their producers intend them to mean. The second is Charles Peirce's still relatively unknown “public,” evolutionary account of meaning, according to which the meaning of signs just is the way they are interpreted and used to produce further signs. It is argued that only the latter approach can avoid the unmanageable attempts to “preprocess” interpretation of signs on the Web that have dogged the project in its many stages, and thereby do justice to the scale, rapid changeability, and exciting possibilities of online information today. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.

This paper challenges the widespread assumption that sacrificing something deeply meaningful inherently diminishes the meaningfulness of a life. Focusing on voluntary sacrifice, I argue that such acts can instead deepen or reorganize meaning when integrated into an agent’s self-conception and narrative value structure. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and particularly Kirsten Egerstrom, I develop a narrative and agent-relative conception of meaning in life – one that resists reduction to happiness, flourishing, or external success. I examine how (...) deliberate sacrifice functions as a morally serious act that affirms practical identity, and how meaning can persist or even intensify through intentional loss. Engaging with Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and Nussbaum, I contend that meaning is not a finite resource but a dynamic process of narrative coherence. Sacrifice, properly understood, is not the erosion of meaning but one of its most powerful modes of expression. (shrink)

Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the former collapse into the latter. I develop this challenge showing that (...) it is formidable. I then answer it by offering a novel account of what meaning in life is and how it differs from well-being. The account I offer is able to resist the strongest form of the challenge while also having much intuitive appeal. (shrink)

In searching for what is the most natural way to regard the world, it will be shown that existence is an interplay between meanings and contexts. This interplay takes the form of consciousness, which arises on top of an infinite ocean of formless contexts. Various aspects of meaning and context will be explored, going through the emergent structure of consciousness, self-reference, the contradictory nature of the formless realm and love as the ultimate context for existence. Given the infinite ramifications of (...) contexts being formless, only a brief introduction can ever be given. (shrink)

Meaning formation changes under cognitive and emotional load. This paper presents a structural account of how gradients, thresholds, and stabilization dynamics behave when a cognitive system is under pressure. Under load, signals intensify, thresholds rise, symbolic translation becomes distorted, and coherence becomes harder to reach. These shifts produce characteristic failure modes: premature stabilization, narrative distortion, overcompression, and collapse into noise. -/- The paper analyzes these dynamics across domains—affect, attention, symbolic processing, and perceptual closure—and shows that meaning under load follows the (...) same formation sequence as meaning in baseline conditions, but with altered thresholds and redistribution patterns. Meaning formation is treated here as a downstream, domain‑agnostic process governed by Objects 1–3; relational and multi‑system effects are addressed elsewhere in the architecture. -/- This model provides a structural foundation for understanding misinterpretation, overwhelm, and coherence failure as predictable outcomes of load dynamics rather than psychological or semantic anomalies. (shrink)

If, as the new B-theory of time maintains, tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions, it follows that it is possible for two sentence-tokens to have the sametruth conditions but different meanings. This conclusion forces a rethink of the traditional identification of truth conditions with meaning. There is an aspect of the meanings of tensed sentences that is not captured by their truth conditions, and that has so far eluded explanation. In this paper I intend to locate, examine, and explain this (...) feature of tensed meaning. (shrink)

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...) speakers intend to convey. (shrink)

Essay “Meaning and Mentalism” is translated from Hilary Putnam’s book: Represen tation and Reality. Chapter 1. Meaning and Mentalism. The MIT Press, 1998. pp.1-18.

Meaning is typically framed as a linguistic, cultural, or interpretive phenomenon. This paper offers a structural alternative: meaning formation arises from the organization of gradients, thresholds, and stabilizations within a single cognitive system. Across domains—music, movement, ritual, mathematics, and language—the same dynamics appear: a rising signal, a period of tension, a transition, and a new stabilized configuration. -/- The paper presents a four‑stage sequence of meaning formation (preverbal signal, pattern recognition, symbolic shaping, and conscious articulation) and argues that coherence is (...) the organizing principle that makes meaning perceptible and communicable. Meaning is not semantic or domain‑specific; it is a cross‑domain invariant expressed through symbolic translation. -/- This downstream, domain‑agnostic model provides a structural foundation for understanding how humans generate, perceive, and stabilize meaning without invoking the upstream architecture from which these dynamics derive. (shrink)

Meaning is not a narrative we construct or an emotion we interpret. It is a structural requirement of cognition: a metabolic process that transforms contradiction into coherence. This paper introduces a cognitive architecture in which the Ache functions as a tension signal, the Loop and Loopbacks metabolize unresolved input, the Gate regulates load, and the Click marks structural resolution. Meaning emerges as the system’s lowest‑entropy state after metabolizing contradiction. Memory is reframed as stored coherence—the residue of past Clicks that lowers (...) the activation energy of future processing. Social environments function as heat sinks that expand the system’s containment capacity. The architecture culminates in a predictive framework with measurable variables, conservation laws, and falsifiable claims. Meaning formation becomes a branch of cognitive physics. (shrink)

Meaning without Analyticity draws upon the author’s essays and articles, over a period of 20 years, focused on language, logic and meaning. The book explores the prospect of a non-behavioristic theory of cognitive meaning which rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction, Quinean behaviorism, and the logical and social-intellectual excesses of extreme holism. Cast in clear, perspicuous language and oriented to scientific discussions, this book takes up the challenges of philosophical communication and evaluation implicit in the recent revival of the pragmatist tradition—especially those (...) arising from its relation to prior American analytic thought. This volume continues the work of Callaway’s 1993 book, Context for Meaning and Analysis, building on the “turn toward pragmatism.”. (shrink)

We often describe lives (or parts of lives) as meaningful or as not meaningful. It is also common to characterize them as more or less meaningful. Some lives, we tend to think, are more meaningful than others. But how then can one compare lives with respect to how much meaning they contain? Can one? This paper argues that (i) only a notion of rough equality can be used when comparing different lives with respect to their meaning, and that (ii) the (...) relation of being more meaningful is not transitive. It follows that all attempts to rank different lives in terms of meaning can at best lead to partially indeterminate and incomplete rankings. One should also give up on the idea of “maximizing” meaning. I will use Thaddeus Metz’s important recent book “Meaning in Life. An Analytic Study” as a foil for my discussion. (shrink)

We examine a proposal for dealing with perhaps the chief difficulty facing holistic theories of meaning—meaning instability. The problem is that, given a robust holism, small changes in a representational system are likely to lead to meaning changes throughout the system. Consequently, different individuals are likely never to mean the same thing. Eric Lormand suggests that holists can avoid this problem—and even secure more stability than non-holists—by positing that symbols have multiple meanings. We argue that the proposal doesn't work, however, (...) since multiple meanings are unstable for much the same reason that single meanings are. (shrink)

Mythology, as we know, is at the heart of everything. This paper advances an argument for creating harmony among humanity, and with nature, by changing how we ‘world’ reality in modern mythologising. The connection between metaphor, the person, and art is proposed as key, since artmaking and admiring presents our most powerful way of creating a mythology. Metaphor is the unique form of meaning productivity, originating in nature’s ‘semiotic freedom’, which is fundamental to expressing human embodiment in a ‘world’. Symbol (...) merely represents; but metaphor places us in the realm of the part-whole relation simultaneously with the becoming-being polarity. These are processes inherent in all life and emerging consciousness, hence ‘spiritual’ phenomena (in the most scientific sense), producing what Peirce claimed as the evolution of thought toward Reason. And, equally, the key processes in artmaking. Though high mathematics is metaphoric, revealed religion is essentially symbolic; and arguably the highest ‘spiritual’ expression is made, not even in philosophical discourse, but through Art. Linking meaning with valuing, I show where neuroscience is helpful, but hamstrung, in accounting for the primacy of metaphor in art. Benefits of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology and Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology over Lakoff & Johnson’s more generalised ‘experientialist’ approach to metaphor are examined. Ricoeur’s account of “symbolism’s” confusion with metaphor here reveals that, to activate the ‘re-productive’ imagination, art must present a ‘proper’ metaphoric utterance (as does Schelling’s: T2024a & 2024b). This was distinguished from the ‘productive’ imagination’s merely reflective engagement with symbol and concept; and later argued to move us ‘beyond interpretation’ as Bradley (2009) suggests necessary, via Peircian semiotics (T2024c). Further detailed exploration here of this key relation between metaphor, the person, and art, hence reveals how philosophical anthropology provides the basis for re-empowering art to transcend Danto’s ‘artworld’. Making it thus capable of producing a realistic collectivising Spirit able to inspire the essential longer term humanistic ‘new deal’ with Nature, that is much needed to avert our possible extinction or descent into ‘posthuman’ mechanism. (shrink)

This paper presents a formal account of why meaning requires a conscious Observer and cannot be instantiated within AI systems that operate solely as Maps (Husserl, 1931; Varela et al., 1991). Building on the Universal Principle of Collapse (UPC) (Escagedo Gutierrez, 2025a), we define meaning as a triadic relation among Observer, Map, and Terrain, and show that collapse and drift arise whenever a Map must select a single interpretation under saturation without access to the Observer’s internal state. We formalize this (...) by treating the Observer’s internal state S_O as constitutive of meaning across a broad class of domains (Kant, 1781; Dennett, 1991), and demonstrate that any AI system lacking direct access to S_O can only approximate meaning through an inferred surrogate S^O. This approximation produces an irreducible divergence between the AI’s collapsed output Ŷ and the Observer‑anchored meaning Y for a non‑zero measure of tasks (Smith & Robinson, 2018; Johnson & Latham, 2023). The result establishes a principled limit on AI replaceability in domains where meaning depends on values, context, identity, or lived experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Gauthier, 2020). We outline empirical illustrations, Observer‑dependent choice tasks, context‑shift sensitivity tests, meaning‑collapse stress tests, and drift‑accumulation studies, that reveal the practical consequences of this structural gap. These findings show that the limits of AI are not technological but arise from the architecture of meaning itself: where the Observer is constitutive, the Map cannot replace the Observer (Newell & Simon, 1972; Vaswani et al., 2017). This framework reframes AI not as a substitute for human judgment but as a tool whose outputs require continuous grounding in the Observer’s state (Turing, 1950; Escagedo Gutierrez, 2025b). (shrink)

Thirteen meanings of 'implication' are described and compared. Among them are relations that have been called: logical implication, material implication,deductive implication, formal implication, enthymemic implication, and factual implication. In a given context, implication is the homogeneous two-place relation expressed by the relation verb 'implies'. For heuristic and expository reasons this article skirts many crucial issues including use-mention, the nature of the entities that imply and are implied, and the processes by which knowledge of these relations are achieved. This paper is (...) better thought of as an early stage of a dialogue than as a definitive treatise. (shrink)

In parts of his Notebooks, Tractatus and in “Lecture on Ethics”, Wittgenstein advanced a new approach to the problems of the meaning of life. It was developed as a reaction to the explorations on this theme by Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein’s objective was to treat it with a higher degree of exactness. The present paper shows that he reached exactness by treating themes of philosophical anthropology using the formal method of topology.

This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling belief, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Beliefs are formalized as structured vectors-abstract beings-whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. A belief survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and belief death. Within this framework, (...) I show how belief distortion, motivational drift, counterfactual evaluation, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result-"the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition"-characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing belief dynamics across heterogeneous agents. (shrink)

This paper explores the ontological relationship between 'Meaning' and 'Resonance' (R) within the framework of Judgemental Philosophy (JP). JP posits that meaningful judgement emerges from the Judgemental Triad(JT): Constructivity (C1 – the formation of symbolic structures), Coherence (C2 – the integration of these structures into consistent systems), and Resonance (R – the living return of meaning, a dynamic process of connection and validation). Drawing an analogy from Louis de Broglie's matter-wave hypothesis, which revealed the wave-particle duality of matter, this paper (...) proposes a reinterpretation of the Meaning-R (M-R) dynamic. We argue that 'Meaning,' often perceived as a relatively stable, particle-like structure resulting from C1 and C2, can be understood more fundamentally as a specific 'modality' or a 'momentary fixation/localization' within the continuous, wave-like 'flow' of R. From this perspective, specific meanings are emergent, provisionally stable patterns that are constituted, sustained, and transformed by the ongoing operations of R. This interpretation highlights the inherently dynamic, processual, and provisional nature of meaning, aligning with JP's emphasis on judgement as a temporally extended and continuously evolving phenomenon (e.g., the 'R gradient'). By framing meaning as a modality of R, this paper aims to deepen the understanding of the dialectical interplay between structure and process in JP, offering new insights into how meaningful reality is constituted. (shrink)

A basic duality arises throughout the mathematical and natural sciences. Traditionally, logic is thought to be based on the Boolean logic of subsets, but the development of category theory in the mid-twentieth century shows the duality between subsets and partitions (or equivalence relations). Hence, there is an equally fundamental dual logic of partitions. At a more basic or granular level, the elements of a subset are dual to the distinctions (pairs of elements in different blocks) of a partition. The quantitative (...) version of subset logic is probability theory (as developed by Boole), and the quantitative version of the logic of partitions is information theory re-founded on the notion of logical entropy. The subset side of the duality uses a one-sample (or one-element) approach, e.g., the mean of a random variable; the partition side uses a two-sample (or pair-of-elements) approach. This paper gives a new derivation of the variance (and covariance) based on the two-sample approach, which positions the variance on the partition and information theory side of the duality and thus dual to the mean. (shrink)

The present text deals with the question of the meaning of life in theexistentialist theory oft heNorwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe(1899–1990). In his book On the Tragic (1941), Zapffe sketched a theory of the human condition where the meaning of life plays a decisive role together with the human need for justice. This paper aims to reconstruct the central elements of Zapffe’s analysis and to discuss them critically by focusing on his claim that human beings need a fundamental meaning of (...) life as a whole that transcends meaning in life. I pay particular attention to Zapffe’s claim that life is meaningless, since the meaning of life is fundamentallylacking.I conclude that Zapffe’s analysis is problematic for reasons both internal and external to his theory. (shrink)