Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of (...) the Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

The Holocaust’s extreme character, which makes it different from other historical events, can arguably by associated, with the help of philosophy, with its ‘negative radicality’. This radicality emanates from those elements in the cataclysm that seem to lack any apparent meaning when approached by means of ‘normal’ historical experience and understanding. Hence it is hardly surprising that the Shoah poses some of the biggest challenges to our capacities to comprehend, conceive, and represent not only historical events but history (...) and historicity themselves. It turned out to be a more and more a ‘radical countertestimony’ to traditional philosophy; as philosophy has a lot to do with the historical circumstances in which it is written, we must ask how the Holocaust’s radicalism force a re-examination of philosophical categories. This does not mean we will find no meaning of the Holocaust: but if we want to deepen our understanding of it, we have to treat is as a philosophical-historical and cultural problem, subject to philosophical-historical and cultural answers. (shrink)

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly (...) to language and what is more, sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and (...) Death Studies. We accepted about 50 presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life. (shrink)

This volume of new essays presents groundbreaking interpretations of some of the most central themes of Wittgenstein's philosophy. A distinguished group of contributors demonstrates how Wittgenstein's thought can fruitfully be applied to contemporary debates in epistemology, metaphilosophy and philosophy of language. The volume combines historical and systematic approaches to Wittgensteinian methods and perspectives, with essays providing detailed analysis that will be accessible to students as well as specialists. The result is a rich and illuminating picture of a key (...) figure in twentieth-century philosophy and his continuing importance to philosophical study. (shrink)

To me, philosophy is the relentless pursuit of 1) how I am to live and die from this moment forward and 2) the meaning of my having been born. This pursuit does not stop until I reach an understanding that satisfies me. If I expand my field of view slightly, it is to understand where humanity came from and where it is going through an intellectual lens. When I entered the ethics program at the University of Tokyo, I (...) thought I could do this sort of thing at a university. This expectation, however, was utterly betrayed. The study of philosophy at Japanese universities in the 1980s was mainly the study of writings by Western philosophers. What was undertaken in the ethics program and neighboring philosophy program was the close reading and interpretation of detailed elements of texts by great philosophers, always in the original language, and this was considered to be philosophy and ethics. I strongly opposed this even as I entered graduate school, and my first presentation given to the Japanese Society for Ethics when I was a graduate student was a critique of this organization.... (This is an English translation of a slightly modified version of my Japanese essay “What Does Doing Philosophy Mean to Me?,” which was published in the August issue of Contemporary Thought (Special Feature: How Philosophy is Made). It offers insight not only into my way of thinking about philosophy but also into the world of contemporary Japanese philosophy.). (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue "Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol. 5: Selected Papers from the Tohoku Conference," Journal of Philosophy of Life Vol. 14 , No.1, 2024 , 1-53 . -/- Perfectionism and Vulgarianism About a Meaningful Life David Matheson -/- What’s the Point If We’re All Going to Die?: Pessimism, Moderation, and the Reality of the Past Matthew Pianalto -/- Meaning in Life in the Context (...) of Psychopathology and Personal Recovery Bernice Brijan. (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.4: Selected Papers from the Pretoria Conference,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.12, No.1, 2022, pp.1-115. -/- Theorizing About Meaning in Life Cheshire Calhoun -/- Is It Possible to Say ‘Yes’ to Traumatic Experiences?: A Philosophical Approach to Human Suffering Masahiro Morioka -/- Why Beauvoir Is Not a Subjectivist about Meaning in Life Kiki Berk -/- Axiological (...) Values Grounded in Basic Motivational Dispositions: How to Be a Subjectivist about Meaning in Life Frank Martela -/- Pessimism, Political Critique, and the Contingently Bad Life Patrick O’Donnell -/- Reason, Luck, and Meaning: A Critique of the Moralist View of Meaning in Life Kazuki Watanabe. (shrink)

Meanings are present everywhere in our environment and within ourselves. But these meanings do not exist by themselves. They are associated to information and have to be created, to be generated by agents. The Meaning Generator System (MGS) has been developed on a system approach to model meaning generation in agents following an evolutionary perspective. The agents can be natural or artificial. The MGS generates meaningful information (a meaning) when it receives information that has a connection with (...) an internal constraint to which the agent is submitted. The generated meaning is to be used by the agent to implement actions aimed at satisfying the constraint. We propose here to highlight some characteristics of the MGS that could be related to items of philosophy of information. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

When our smartphones distract us, much more is at stake than a momentary lapse of attention. Our use of smartphones can interfere with the building-blocks of meaningfulness and the actions that shape our self-identity. -/- By analyzing social interactions and evolving experiences, Roholt reveals the mechanisms of smartphone-distraction that impact our meaningful projects and activities. Roholt’s conception of meaning in life draws from a disparate group of philosophers—Susan Wolf, John Dewey, Hubert Dreyfus, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Borgmann. Central to (...) Roholt’s argument are what Borgmann calls focal practices: dinners with friends, running, a college seminar, attending sporting events. As a recurring example, Roholt develops the classification of musical instruments as focal things, contending that musical performance can be fruitfully understood as a focal practice. -/- Through this exploration of what generates meaning in life, Roholt makes us rethink the place we allow smartphones to occupy in the everyday. But he remains cautiously optimistic. This thoughtful, needed interrogation of smartphones shows how we can establish a positive role for technologies within our lives. (shrink)

In her impressive book, looking at the philosophy and science of well-being, Anna Alexandrova argues for the strong claim that we possess no stable, unified concept of well-being. Instead, she thinks the word “well-being” only comes to have a specific meaning in particular contexts, and has a quite different meaning in different contexts. I take issue with (1) her claim that we do not possess a unified, all-things-considered concept of well-being as well as with (2) her failure (...) to consider why we might want a unified concept. I grant that Alexandrova is probably correct that the word “well-being” is used differently in different contexts. But this only shows that one word can come to be used to express different concepts. Moreover, noting that several concepts exist that are picked out by “well-being” doesn’t establish that we lack altogether a notion of all-things-considered well-being. I believe we have such a concept, even though it is not always the concept in play. Moreover, I think we need such a concept. The conceptual muddles Alexandrova highlights—muddles that result from a single word being used to express multiple ideas—remind us how important it is to be able to distinguish different concepts from one another, as well as how important it is to periodically remind ourselves of how various forms of specialist dialogue relate back to the broader, more general notion of “well-being.”. (shrink)

This book provides a concise overview, with excellent historical and systematic coverage, of the problems of the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. Howard Callaway explains and explores the relation of language to the philosophy of mind and culture, to the theory of knowledge, and to ontology. He places the question of linguistic meaning at the center of his investigations. The teachings of authors who have become classics in the field, including Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, (...) and Putnam are critically analyzed. I share completely his conviction that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy follows the spirit of the enlightenment in insisting on intellectual sincerity, clarity, and the willingness to meet scientific doubts or objections openly. --Professor Henri Lauener, Editor of Dialectica. (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)

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)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, the essay elucidates Husserl’s descriptions of meaning consciousness from the 1901 Logical Investigations. I examine Husserl’s observations about the three ways we can experience meaning and I discuss his conclusions about the structure of meaning intentions. Second, the paper explores how Husserl reworked that 1901 theory in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Investigation. I explore how Husserl transformed his descriptions of the three intentions involved in meaningful experience. By doing so, (...) Husserl not only recognized intersubjective communication as the condition of possibility of linguistic meaning acts, but also transformed his account of the structure of both signitive and intuitive acts. In the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by showing how, on the basis of these new insights, Husserl reconstructs his theory of fulfillment. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible. Many philosophers from Hobbes through Berkeley and Hume to the pragmatists, the logical positivists and (above all) Wittgenstein have devised such theories and criteria in order to discredit their opponents. I argue 1) that such theories and criteria are morally obnoxious, a) because they smack of the totalitarian (...) linguistic tactics of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 and b) because they dehumanize the opposition by portraying them as mere spouters of gibberish; 2) that they are profoundly illiberal since if true, they would undermine Mill’s arguments for free speech; 3) that such theories are prone to self-contradiction, pragmatic and otherwise; 4) that they often turn against their creators including what they were meant to exclude and excluding what they were meant to include; 5) that such theories are susceptible to a modus tollens pioneered by Richard Price in his Review Concerning the Principle Questions of Morals(1758); and 6) that such theories are prima facie false since they fail to ‘predict’ the data that is it their business to explain (or, in the case of criteria, fail to capture the concept that they allegedly represent). The butcher’s bill is quite considerable: some of Hobbes, a fair bit of Locke, half of Berkeley, large chunks of Hume, Russell's Theory of Types, verificationism in its positivist and Dummettian variants, much of pragmatism and most of Wittgenstein - all these have to be sacrificed if we are to save our souls as philosophic liberals. (shrink)

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)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say (...) it another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

This present study aims at exploring the meaning of the building of Santa Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (abbreviated as: SMFCC) or Toasebio Parish located in District Glodok, Jakarta, Indonesia. The author exposes in advance the meaning of the physical elements of the building SMFCC as understood by history writers and building experts. These meanings are not inseparable from the elements of human activities in the building. Through qualitative methods and literature review, the author describes in the Results (...) section, how those meanings can be further interpreted through the existing studies and expressions of the SMFCC Parish Head. It is found that these meanings are contested − from the direction of religious faith and of culture − but complete our understandings of the church which is well-known as an Indonesian cultural heritage and dominated by Chinese and pastors from Europe. (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’re 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 shouldn’t disregard the boundary between the narrowly meaning-related (“semantics”) and the more broadly communication-related (“pragmatics”), we shouldn’t disregard the boundary between the former and the more broadly thought-related, conceptual or cognitive (“cognition”). (shrink)

The primary function that philosophy has to perform is analysis of meanings. Contemporary philosophy is a story of the idea of meaning, in the words of Gilbert Ryle. The study of meaning in our time takes several ways. Two ways come in the forefront. The first relates to the formal theories proposed by Frege, earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky and Dummmett. The second relates to the theories of use suggested by the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Grice (...) and Searle. Formal theories are concerned with the formal structure of languages, and the interrelationships between sentences, while the use theories emphasize the role of speakers in determining and understanding the meaning. This book provides an analytical and critical study of the theory communication- intention in meaning according to Paul Grice (1913-1988), which gave speakers and their intentions a central place in the interpretation of meaning, and also aims to formulate the links between theory of communication- intention in semantics and the theory of conversational implicature in pragmatics. الوظيفة الأساسية التي يتعين على الفلسفة القيام بها هي تحليل المعاني. والفلسفة المعاصرة قصة لفكرة المعني على حد تعبير جيلبرت رايل. وتسلك دراسة المعنى في عصرنا عدة طرائق. تأتي في طليعتها طريقتان. ترتبط الأولي بالنظريات الصورية التي اقترحها فريجه، وفتجنشتين المبكر، وكواين، وتشومسكي، ودميت. وترتبط الثانية بنظرية الاستعمال التي اقترحها فتجنشتين المتأخر، وأوستن، ورايل، وستراوسون، وجرايس، وسيرل وتحفل النظريات الصورية بالبنية الصورية للغات، والعلاقات المتبادلة بين الجمل،على حين تؤكد نظريات الاستعمال على دور المتكلمين في تحديد المعنى وفهمه. ويقدم هذا الكتاب دراسة تحليلية نقدية لنظرية قصد الاتصال (النظرية القصدية) في المعنى عند جرايس (1988-1913) الذي أعطى المتكلمين ومقاصدهم مكانة محورية في تفسير المعنى، ويهدف أيضا إلى صياغة الروابط بين نظرية قصد الاتصال في علم الدلالة ونظرية الاقتضاء التخاطبي في علم الاستعمال المعنى، علم الدلالة، علم الاستعمال، المعنى لدى المتكلم، الاقتضاء التخاطبي، قواعد المحادثة، النظريات الصورية، نظريات الاستعمال، فريجه، جرايس، سيرل . (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess Mark Richard’s interesting and important development of the claim that linguistic meanings can be fruitfully analogized with biological species. I argue that linguistic meanings qua cluster of interpretative presuppositions need not and often do not display the population-level independence and reproductive isolation that is characteristic of the biological species concept. After developing these problems in some detail, I close with a discussion of their implications for the picture that Richard paints concerning the dangers of (...) conceptual engineering and the prospects for dynamic notions of semantic stability. (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)

I address here the question what sense to make of the idea that there can be thought prior to language. I begin by juxtaposing two familiar and influential philosophical views, one associated with the work of Paul Grice, the other associated with the work of Donald Davidson. Grice and Davidson share a broad, rationalist perspective on language and thought, but they endorse conflicting theses on the relation between them. Whereas, for Grice, thought of an especially complex sort is a precondition (...) of linguistic meaning, for Davidson, there can be no genuine thought without language. I argue that both views present us with unpalatable alternatives concerning our understanding of the natural origins of objective thought and meaningful language. Drawing on what I take to be key insights from Grice and Davidson, I then lay out some broad desiderata for an intermediate position. I finally turn to a certain form of nonlinguistic communication of the sort of which both prelinguistic children and languageless animals are capable, viz., expressive communication. I propose that a proper appreciation of the character and function of expressive communication can help us trace the outlines of the desired intermediate position. (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)

My main aim is to clarify what we mean by ‘look’ sentences such as (1) below – ones that we use to talk about visual experience: -/- (1) The ball looked red to Sue -/- This is to help better understand a part of natural language that has so far resisted treatment, and also to help better understand the nature of visual experience. -/- By appealing to general linguistic principles I argue for the following account. First, we use (1) to (...) talk about an event. Second, we use the verb ‘look’ to specify the kind of event about which we are talking – it is a looking event. Third, we use the subject ‘the ball’ to specify a stimulus of the event – something that looks some way in the event. Fourth, we use the adjunct ‘to Sue’ to specify an experiencer of the event – someone to whom things look some way in the event. Finally, we use the complement ‘red’ to specify a way of the event – a way in which the event occurs (I take ways of occurring to be properties of events). Which way do we use ‘red’ in (1) to specify? I argue: the maximally specific way w such that the following is generically true: looking events whose stimulus is red occur in way w (it is important that this is understood generically: this is what does much of the work in explaining our use of (1) and other ‘look’ sentences). Putting this together, what we mean by (1) is: there was a looking event whose stimulus was the ball, whose experiencer was Sue, and which occurred in the maximally specific way that looking events occur when their stimulus is red. -/- This account of how we use ‘red’ in (1) is one of the most interesting aspects of my thesis. It extends to an account of how we use ‘proud’ in ‘John walks proud’, ‘as if he is American’ in ‘John talks as if he is American’, ‘like a duck’ in ‘John sounds like a duck’, and so on. In each case we use the expression in question to specify a way: the maximally specific way proud people walk, the maximally specific way American people talk, and so on. So the study of ‘look’ sentences has much to tell us about the functioning of many other English language constructions, and suggests that ways have a significant role to play in the semantics of natural language – a fact that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by linguists or philosophers of language. -/- My thesis also has implications for the philosophy of perception. One of the central questions about perception is: What is the nature of visual experience? What is it, for example, for a ball to look red to Sue? My thesis offers an answer: What it is for the ball to look red to Sue is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ to be the case, and what we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the ball, whose experiencer is Sue, and which is occurring in a certain way. It thus delivers an adverbial account of visual experience, one that has the resources to better deal with problems that are traditionally thought to be decisive against adverbial accounts. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad (...) absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models (...) cannot apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative intentions. I argue that Grice’s notion of natural (...) meaning, because it is a factive relation, is too restrictive for this purpose. I then present the notion of probabilistic meaning. The latter seems adequate for analyzing our ability to interpret non-communicative emotional signs, but it faces several difficulties when it comes to analyzing how we and other animals interpret emotional _signals_, i.e. signs that have the function to communicate emotional information. I present three of these difficulties. En passant, I suggest that a teleosemantic notion may be better suited for these challenges. (shrink)

In this article the linguistic processes of consciousness are discussed at the informational and semantic levels. The key question is devoted to the distinction between the information, meaning and sense in the physical, logico-semantic and historic levels of brain and consciousness. The principal point runs that the human linguistic process of sense producing takes the variety and indistinctness in the cultural presupposition. The modern theories of philosophy of mind relying on the theories of Soviet psychological school propose some (...) new solutions in the pragmatic questions of the semantic noncomputability. In this review we will try to justify the dualistic correlation between the cultural base and the communicative semantic process. (shrink)

By endorsing that Bildung is a condition for thought, McDowell explicitly sets out to revive a theme in classical german philosophy. As long as the concept of Bildung is intended to play a role in McDowell’s theory of meaning and reasons, however, it is best understood in the light of its distinctive combination of neo-Fregeanism about content and Wittgensteinianism about rule-following. The Fregean part is there to warrant that reasons are objective, the Wittgensteinian move is to account for (...) our grasping of reasons. I argue that, as it stands, the project can hardly succeed. According to this reading, Bildung not only provides the epistemic resources to access reasons. It shapes them in a way that is in tension with the idea that reasons are objective. I conclude with a guess about the amendment needed to keep the project in the air. (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)

This paper explores three important interrelated themes in Putnam’s philosophy: language, meaning, and the context-sensitivity of “truth-evaluable content.” It shows how Putnam’s own version of semantic externalism is able to steer a middle course between an internalism about meaning that requires a “language of thought” (or “mentalese”) and a mind-independent realism about meaning that requires Platonic objects (or other such “abstract entities”), while doing justice to how ascriptions of meaning are causally related to the objective (...) world. The following account is able to allow for the primacy of language over thought while ensuring that the content of thought is partially fixed by the external world. The emphasis in Putnam’s later writings on the “context sensitivity” of meaning are often construed as marking a major departure from his earlier thought. It is here argued that such an interpretation involves a misunderstanding both of the commitments of Putnam’s original form of semantic externalism and of the implications of the version of context sensitivity he embraces. (shrink)

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)

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)

Explores the central role in Wittgenstein's later work of his opposition to a 'mechanistic' conception of understanding. Offers a diagnosis of Kripke's skeptical paradox on this basis.

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)

Disability has been a topic in multiple areas of philosophical scholarship for decades. However, it is only in the last ten to fifteen years that philosophy of disability has increasingly become recognized as a distinct field. In this paper, I argue that the foundational question of continental philosophy of disability is the question of the meaning of ability. Engaging a range of canonical texts across the Western intellectual tradition, I argue that the foundational question of continental (...) class='Hi'>philosophy of disability is the question of the meaning of ability. I then explore three pathways toward this question: the verdict of bodies, the bind of bodies and worth, and the dogma of individual ability. I contend that unlike the question of the meaning of being, the question of the meaning of ability is not simply a problem of forgetting but instead a problem of cruelty and dehumanization. (shrink)

In an effort to produce new and more sustainable technologies, designers have turned to nature in search of inspiration and innovation. Biomimetic design (from the Greek bios, life, mimesis, imitation) is the conscious imitation of biological models to solve today's technical and ecological challenges. Nowadays numerous different approaches exist that take inspiration from nature as a model for design, such as biomimicry, biomimetics, bionics, permaculture, ecological engineering, etc. This variety of practices comes in turn with a wide range of different (...) promises, including sustainability, increased resilience, multi-functionality, and a lower degree of risk. How are we to make sense of this heterogeneous amalgam of existing practices and technologies, and of the numerous promises attached to them? We suggest that a typology of biomimetic approaches would provide a useful hermeneutic framework to understand the different tensions that pull this variegated landscape in different directions. This is achieved through a critical analysis of the literature in different fields of biomimetic design and the philosophy of biomimicry, in order to derive conceptual and normative assumptions concerning the meaning and value of the imitation of nature. These two dimensions are then intersected to derive an analytical grid composed of six different biomimetic types, which enable the classification of existing and possible biomimetic approaches, practices, and technologies according to their specific conceptual assumptions and guiding norms. (shrink)

This essay examines how Husserl stretches the bounds of his philosophy of meaning, according to which all propositions are categorical, to account for existential propositions, which seem to lack predicates. I examine Husserl’s counterintuitive conclusion that an existential proposition does possess a predicate and I explore his endeavor to pinpoint what that predicate is. This goal is accomplished in three stages. First, I examine Husserl’s standard theory of predication and categorial intuition from his 1901 Logical Investigations. Second, I (...) show how Husserl imposes those 1901 insights to uncover the predicate of the existential proposition in unpublished manuscripts and lectures. He determines that the existential proposition predicates of the subject, that it corresponds to an actual object. This analysis reveals that Husserl’s descriptions of existential propositions from the late 1890s employed both static and genetic methodologies. In those texts, he carefully untangles and clarifies the co-enmeshed passive and active moments of consciousness and shows that the passive givenness of certain circumstances is the condition of possibility for our active verifying of propositions. Finally, I execute a critical assessment of Husserl’s thought to reveal that, while his insights about existential propositions are largely correct, they are augmented by re-construing them within the context of his mature philosophy. Only by renouncing his metaphysical neutrality and by accounting for intersubjectivity, can Husserl properly clarify existential propositions. (shrink)

Corcoran, John. 2005. Meanings of word: type-occurrence-token. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 11(2005) 117. -/- Once we are aware of the various senses of ‘word’, we realize that self-referential statements use ambiguous sentences. If a statement is made using the sentence ‘this is a pronoun’, is the speaker referring to an interpreted string, a string-type, a string-occurrence, a string-token, or what? The listeners can wonder “this what?”. -/- John Corcoran, Meanings of word: type-occurrence-token Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150 (...) E-mail: [email protected] The four-letter written-English expression ‘word’, which plays important roles in applications and expositions of logic and philosophy of logic, is ambiguous (multisense, or polysemic) in that it has multiple normal meanings (senses, or definitions). Several of its meanings are vague (imprecise, or indefinite) in that they admit of borderline (marginal, or fringe) cases. This paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyses several senses of ‘word’ focusing on a constellation of senses analogous to constellations of senses of other expression words such as ‘expression’, ‘symbol’, ‘character’, ‘letter’, ‘term’, ‘phrase’, ‘formula’, ‘sentence’, ‘derivation’, ‘paragraph’, and ‘discourse’. Consider, e.g., the word ‘letter’. In one sense there are exactly twenty-six letters (letter-types or ideal letters) in the English alphabet and there are exactly four letters in the word ‘letter’. In another sense, there are exactly six letters (letter-repetitions or letter-occurrences) in the word-type ‘letter’. In yet another sense, every new inscription (act of writing or printing) of ‘letter’ brings into existence six new letters (letter-tokens or ink-letters) and one new word that had not previously existed. The number of letter-occurrences (occurrences of a letter-type) in a given word-type is the same as the number of letter-tokens (tokens of a letter-type) in a single token of the given word. Many logicians fail to distinguish “token” from “occurrence” and a few actually confuse the two concepts. Epistemological and ontological problems concerning word-types, word-occurrences, and word-tokens are described in philosophically neutral terms. This paper presents a theoretical framework of concepts and principles concerning logicography, including use of English in logic. The framework is applied to analytical exposition and critical evaluation of classic passages in the works of philosophers and logicians including Boole, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Tarski, Church and Quine. This paper is intended as a philosophical sequel to Corcoran et al. “String Theory”, Journal of Symbolic Logic 39(1974) 625-637. https://www.academia.edu/s/cdfa6c854e?source=link -/- . (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 708-709, August 2012.

A 10,000+ word critical overview of analytic philosophy devoted to life's meaning, with some focus on books and more recent works.

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)

In this chapter, we explore how themes of existential philosophy have been used to develop a formal orientation of psychotherapy, and we discuss the main principles of existential psychotherapy and their application in practice. We also draw upon case examples to specifically illustrate how the approach of existential psychotherapy is utilized in clinical practice. In the case examples, each patient's identify has been disguised to maintain confidentiality. The new science of meaning, represented by the chapters in this volume, (...) not only offers therapists a deep conceptual framework within which to practice older, more established techniques but should also suggest new approaches. By recognizing the centrality of meaning as sense making and acknowledging the distinction between the what and the why of sense making, therapists should be armed with a variety of epistemic and teleological tools with which to fashion therapy strategies that are unique for each individual. (shrink)

Contrary to dictionaries, a non sequitur isn’t “any statement that doesn’t follow logically from previous statements”. Otherwise, every opening statement would be a non sequitur: a non sequitur is a statement claimed to follow from previous statements but that doesn’t follow. If the sentence making a given statement doesn’t contain ‘thus’, ‘so’, ‘hence’, ‘therefore’, or something else indicating an implication claim, the statement isn’t a non sequitur in this sense. But this is only one of several senses of that expression, (...) which, contrary to appearances, is a unitary common noun more properly written as one word: non-sequitur or nonsequitur. Above a nonsequitur was, roughly speaking, a conclusion of an invalid premise- conclusion argument, but not every such, only those that were stated to follow from premises that had been stated. Every informative proposition is the conclusion of an invalid argument. Anyway, nonsequiturs were not arguments. However, the expression ‘nonsequitur’ also means “invalid premise- conclusion argument”. It also means something like “fallacious reasoning” as in ‘Abe’s proof of the big-bang hypothesis is a nonsequitur’. The English noun is also used for an irrelevancy, an abrupt change of topic, or for any of many other expressions that are gratuitous, inappropriate, incongruous, or in some other way out of place. The English noun is derived from the Latin expression ‘non sequitur’, which is not a common noun but a sentence variously meaning “it isn’t in sequence ”, “it doesn’t follow”, “it is out of order”, etc. A statement that begins ‘in the second place’ is a nonsequitur if the previous sentence lacked implication of something like ‘in the first place’ or if it contained something similar to ‘in the third place’. In fact, a true implication claim can be a nonsequitur if there is no reason for making it. If Ben says ‘Hence, Abe swims and Abe swims’ in reply to Carl’s statement ‘Abe swims‘, then Ben may well be committing a nonsequitur. Many conversation stoppers are nonsequiturs. This lecture surveys and analyses a wide selection of uses of ‘nonsequitur’ in logic and logic-related literature. -/- END OF DRAFT 4 -/- NOTE 091215: When Rick Perry was discussing possible withdrawal from the race—unfortunately not the human race but the Republican race—a reporter reminded him that just last week Donald Trump predicted the Perry withdrawal. Perry interrupted with “A broken clock is right once a day”. -/- If you did not know Perry you might think his reply was a brilliant diversionary nonsequitur. If you know Perry you might think his reply was a stupid nonsequitur. -/- For the record, he did say ‘once a day’, not ‘twice a day’. BTW, my interjection ‘unfortunately not the human race but the Republican race’ was also a nonsequitur. (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)

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.