An enactivist approach to treating depression: cultivating online intelligence through dance and music

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment....     

Reenactment: an embodied cognition approach to meaning and linguistic content

A central finding in experimental research identified with embodied cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e., executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment??the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances??makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction.     

Saying what you mean, meaning what you say: language, interaction and interpretation

As analysts, we strive to say what we mean, which involves understanding the other person's communication, finding the appropriate form of words to articulate what we have understood, and expressing them in the tone of voice which can be heard. Meaning what we say refers to the authenticity of our response, that what we say is sincere. My theme touches on different ways of saying what we mean and how this can affect the meaning of what we say. Some of the issues are aesthetic, some grammatical. How some sentence structures lead to closing off communication while others open it.     

You,me, and meaning: an integrative review of connections between relationships and meaning in life

Social relationships are seen to be vital to human functioning, both in terms of psychological functioning and physical health. Relationships are a cornerstone of well-being. For instance, having positive relationships has been linked to greater happiness, life satisfaction and physical health outcomes. Meaning in life, or the perception that one's life is significant and has a purpose, is another prominent cornerstone of well-being. As such, social relationships and meaning in life should have reciprocal associations. In this paper, cross-cultural theory and empirical research will be reviewed to explore the role of family, romantic and friendship relationships in supporting meaning in life. Further, we will discuss the implications of the current research and propose new directions for future research.     

An enactivist account of abstract words: lessons from Merleau-Ponty

Enactivist accounts of language use generally treat concrete words in terms of motor intentionality systems and affordances for action. There is less consensus, though, regarding how abstract words are to be understood in enactivist terms. I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy to argue, against the representationalist paradigm that has dominated the cognitive scientific and philosophical traditions, that language is fundamentally a mode of participation in our world. In particular, language orients us within our milieus in a manner that extends into the depth of the idea-endowed world (where “ideas” are construed in a specifically Merleau-Pontian sense). This conceptualization of language allows us to see that abstract words orient us bodily just as surely as concrete words do, albeit in a manner that is more diffuse across the entirety of given situations, as I will show with an example of abstract language use in Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld. These insights are applied to some of the recent enactivist discourse to suggest some ways in which representationalism maintains a latent presence in this discourse. I conclude by pointing to developments in conceptual metaphor theory that can enrich our sense of how abstract language is involved in embodied understanding.     

Structural properties of personal meaning systems: A new approach to measuring meaning of life

This article introduces a new qualitative–quantitative approach to assess meaning of life. The participants described their sources of meaning and how they were interconnected. Four quantitative measures for (1) the accessibility of meaning-related knowledge, the degree of (2) differentiation and (3) elaboration of personal meaning systems, and (4) their coherence were calculated. The sample consisted of 59 theology and science students. The study tested (a) whether the structural properties of personal meaning systems predicted health and well-being, and (b) reflected different degrees of expertise in constructing meaning. Differentiation, elaboration, and coherence measures correlated with health and well-being and predicted life satisfaction. Theology students presented more differentiated, elaborated, and coherent personal meaning systems than science students. Both results indicate that assessing structural properties of personal meaning systems can be a promising new approach to measure meaning of life.     

The traditional approach to meaning invariance

Kathryn Parsons attempts a criticism of the traditional approach to the problem of meaning invariance of predicate expressions when a theory is replaced by a successor. I have considered three types of cases which Parsons presents as counter-examples to Fine's criterion, and find that the first two do not succeed in refuting the criterion. The third, however, does suceed; and I argue that there is no way to revise Fine's criterion in order to remove the difficulty. Hence some non-traditional approach to meaning invariance is required, or subjectivity in the science must be shown to be avoidable in spite of the incommensurability of theories.     

Homograph norms: An alternative approach to determining meaning dominance

In the present study, we provide a new technique for the collection of homograph norms that reduces subjectivity in the determination of meaning dominance by allowing participants rather than experimenters to indicate to which meaning or meanings the associates were related. To evaluate the effectiveness of this new technique, a subset of homograph norms were used in three separate experiments, demonstrating that (1) when presented with additional meaning categories, participants classified the associates consistently into the primary and secondary meaning categories; (2) overall, the participants were most familiar with primary meanings, followed by secondary, tertiary, and quaternary meanings; and (3) the meaning categories provided to the participants during norms collection were appropriate, since the two meanings provided for each homograph by the participants were consistent with the original data. Finally, in a fourth experiment, we compared the results of this new technique with a parallel set collected in Australia. The high degree of similarity in the results provides validity for this procedure. The homograph norms discussed in this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

An approach to the problem of meaning: Semantic networks

An approach to the problem of meaning through the postulation of semantic networks is presented. Subjects generated them for ten concrete and ten abstract nouns with two different procedures. Comparisons were made between the semantic network and the set of associations given to each concept. Finally, both the concrete concepts' and the abstract concepts' networks were compared. It was suggested that a form of meaning is given by the semantic network of the concept, by a reconstructive memory process.     

Having an interpretation

I investigate what it means to have an interpretation of our language, how we manage to bestow a determinate interpretation to our utterances, and to which extent our interpretation of the world is determinate. All this is done in dialogue with van Fraassen’s insightful discussion of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and of scientific structuralism.     

The interpretation of classically quantified sentences: a set-theoretic approach

We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne circles) that constitutes a semantic representation, these concepts can also be expressed syntactically in the form of algebraic formulas. We hypothesized that the quantified sentences have an abstract underlying representation common to the formulas and their associated sets of diagrams (models). We derived 9 predictions (3 semantic, 2 pragmatic, and 4 mixed) regarding people's assessment of how well each of the 5 diagrams expresses the meaning of each of the quantified sentences. We report the results from 3 experiments using Gergonne's (1817) circles or an adaptation of Leibniz (1903/1988) lines as external representations and show them to support the predictions.