A science of meaning. Can behaviorism bring meaning to psychological science?

An argument is presented for making meaning a central dependent variable in psychological science. Principles of operant psychology are then interpreted as providing a basic foundation for a science of meaning. The emphasis here is on the generality of basic operant concepts, where learning is a process of meaning making that is governed largely by natural contingencies; reinforcement is an organic process in which environment-behavior relations are selected, defined here as a dialectical process of meaning making; and reinforcers are experiential consequences with acquired, ecologically derived meanings. The author concludes with a call for a more interdisciplinary science of psychology, focusing on the individual in society.     

The meaning of “Evolution”

In a recent article [Mertz 2001] in this journal I argued for the virtues of a realist ontology of relation instances (unit attributes). A major strength of this ontology is an assay of ontic ('material') predication that yields an account of individuation without the necessity of positing and defending 'bare particulars'. The crucial insight is that it is the unifying agency or combinatorial aspect of a relation instance as predicable that is for ontology the principium individuationis [Mertz 2002; 1996]. Or in short, what is ontically predicable, precisely as such, is the cause of individuation. As a preface to this positive doctrine I offered arguments against the coherence of bare particulars as defended in an article by J. P. Moreland [1998]. In a reply contained in this issue Moreland and Timothy Pickavance (hereafter M/P) propose to answer my objections [2002]. The response that follows provides reasons why, I contend, M/P have not succeeded in parrying my objections to bare particulars.     

Is meaning implicated in illusory conjunctions?

According to feature-integration theory, when attention is diverted from a display, features from different objects in that display may be wrongly recombined, giving rise to "illusory conjunctions" (Treisman & Schmidt, 1982). Two experiments are reported that examine the nature of these illusory conjunctions. In displays that contain color names and adjectives printed in colored ink, subjects made two kinds of interesting and previously unreported errors. Consider, for example, a display that included the word BROWN in red ink and the word HEAVY in green ink. Subjects would sometimes incorrectly report that the word RED or the ink color brown had appeared in the display (e.g., RED in green ink or HEAVY in brown ink). It appears that subjects extract semantic representations from input and are sometimes confused about whether a particular representation has been extracted from a word or a color patch. Contrary to feature-integration theory, these findings suggest that illusory conjunctions may occur with high-level codes as well as with perceptual features.     

Is a life without meaning satisfying? The moderating role of the search for meaning in satisfaction with life judgments

Results from two studies revealed that the relation between meaning in life and life satisfaction was moderated by the extent to which the rater was searching for meaning in his or her life. In Studies 1a and 1b, the presence of meaning was more strongly related to life satisfaction for those who were actively searching for meaning in life than for those who were not. Study 2 extended the finding to judgments concerning a fictitious target's life satisfaction based on experimentally manipulated information regarding meaning in life. Thus, the role of meaning in life satisfaction judgments varies across individuals, depending on the level of search for meaning in life. These results suggest that search for meaning behaves like a schema increasing the salience of meaning-relevant information, and provides new ways of understanding people's efforts to establish meaningful lives.     

Test “reliability”: Its meaning and determination

The concept of test reliability is examined in terms of general, group, and specific factors among the items, and the stability of scores in these factors from trial to trial. Four essentially different definitions of reliability are distinguished, which may be called the hypothetical self-correlation, the coefficient of equivalence, the coefficient of stability, and the coefficient of stability and equivalence. The possibility of estimating each of these coefficients is discussed. The coefficients are not interchangeable and have different values in corrections for attentuation, standard errors of measurement, and other practical applications.     

Lepore and Ludwig on ‘explicit meaning theories’

The fundamental problem proponents of truth conditional semantics must face is to specify what role a truth theory is supposed to play within a meaning theory. The most detailed proposal for tackling this problem is the account developed by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig. However, as I will show in this paper, theories along the lines of Lepore and Ludwig do not suffice to put someone into the position to understand the objectlanguage. The fundamental problem of truth conditional semantics thus remains unsolved.     

Do people access meaning when they name banknotes?

Do people access the monetary value of banknotes when they say them aloud? In this study, we evaluated this question by asking people to name sequences of euro banknotes blocked by category or mixed with exemplars of other categories. The participants did not show an interference effect in the blocked context. The absence of semantic interference effect was also observed when participants named euro banknotes that did not have imprinted monetary value. These results suggest a direct connection between perceiving banknotes and accessing their names.     

The psychoanalytic theories of wish‐fulfilment and meaning

Psychoanalysis regards many previously inexplicable phenomena as wish‐fulfilments, which have meaning inasmuch as they express the person's wishes or affects. This might appear to make such psychoanalytic explanations rather like ordinary explanations of conduct and to enlarge the area of intentional and possibly that of responsible behavior. But a critique of these psychoanalytic accounts will show that they are very unlike accounts in terms of ordinary notions of fulfilling or expressing wishes and that the psychoanalytic concept of wish‐fulfilment differs sufficiently from the ordinary one for it to be difficult to determine how to test psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning wish‐fulfilment by merely considering the way in which we assess claims utilizing the ordinary notion. In fact, such a critique will show that for a certain type of claim regarding wish‐fulfilments, psychoanalysts have not indicated ways of confirming or disconfirming such claims — in the sense that they have not shown how to find any evidence which would support these claims to a higher degree than contrary or contradictory claims. After offering the first part of this critique, which is a comparison of psychoanalytic and ordinary notions of fulfilling and expressing wishes, some considerations concerning a second part of the critique are presented regarding the connection between the construct of psychic energy and that of wish‐fulfilment.     

“Motority” in three functional domains of word meaning

This article deals with relations between mental motor evoking capacity (motority, Putnoky, 1975a, b) and the sensory and affective connotations, as well as certain denotations, of words. Sensory connotation is indexed by degree of visual auditory, and tactual imagery, as assessed on a 7-point scale, while affective connotation is indexed by the usual three factors tapped by the semantic differential. The aspect of denotation used here is the abstractness value of words, also based on rating by scales. The general conclusions about motority are as follows: (1) the finding that its sensory connotations are mainly via theauditory modality of imagery, and especially in correlation with abstract words, suggests that it has a specific function that may have originated in the processing of heard language; (2) it correlates with thepotency andactivity factors of affective connotation, which suggests the existence of a nonspecific function or component in it; (3) correlations with abstractness reflect that motority must have a denotative function or component, especially in case of abstract verbal stimuli. On the basis of the results, motority is supposed to play a regulative role at higher levels of the organization of word meaning in particular.Computation of SD data was carried out under the direction and according to the programming of Professor William H. May in the Center for Comparative Psycholinguistics (Director: Charles E. Osgood), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with support provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH 07705) and National Science Foundation (NSF GS 360 and 2012-X).     

Measure-taking: meaning and normativity in Heidegger’s philosophy

Following Marc Richir and others, László Tengelyi has recently developed the idea of Sinnereignis (meaning-event) as a way of capturing the emergence of meaning that does not flow from some prior project or constitutive act. As such, it might seem to pose something of a challenge to phenomenology: the paradox of an experience that is mine without being my accomplishment. This article offers a different sort of interpretation of meaning-events, claiming that in their structure they always involve what the late Heidegger called “measure-taking” (Maß-nehmen)—that is, an orientation toward the emergence of normative moments thanks to which what apparently eludes phenomenology becomes accessible in its inaccessibility. This is shown, first, on the example of conscience in Sein und Zeit and then on the example of the poetic image (Bild) in Heidegger’s later essays.     

‘What meaning does somebody's death have,what meaning does somebody's life have?’ Psychotherapists’ stories of their work with suicidal clients

Working with suicidal clients is perceived to be demanding and anxiety provoking for psychotherapists. This investigation explores what it is like for psychotherapists who work with suicidal clients, particularly as within the prevailing culture there is an increasing focus on strategies aimed at suicide prevention. Five themes were identified through narrative analysis, with support systems such as supervision and peer support being seen as vital in surviving working with suicidal clients. However, there is also ambivalence about involving other professionals, such as mental health services, as there is a sense that to do so may be anti-therapeutic and unhelpful to the client. Overall, what emerges from this study is that it is important to challenge the prevailing culture in which a medical discourse is dominant, in order to find a different way of talking about suicide and despair.     

A word’s meaning affects the decision in lexical decision

The influence of an isolated word’s meaning on lexical decision reaction time (RT) was demonstrated through four experiments. Subjects in two experiments made lexical decision judgments, those in a third experiment pronounced the words used in the lexical decision task, and those in a fourth experiment quickly pronounced their first associative response to the words. Differences in lexical access time for the words were measured with the pronunciation task, and differences in meaning were assessed with the association task. Multiple regression analyses of lexical decision RT were conducted using associative RT, pronunciation RT, and other target word properties (printed frequency, length, instance dominance, and number of dictionary meanings) as predictor variables. These analyses revealed a relationship between lexical decision RT and associative RT after the effects of other variables had been partialed out. In addition, word frequency continued to have a significant relationship to lexical decision RT beyond that shared with pronunciation RT and the other variables. The results of these experiments indicate that at least some of the effect of word meaning and word frequency in lexical decision is attributable to a decision stage following lexical access.     

Children’s use of phonological encoding when reading for meaning

The role of phonological recoding in children’s reading was investigated by means of a task requiring comprehension of sentence meaning: The child’s task was to decide whether a sequence of printed letter strings was a meaningful sentence or not. Meaningless sentences that are meaningful when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran threw the street”) produced more incorrect responses than did meaningless sentences that remain meaningless when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran sew the street”). The difference in error rates between the two sentence types diminished as a function of age. Control experiments showed that these results were not due to visual similarity effects, nor to imperfect ability to spell homophones. It was concluded that very young readers rely extensively on phonological recoding when reading for meaning; as they grow older, reliance on visual encoding becomes progressively more important.     

Which are the basic meaning dimensions of observable interpersonal behavior?

We investigated the basic meaning dimensions of overt interpersonal behavior in an observational multi-rater multi-situation study. The interpersonal behavior of 99 participants in 17 different interpersonal role-plays was videotaped and judged by three independent observers using 35 adjective-pairs. Principal Components Analysis yielded three factors with Eigenvalues above chance level. The first two factors were easily identifiable as Agency and Communion, which represent the fundamental dimensions in interpersonal theory (Wiggins, 1991). Unexpectedly, we also found a third, weaker factor pertaining to Emotional Stability. Factor coefficients and factor scores of all three factors showed acceptable to good stability across observers and role-plays. Our study is the first to demonstrate the appropriateness of the Agency/Communion framework with observational data.     

Can the LTSI Predict Transfer Performance? Testing intent to transfer as a proximal transfer of training outcome

Law enforcement personnel (n = 235) were administered the Learning Transfer Systems Inventory (LTSI) and a transfer measure after completing leadership development training. Although most studies using the LTSI have focused on validation efforts in different linguistic settings, this study is one of the few to examine the relationship between the LTSI factors and a proximal transfer outcome score (as measured by intent to transfer). Motivation to transfer, transfer design, and transfer performance expectations had the strongest relationship with intent to transfer, and the motivation subscales (motivation to transfer, performance expectations, and outcome expectations) accounted for the largest amount of unique variance in intent to transfer.     

When does word meaning affect immediate serial recall in semantic dementia?

Patients with semantic dementia can show superior immediate recall of words that they still understand relatively well, as compared with more semantically degraded words, suggesting that conceptual knowledge makes a major contribution to phonological short-term memory. However, a number of studies have failed to show such a recall difference, challenging this view. We examined the effect of several methodological factors on the recall of known and degraded words in 4 patients with semantic dementia, in order to investigate possible reasons for this discrepancy. In general, our patients did exhibit poorer recall of the degraded words and made more phonological errors on these items. In addition, set size affected the magnitude of the recall advantage for known words. This finding suggests that semantic degradation influenced the rate of learning in the immediate recall task when the same items were presented repeatedly. The methods used to select known and degraded items also impacted on the recall difference. List length, however, did not affect the advantage for known words. The coherence of items in phonological short-term memory was affected by their semantic status, but not by the length of the material to be retained. The implications of these findings for the role of semantic and phonological representations in verbal short-term memory are discussed.     

When objects lose their meaning: what happens to their use?

The 8 patients involved in this study were impaired on tests assessing knowledge of objects and on the demonstration of their use. The patients' success in object use was significantly correlated with their knowledge about the objects, providing further evidence that conceptual knowledge plays a key role in object use. Having a recipient present improved performance in the moderately impaired patients, suggesting that a certain level of conceptual knowledge must remain for the additional information to be beneficial. Although overall accuracy in using the target objects was not related to our measures of affordance, the specific aspects of use afforded by the objects' structures were relatively impervious to semantic impairment, suggesting a role for affordance information when object-specific knowledge is disrupted. The patients' familiarity with the objects was an important predictor of performance. Finally, despite good performance on tests of mechanical problem solving, the patients showed very little evidence of employing these skills in their interactions with real objects.