On Meaningfulness and Truth

We show how to construct certain L _{M, T} -type interpreted languages, with each such language containing meaningfulness and truth predicates which apply to itself. These languages are comparable in expressive power to the L _T -type, truth-theoretic languages first considered by Kripke, yet each of our L _{M, T} -type languages possesses the additional advantage that, within it, the meaninglessness of any given meaningless expression can itself be meaningfully expressed. One therefore has, for example, the object level truth (and meaningfulness) of the claim that the strengthened Liar is meaningless.     

Meaningfulness and Identities

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - Three distinct but related questions can be asked about the meaningfulness of one’s life. The first is ‘What is the meaning of life?,’ which...     

Meaningfulness as Contribution

This article aims to offer a refined way of understanding what we mean by the concepts of meaningfulness and meaning in life. The first step is to separate worthwhileness, as the broadest evaluation of life taking all types of values into account, from meaningfulness, which is seen as one type of intrinsic value along with, for example, well‐being, moral praiseworthiness, and authenticity, which I argue are also separate types of intrinsic value. After discussing why we should not settle with the currently popular fitting attitudes analysis of meaningfulness, I argue that the meaningfulness of a life should be seen to be about the positive contribution beyond itself that this particular life is able to make. I show how this analysis is different from previous similar accounts and how it is able to avoid a number of challenges that have troubled these previous accounts, such as the pleasure machine challenge, the results machine challenge, and the doing good unintentionally challenge. I also demonstrate how it is able to account for prototypical examples of meaningful and meaningless lives and how it is compatible with subjectivism, supernaturalism, and objective naturalism, which is seen as a merit. Finally, I conclude with some notes about what could make life meaningful, given the current analysis of meaningfulness itself.     

Meaningfulness as Sensefulness

Philosophia - It is only in the last few decades that analytic philosophers in particular have begun to pay any serious attention to the topic of life’s meaning. Such philosophers, however,...     

The Meaningfulness of Meaning Questions

Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators onWittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaningare meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason tobelieve so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgensteinrejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to befound in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein's anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve.     

Meaningfulness and Kinds of Normative Reasons

Philosophia - Meaningfulness is the dimension of importance that exists for beings capable of adjudicating between competing kinds of normative reasons. The way an agent decides to rank competing...     

On Order Invariant Aggregation Functionals

This paper deals with aggregation functionals defined on arbitrary sets of ordinal numerical values in the framework of representational measurement theory. Our basic assumption is that such a functional represents a meaningful relation between variables; i.e., it is invariant under actions from an appropriate automorphism group. We prove that an aggregation functional is continuous, idempotent, and invariant if and only if it can be represented in the form of the Choquet integral with respect to a monotonic {0, 1}- valued set function. We also establish a polynomial representation for these functionals.     

Meaningfulness as a mediator of subjective well-being

In a sample of 347 university students and community residents, measures of meaningfulness, self-esteem, internal locus of control, positive social relationships and optimism were given to predict subjective well-being, i.e., measures of happiness, life satisfaction, and affect balance. Correlations, canonical correlations, and structural equation modeling supported the hypothesis that meaningfulness is a significant mediator between personality variables and subjective well-being.     

Meaningfulness Beats Frequency in Multiword Chunk Processing

Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences, using items that varied in chunk meaningfulness. In a phrasal-decision study, we compared reaction times for triads of three-word sequences, corresponding to idiomatic expressions, compositional phrases, and phrasal fragments, while controlling for phrase and substring frequencies. Chunk meaningfulness, as assessed by a separate subjective rating study, was found to speed up decision times for all three types of strings: The more meaningful a multiword sequence was judged to be, the faster it was processed, independently of whether it was idiomatic, compositional in nature, or a phrasal fragment. These results highlight the importance of taking meaning into account when considering the processing of multiword chunks, consistent with predictions of construction-based approaches to language.     

Memory scanning by children: Meaningfulness and mediation

Two experiments were performed for the purpose of isolating factors that influence speed of memory scanning by children. The first experiment revealed an interaction involving age and type of stimulus. Young children required relatively greater time to process ambiguous stimuli. The second experiment, involving a pretraining phase designed to induce mediation, showed that preschool children scan representations more rapidly when given instructions to apply a mediator.     

Meaningfulness (m′) values for 300 CCCs

Normative values are given for the rated meaningfulness (m′) of 300 consonant-consonant-consonant trigrams (CCCs). The CCCs were selected from the entire range of association values in Witmer (1935). Thus, they represent a greater range than Costantini and Blackwood’s (1968) norms and are more current than the Witmer norms.