Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a part – a very important part – of the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. And, in consequence, the focus has moved from sentences to utterances. It has moved, but not entirely. Not because philosophers and logicians are unaware of utterances, but because the working assumption is that semantics should focus on what all utterances of an expression or sentence have in common, due to meaning, and not on how they differ, due to the particular facts of the utterance. In this chapter we first consider how this assumption has been challenged and express some reservations about alternatives. Then we turn to our own theory, the reflexive-referential theory, which takes utterances as basic to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.

Messiaen was inspired by a pantheon of saints and theologians that were important to him: Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and then Ernest Hello, Dom. Columba Marmion, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This chapter focusses in particular on St Thomas Aquinas, whose work exerted the greatest influence on Messiaen’s understanding of Christian doctrine. It examines the way this shaped his language, and assesses the range of the symbolic manifestations of Aquinas’s thought in his art.

This chapter focuses on the role of narrative in psychology, arguing that narrative is implicitly universal in psychology, is the basis of good science and should be used explicitly across the different areas of psychology, that is, it is the root metaphor of psychology (Sarbin, 1986). There is a brief exploration of narrative and neuroscience, and the evolution of narrative. There is also a focus on dominant narratives, reality and identity. Identity and narrative are closely related. There is a brief description of redemptive and contaminated narratives, and the relationship between narratives and memory construction. Some narratives are universal, and some are cultural, and we need to know how to make distinctions between these, as they help explain the fundamental nature of being human versus cultural constructions.

The study of grammatical variation is crucial to understanding how language is used to undertake social action. To explore the relationship between grammar and social life, we need to consider what people have learnt about language and how they employ that learning to make meaning in the world. In particular, this chapter considers how grammatical variation is used to infer things about a speaker’s social background, whilst also potentially communicating more subtle information about a speaker’s preferences, their alignment as to what they are saying, and their feelings are about who they are saying it to. This chapter also explores the types of grammatical variation (morphophonemic, morpholexical, morphosyntactic, syntactic) studied by sociolinguists and the extent to which these fit with the standard notion of the ‘linguistic variable’. It argues that the ability for syntactic constructions to encode pragmatic meaning by virtue of their grammatical configuration makes them quite different from phonological variants, and the focus on the latter in sociolinguistics has hindered our understanding of the relationship between grammatical variation and social meaning.

We present a semantic and textual analysis of the first two chapters of the Wealth of Nations to elucidate the meaning of several of Adam Smith’s key ideas. Using the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, we produce semantic explications of some of Adam Smith’s fundamental principles of economics phrased in simple and cross-translatable words. The extracts from the original text function as textual evidence and conceptual reference for the explications we present. We demonstrate that: (i) by reducing the principles as conceived by Smith to their core meanings, it is possible to resolve some interpretive ambiguities for general readers of economics, and (ii) by producing explications that are clear, cross-translatable, and free from terminological ethnocentrism, these principles become accessible and maximally intelligible to twenty-first-century readers who are nonexperts in economics and nonnative speakers of English, too. Ultimately, our project re-humanizes economics as a study of the human condition by drilling down to the core of what Adam Smith the moral philosopher meant in his most famous book that founded a discipline.

Neural machine translation is not neutral. The increased linguistic fluency and naturalness as the hallmark of neural machine translation sometimes runs the risk of trans-creation, which bends the true meaning of the source text to accommodate the conventionalized, preferred use and interpretation of concepts, terms and expressions in the target language and cultural system. This chapter explores the cultural and linguistic bias of neural machine translation of English educational resources on mental health and well-being, highlighting the urgent need to develop and redesign machine translation systems to produce more neutral and balanced machine translation outputs for global end users, especially people from vulnerable social backgrounds.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was a survivor of the Holocaust, has much to teach us about resilience. One key lesson from his work is that having a sense of meaning and purpose can fuel persistance and survival in some of life's most difficult situations. In this chapter you will learn about post-traumatic growth, the experience of positive life changes after a stressful or traumatic event. You will see ways that individuals have used their emotional suffering to help others, including having a clear and impactful “survivor mission.” Meaning and purpose can be given, but it can also be made. We will teach you four areas where you can make meaning in your lives.

This chapter includes an investigation of precolonial Mesoamerican languages, including Maya languages and Nahuatl, and their connection to issues of truth and meaning. We find the concept of truth connected to representation and activity. The importance of performative aspects of language can be seen in different ways throughout Mesoamerican traditions, from the ritual performances of the Maya to the focus of acts of speaking of the Aztecs. The chapter begins with a consideration of written language, and continues on to considerations of movement and physical performance as symbolic and as continuous with language, which expresses meaning by sharing essence with what is expressed.

Culture and language are crucial elements of the information realm to interpret and represent contemporary armed conflict in the cognitive realm. They set the tone for how different audiences perceive mediated conflict events, which engineers observers’ opinions, perceptions and responses to the physical realm event. Language and culture have been instrumentalised by Western countries to facilitate conflict and warfare, creating unneccessary wars of choice through creating simple binary stories of ’Us’ versus the ’Other’ that attempt to convince the audience of the moral and ethical superiority of ’Us’ over the ’Other’. The result has been the Endless Wars and the rapidly expanding New Cold War.

Can creativity make you feel connected to other people? Terror management theory, which addresses the existential dread associated with death, suggests that the answer is no. But I push back against this view and highlight an array of studies and theories that point to many ways in which creativity can bring us together. First I discuss the museum effect, which indicates that experiencing the arts makes us feel connected to other people and the world. Next I discuss creativity’s association with friendships, positive working relationships, and even romance. Finally I explore a cluster of traits associated with creativity, including openness, perspective taking, and cognitive flexibility, which are also related to reduced prejudice and stereotyping. Nurturing creativity may be a way to increase equity.

I start with a brief overview of the literature on meaning. The tripartite model proposes coherence, significance, and purpose as the key factors. The first component of the Creativity Advantage model, self-insight, is strongly connected to coherence, which is being able to look back and feel as though your life has made sense. Some nostalgia may be involved (which is associated with creativity as well). As long as some kind of narrative is present, writing expressively on a regular basis is associated with many positive outcomes, both psychological and physical. Forming narratives in general is a powerful tool and may help shape our identity in adolescence and beyond – which can also be seen as a creative act itself.

The digitalization of business organizations and of society in general has opened up the possibility of researching behaviours using large volumes of digital traces and electronic texts that capture behaviours and attitudes in a broad range of natural settings. How is the availability of such data changing the nature of qualitative, specifically interpretive, research and are computational approaches becoming the essence of such research? This chapter briefly examines this issue by considering the potential impacts of digital data on key themes associated with research, those of induction, deduction and meaning. It highlights some of the ‘nascent myths’ associated with the digitalization of qualitative research. The chapter concludes that while the changes in the nature of data present exciting opportunities for qualitative, interpretive researchers to engage with computational approaches in the form of mixed-methods studies, it is not believed they will become the sine qua non of qualitative information systems research in the foreseeable future.

This chapter discusses the reflexive relationship between qualitative researchers and the process of selecting, forming, processing and interpreting data in algorithmic qualitative research. Drawing on Heidegger’s ideas, it argues that such research is necessarily synthetic – even creative – in that these activities inflect, and are in turn inflected by, the data itself. Thus, methodological transparency is key to understanding how different types of meanings become infused in the process of algorithmic qualitative research. While algorithmic research practices provide multiple opportunities for creating transparent meaning, researchers are urged to consider how such practices can also introduce and reinforce human and algorithmic bias in the form of unacknowledged introduction of perspectives into the data. The chapter demonstrates this reflexive dance of meaning and bias using an illustrative case of topic modelling. It closes by offering some recommendations for engaging actively with the domain, considering a multi-disciplinary approach, and adopting complementary methods that could potentially help researchers in fostering transparency and meaning.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are notable for their resolution. It is precisely this quality that leads characters such as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, Stevens in Remains of the Day, Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, and Kathy H in Never Let Me Go to make life-defining but ethically dubious decisions. In this sense, irresolution can be seen, paradoxically and not unproblematically, as a key Ishigurian virtue. Indeed, irresolution inheres in Ishiguro’s novels in terms of narrative form as well as ethics and theme: rather than offering epiphany, consolation, redemption, or any final hermeneutic closure or disclosure, the novels are insistent, resolute in their tendency towards thematic, ethical, and structural irresolution. At the same time, however, the desire for resolution is shown to be an understandable one, and to underlie the characters’ efforts to make meaning from the worlds and situations in which they find themselves.

This first stage of the journey introduces the concept of meaning in language and discourse, discusses the advantages of studying it at the interfaces of semantics, pragmatics, and philosopy, and moves to the correlates of meaning in the mind and in the world. It also addresses the question of the appropriate unit of study – a flexible type of proposition.

[8.1] The law of statutory interpretation directs us to ascertain the ‘purpose’ of an Act when construing a provision of that Act. This is one of the few general principles of statutory interpretation law that is the subject of a legislative mandate, though the common law has developed an equivalent principle. The mandate is that we must have regard to the purpose of an Act and choose the construction that promotes or best achieves that purpose. This does not warrant neglect of the statutory text or context, but instead requires the interpreter to have regard to the purpose in the context of the broader analysis of text and context required by the rules of statutory interpretation. Sometimes the purpose will be critical to the task of attributing meaning and sometimes it will be of little value. The value that purpose can provide to the task may depend on the degree of specificity with which it can be expressed. Many Acts embody multiple purposes or the purpose of the Act may be general. For these reasons, the purpose of the provision being construed can be more helpful for the interpretative task than the purpose of the Act as a whole.