Seeking the Meaning of Meaning: A Positive Personal Quest

It has been widely asserted that the impulse to make meaning is one of the most characteristic attributes of human beings. Assertions to the effect that “humans are meaning makers” (e.g. Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Olivares, 2012) are so common that “the notion that human beings are ‘natural meaning makers’ is practically a truism” (Heintzelman & King, 2013). Klinger (2013) has proposed that the search for meaning “is an inexorable result of the way the brain is organized” (p.31) and “an inevitable outgrowth of human evolution” (p.23). Frankl contended (1963) that the will to meaning is the main motivating drive in man (1963).

This supposed preoccupation with meaning has not always been so apparent. When the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus devised his binomial classification system in the 18th century (Koerner,1996) he chose a name for our species that highlighted wisdom as the defining attribute (homo sapiens) rather than meaning-making. This may be because it was only from the late19th century onwards that questions relating to meaning became prominent in intellectual life. This partly reflects the effects of long-established religious world views being challenged by science. The evolutionary notion that human beings are descended from more primitive species (Darwin, 1871) disturbed Bible-based understandings of man’s origins and place in the universe.

The massive destruction of two world wars in the 20th century disrupted old assumptions about human nature and spurred existentialist questions about meaning and purpose (e.g. Sartre, 1967; Barrett, 2011). From the middle of the 20th century, meaning-related issues became a central concern for psychotherapists such as Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) and Carl Rogers (1902-1987). In the 21st century, meaning has been a major area of interest for Positive Psychology (PP). It is the M in the PERMA model posited by Seligman (2012), along with Positive emotions, Engagement, Positive relationships, and Accomplishments. Most recently it has been the theme of a whole issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology (JoPP) edited by Leontiev (2013).

Many of the key concepts and concerns of PP are relatively easy to grasp. For example happiness and gratitude are commonly discussed in everyday life, although they must be operationally defined when they are objects of study. In presenting PP to people who may benefit from its applications, these constructs require little explanation. By contrast, even on a superficial level, meaning is
arguably a more complex and ambiguous concept that presents a number of challenges. One of them is that any discussion of meaning is likely to involve the use of the word itself, and words related to it. Questions such as “what does meaning mean?” and “what do you mean by meaning?” can become a self-referential loop.

Nevertheless, it is proposed to explore the meaning of meaning in this paper. It is far beyond the scope of a few thousand words to provide a comprehensive and critical investigation of meaning in all its complexities. Rather, this paper is an exploration of some of the many meanings of meaning, in which a personal constructivist approach (e.g. Kelly, 1955; Raskin 2001) is adopted to create a meaningful account of the exploration. Although such an exploration is rewarding in itself, it is also intended that insights gleaned from the exploration will be distilled into propositions that are accessible for use in Applied Positive Psychology

Meaning has been characterised as associative and relational (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006), as a mycelium (Leontiev, 2013b) and as a web (Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker, & Garbinsky, 2013). Accordingly, this paper will trace manifestations of meaning across a web of associations. Firstly, it will examine uses and semantics of the word and its equivalents in other languages with the aim of identifying common
themes. It will then explore the intuitive experience of meaning in early life. Thirdly, it will survey and critique some conceptualizations of meaning in PP and related disciplines, along with key dimensions of differentiation between them. It will then examine meaning from an adaptive perspective. In conclusion, it will summarize the key points.

Semantic and linguistic aspects of meaning

Examining the notion of meaning inevitably gives rise to the question “What does meaning mean?” Questions about meaning typically prompt recourse to dictionaries. They define themselves as reference books that give information about the meanings of words (Merriam-Webster, 2014: Cambridge, 2014). It may be argued that in literate cultures, dictionaries are generally treated as repositories and arbiters of meaning. It is not proposed here that a semantic approach to the meaning of meaning can provide definitive answers to the bigger issues of meaning. However, it is proposed that it may be illuminating to start by tracing the roots of the word and its connection with words related to it.

Etymologically, meaning has been traced back to Proto Indo-European (PIE) roots. PIE words are academic reconstructions of extinct forms, since no written records exist (Ruhlen, 1994). When written, by convention they are preceded by an asterisk. In PIE, *meino denoted “opinion” or “intent” and *men, denoted “mind (Online Etymological Dictionary, 2014). The notions of “opinion” and “intent” imply the presence of an agent with a mind: “opinion” may be described as the agent’s evaluation of a phenomenon and, “intent” as being the agent’s aim or purpose. These ancient meanings are still current. For example a kindly person may be described as well-meaning and a rude person may be asked, “What is the meaning of this behaviour?”

Dictionaries have fostered a different meaning. They implicitly conceptualize meaning as being contained in words, and they define the meanings of words semantically by means of verbal definitions and explanations. In this semantic use of the word meaning, there is no identified or implicit individual agent with a subjective opinion and intent. Hence it can be argued that the dictionary-oriented semantic use of meaning conceptualizes it as being an objective reality that exists independent of
individual agents and their minds.

In common usage, meaning is also used to denote likely developments, implications and consequences inferred from a current situation. For example somebody receiving a favourable exam result may say “this means I’ve passed.” They may notice a darkening sky and declare “those clouds mean rain.” In these cases, there is no external agent to hold a subjective opinion or intention. Rather, meaning in this usage expresses a trajectory of events anticipated by the speaker. The reconstructed original etymological sense of meaning is stretched even further when the word is used in an existential context. For example people of a questioning nature may ask “what is the meaning of life?” This may be interpreted as implying that “life” itself has a mind, or is the product of a mind.

Exploring the challenge of personal meaning, Leontiev too (2013 b) started by examining the linguistic aspects of meaning. He stated that this one word is used to denote many different things in English whereas other languages such as Russian and German have different words for different things. After noting that the German “Sinn” (c.f. English “sense”) conveys an idea of intentional directedness, he discounted the possibility that “sense” in English might convey this idea, and concluded instead that meaning has three overtones: signification, intention and “immediate sensual experience”. It may be argued, however, that Leontiev’s semantic analysis was too narrow in its selection of languages and too narrowly focused on meaning without situating it in a context relevant to psychology. Fortunately the concept “meaning of life” has been current in different cultures for long enough to provide material for a broader analysis. The British film “Meaning of Life” (IMDb, 1983) became “El sentido de la vida” in Spanish, “Le sens de la vie” in French, “Il senso della vita” in Italian and “Der Sinn des Lebens” in German. In each of these cases the word standing for meaning is cognate with the English “sense” and has connotations of “direction”: “sentido único”, “sens unique” and “senso unico” denote “one way street” in Spanish, French and Italian respectively. All are directly connected with the Latin “sensus”. This came from the verb “sentire”, meaning “to perceive, feel, know,” which in turn is thought to have come from the PIE *sent-, meaning “to go”. Furthermore, as in English, those “sense” cognates in other languages are also used also to denote semantic definition. For example the sentence “in what sense do you mean ‘happy’?” can be rendered in Spanish, Italian, French and German in a similar sentence using the cognate for “sense” in each instance. In summary, the words “meaning”’ and “sense” overlap in their denotations and connotations.

Exploring meaning from a linguistic, semantic perspective can help to map its conceptual range, but it is important to bear in mind that the etymology of a word does not determine its semantic destiny, so to speak. Speakers of a language do not use words in strict accordance with their dictionary definitions. Rather, etymology maps the domains of human experience with which a word’s forebears have been associated, while dictionary definitions give a distilled summary of the way the word is currently used.

It is significant that in naming a new form of psychotherapy focused on meaning, Frankl (1963) did not use a word that is formally similar or related to meaning or to ‘sense’. Rather, he used the ancient Greek λόγος (logos), to create the concept “logotherapy”. Much has been written about how λόγος may be
interpreted (e.g. Ward 1995; Emelyanov, 2012), but Frankl specified his intended meaning in the introduction to “The Doctor and the Soul” (1986): “A psychotherapy which not only recognizes man’s spirit, but actually starts from it may be termed logotherapy. In this connection, logos is intended to signify ‘the spiritual’ and, beyond that, ‘the meaning’.”

In exploring the denotations and connotations of “meaning”, “sense” and “logos”, it is important to remember that words themselves do not have intrinsic meanings (Nickerson, 2007). Rather, in a given culture, specific words become systematically associated with specific external events and internal experiences. Some experiences are highly specific to a place and culture, such as the Iceland dish Hákarl made from fermented shark (Lee & Kim, 2013). Other experiences such as meaning would appear to be universal, albeit with cultural nuances. While it is instructive to examine the semantic and cultural nuances of words such as meaning, it is essential to bear in mind that they refer to what are ultimately experiential phenomena.

Intuitive origins and phenomenology of meaning

For a deeper exploration of what meaning means, it is instructive to go “upstream” from semantics to consider how humans initially learn words and their meanings. In the early years of life, infants cannot consult a dictionary. Until they acquire basic language skills they don’t even have the ability to ask for explanations of words, yet they do learn what words mean. This process has been described (Pinker, 1994) as intuiting the correct word-event association (i.e. meaning) from among many possible alternative events that they may observe co-occurring with the word. They intuitively learn to associate specific words and gestures with tangible, observable phenomena in their immediate experience: objects in the physical world such mummy and car, and actions such as eat, clap and cry. They progress to learning words and meanings for less tangible phenomena: qualities such as big, hot and yummy, physical states such as hungry and tired, and emotional states such as happy and sad.

Learning the meanings of words might be characterised as a process of observation, trial and error, in which the infant associates an acoustic phenomenon (a spoken word) with salient percepts and internal experiences. This description of associative learning recalls the experiments of Russian physiologist and 1904 Nobel Laureate Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Lambert, 1963). Having previously rung a bell just before presenting food to the dogs in his experiments, Pavlov found that they subsequently started salivating on hearing the bell, without seeing the food. In effect the sound of the bell meant “food” to the dogs, just as the sound of the word “food” means food to an infant. Indeed Pavlov went on to suggest (Marks, 2004) that “human language might be seen as long chains of conditioned reflexes involving words” (p.674). Hence, our earliest experiences of learning words and their meanings are pre-cognitive; they involve feeling and intuition rather than conscious processes.

Tronick and Beeghly (2011) wrote of meanings as the representations that infants are continually creating from their experience of engaging with the external and internal worlds, gradually increasing in complexity. As dynamic self-organizing systems, infants develop new capacities including walking and language, and these in turn create new meanings (p.2). This perspective on infant meaning-making contains three important implications for this paper. Firstly, while the meaning may be discussed in the singular as a general construct, the psychological phenomenon is actually plural: meanings. Secondly, according to this account, meaning is conceptualized as representations. The authors expanded on this view with reference to the example of new meanings that infants create from interaction with their care-givers. These meanings are called “internal working models”, which are a core construct of attachment theory (e.g. Bretherton & Munhollandl,1999; Pietromonaco & Barrett, 2000). In this conceptualization, a meaning is not a single point-in-time percept, such as an image, a sound or a taste captured in the moment. Rather, it implies a representation of percepts, actions and feelings interacting dynamically across time. Thirdly, it posits early experiences of meaning as pre- linguistic. According to this line of thinking, humans have experiences of meaning before they have words to conceptualize or express those experiences. This strongly implies that during the early years at least, meaning is experiential and non-verbal.

It is beyond the scope and intention of this paper to go more deeply into theories of infant development and meaning-making pioneered by Piaget (1954) and subsequently elaborated (e,g. Beilin & Fireman, 1999; Mandler, 2004). Suffice to say that for the purposes of exploring meaning, at least some of the phenomenological events that psychologists denote as meaning are non-semantic and non-cognitive. This prompts the question: why do academics use a term that has a number of different meanings? As Heintzelman and King (2013) pointed out, apparently endowing the word with agency of its own, “Meaning refuses to surrender to a satisfying, consensually accepted conceptual definition.” (p.471)

It may be conjectured that meaning has acquired its various denotations for adults through a variant of the infant word-learning process. As an infant encounters an experience, it hears members of its culture saying words. The infant infers the meaning of those words by associating their occurrence with the experience and the words become firmly associated with the experience in the infant’s mind. When adults encounter an experience for which they have no ready word or clearly appropriate word, they may consult a fellow member of their culture, asking: “what do you call it when …?” Alternatively, they may use a word that they intuitively associate with an experience that is similar in some way. Hence, it would appear likely that meaning has acquired its various current uses through a chain of intuitive experiential associations stretching back to its PIE origins.

Conceptualizations of meaning in PP and related disciplines

In proposing their Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM), Heine and colleagues stated (2006, pp. 89-90) that “meaning is the expected relationships or associations that human beings construct and impose on their worlds.” It is striking that they explicitly regarded “relationships”, “meaning” and “associations” as synonymous and interchangeable in this context. Their use of the words “construct” and “impose” suggests two important implications. Firstly, it implies that the meaning relationships do not necessarily exist objectively, but rather are subjective constructs. Secondly, it implies that meaning is something in which the individual actively engages at some level. This impression of active engagement is reinforced by their frequent use of “seek”. For example, later in the paper they wrote that people “seek to relate objects and events to each other and to the self” (p.106). However, this seeking and active engagement does not necessarily involve conscious processing. In fact the paper proposes that from the moment they are born, humans “innately and automatically seek out, construct, and apply mental representations of expected relations to incoming information” (p.91). From the automatic “associative impulse” proposed (e.g. p.106) it would appear that their conceptualization of “meaning-making” is something that is purposeful but happens largely outside awareness. However, the authors did not appear to be concerned about precisely situating meaning making in terms of cognitive processes.

Although the Heine et al article makes ample reference to social and cultural contexts, the individual is the locus of the meaning/associations/relations that it describes. This conceptualization of meaning is implicitly personal, although the term ‘personal meaning’ does not appear in the paper. This stands in contrast with a number of academics directly associated with PP, who systematically precede meaning with the word “personal”. It is prominent in the title of the International Network of Personal Meaning (INPM) founded by Dr Paul Wong (INPM) who is also the editor of “The Human Quest for Meaning” (1998, 2012). Personal Meaning also figures prominently in the November 2013 special issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology. Articles by Leontiev (2013b) and della Fave, Brdar, Wissing and Vella- Brodrick (2013) have “Personal Meaning” in their titles, while the article by Nakamura (2013) makes frequent reference to PM. From this it may be inferred that the authors intentionally specified “personal” to denote PM as a construct in its own right as distinct from other forms of meaning. However, none of these sources offered a conceptual definition of PM as a construct. Consequently other sources of definition were sought.

McDonald, Wong and Gingras (2012) have referred to two definitions of PM. The first, citing Reker and Wong (1988) defined PM as “the cognizance of order, coherence and purpose in one’s existence, the pursuit and attainment of worthwhile goals, and an accompanying sense of fulfilment” (p.221). This definition of PM contains a cognitive component (“cognizance”), a motivational component (“goals”) and an emotional component (“sense”). In this three-component conceptualization of PM, it might be argued that only the second component (“pursuit ... of goals”) involves agency. The first component (“cognizance”) implies becoming aware of phenomena, which may be intuitive and involuntary rather than deliberate. The third, affective component is most certainly involuntary.

The second definition of personal meaning offered by McDonald and colleagues (2012) referred to the formulation by Wong (1989) of “an individually constructed cognitive system, which endows life with personal significance.” Compared with the first definition, this one may reasonably be thought to imply greater agency. Rather than specifying a process of becoming aware (“cognizance”) of order, coherence and purpose, in this definition the “cognitive system” is presented as being constructed by the individual (c.f. Heine et al, 2006). Furthermore, five components are enumerated. In addition to the three specified above – cognitive, motivational and emotional – relational and personal components
are also identified (p.357).

It may be inferred that by adding “personal” as a modifier to “meaning”, academics in PP do not necessarily intend to denote a specific conceptual construct with an established definition. Rather, their intention is arguably to differentiate PM from other possible types of meaning such as semantic, symbolic or cultural. It may therefore be inferred that in general, the meaning that interests PP is the variety of meaning-related phenomena experienced by individuals.

Nevertheless, not all academics in PP agree with this use of “personal meaning”. Baumeister and colleagues explicitly challenged the phrase in their article for the JoPP (2013) in which they presented their research into differences between meaningfulness and happiness. They argued that meaning is cultural, not personal, and is embedded in language and the concepts that underlie it. In contrast to Heine and colleagues (2013), they conceptualized meaning as a large map or web that is constructed by cultures cooperatively through time. Consequently, they argued, what individuals experience is meaningfulness rather than personal meaning: “An individual’s meaningfulness may be a personally relevant section of that giant, culturally created, and culturally transmitted map” (p.506). Despite using “meaningful” and “meaningfulness” extensively, the paper is tentative in offering definitions: “Meaningfulness is presumably both a cognitive and an emotional assessment of whether one’s life has purpose and value.”

In view of the complexities and ambiguities of meaning, the “meaningfulness” approach adopted by Baumeister et al offers linguistic, conceptual and operational benefits. Linguistically both “meaningful” and the noun derived from it (meaningfulness) are used less commonly and more narrowly than meaning. Conceptually, this places them clearly in a phenomenological framework. As topics of study and discussion, it clearly implies that they are about subjective, individual experience. Operationally, this conceptualization obviates the need for devising a clear definition before undertaking research. Rather, as the authors specified (p. 506) it is predicated on research participants interpreting the topic (whether “meaningful” or “meaningfulness”) in whatever way they choose. However, despite these significant benefits, it is likely that both words are hampered by being more awkward to use than meaning, which has two syllables fewer than “meaningfulness”. This may appear to be a trivial concern in a field that readily accepts polysyllables such as multidimensionality (Ashmore, Deaux & McLaughlin-Volpe, 2004) and neuroplasticity (Galea, Uban, Epp, Brummelte, Barha, Wilson & Pawluski, 2008). Nevertheless, the principle of least effort postulated by Zipf (1949) would suggest that meaning rather than ‘meaningfulness’ will continue to be used widely. Even Baumeister and colleagues (2013) used the two words interchangeably.

In the same journal Leontiev was sceptical about a “meaningfulness” approach (2013b), although there is no indication that this was in response to the article by Baumeister and colleagues. In Leontiev’s view, measuring research participants’ sense of meaning or meaningfulness does not assess meaning. He was concerned that instead, it measures a positive feeling labelled meaningfulness that has no discriminant validity to separate it from PP constructs such as satisfaction and happiness. This concern would appear to be addressed, and potentially allayed, by Baumeister and colleagues (2013). While they did indeed find that happiness and meaningfulness were substantially and positively intercorrelated, they also found that these two phenomena have some substantially different roots (p.508). Investigating negative correlates, they found components that could form the basis of a “meaningfulness” construct with discriminant validity. Their research suggests that happiness is present-focused and associated with positive affect, whereas meaningfulness is concerned with an arc of time from the past into the future, and could involve negative affect in the present (p.515). The article concluded that meaningfulness may constitute an essential difference between hedonia and
eudaimonia (p.516).

“Meaningfulness” as discussed above is consonant with the perspective proposed by Heintzelman and colleagues (2013). They shared the widespread view that meaning is about connection (e.g. Baumeister, 1991; Leontiev, 2005; Heine et al, 2006), specifying that “meaning is centrally about the experience of reliable connections” (p.472). However, the essential thrust of their paper is to highlight unconscious processes, felt experience and intuition as essential aspects of meaning. Detecting meaning-relevant coherence and connection is posited as a largely unconscious process that occurs outside awareness, and does not involve deliberate effort (p.473). To the extent that meaning reaches awareness, it may be in the form of an intuitive sense that meaning is present. “Sometimes, we just know that something is meaningful, without the need to reflect on why or how this is so.” (p. 472). Extending this phenomenological construct, the authors proposed a highly subjective definition: “meaning is what it feels like to be a person for whom experience is making sense” (p.473).

There is another reason why meaning in PP is implicitly personal. Not only is it concerned with subjective experiences of meaning, it also involves self-expression. In research reported by MacGregor and Little (1988), integrity is identified as the predictor variable for meaning (p.496). It is described as the extent to which participants appraise their projects as being consistent with their self-identity. Baumeister and colleagues (2013) also found positive significant correlations between meaningfulness and activities that participants judged as reflecting who they were – their self (p.513). The article proposes that “meaning links across” time while “the self integrates across time” (p.514).

Consequently, while the locus of meaning may be external, in the community or wider culture, the locus of PM or meaningfulness is the individual and involves that person’s sense of self and self-identity.

Adaptive effects of Personal Meaning

In exploring the biology and psychology of human beings, an essential starting point is to describe the observable form and function of an attribute: what it is, and what it does. However this is not necessarily enough to satisfy the constant human drive to seek meaning. It is arguably the web of meaning created by evolutionary theory (Darwin, 1859) that has driven academics to question what function an observed attribute fulfilled through evolution. What selective benefits did it confer?

Heine and colleagues proposed (2006) that the human need for meaning is rooted in the evolution of our species and served adaptive functions. In particular, the ability to create representations of complex relations would have enabled early humans to acquire cultural skills (p.92). Heintzelman and King proposed (2014) that meaning is adaptive, with implications for our prehistoric origins: “pairing pleasure with adaptive behaviors is evolution’s way of getting us to do the things we must to survive” (p.12). This is a concise description of a naturally-occurring positive reinforcement process (Johnston, 2003) and would appear to be a plausible hypothesis to account, at least in part, for the evolution of meaning-seeking behaviour.

Baumeister and colleagues (2013) certainly found that meaningfulness often corresponded with high positive affect, but not in all cases. Some subjects scored low on positive affect but high on meaningfulness. In the light of the positive reinforcement hypothesis mentioned above, this is puzzling. What would motivate an individual to tolerate aversive experiences that create discomfort or unhappiness, and/or to forego positive affect? In the present day, this tolerance of negative affect might be attributed to causes such as neurosis or social conditioning by the media. However, from evolutionary perspective, this would amount to negative reinforcement, motivating individuals to avoid the behaviour. Therefore, given that meaning-seeking behaviour has survived evolutionary pressure, this suggests that it has been rewarded by adaptive effects offsetting any lack of affective reward.

Elliot and Covington (2001) reviewed a broad range of theory and data to argue that the basic dichotomy of approach-avoidance should be regarded as a fundamental consideration in understanding motivation (p.83). They related approach to a positive experienced state and withdrawal to a negative experienced state (p.84). In behavioural terms, the approach response enables an organism to explore opportunities, while the withdrawal response enables it to avoid threats and danger. The responses are automatic and lead to corresponding approach or withdrawal behaviour (p.78-79). In human beings, there is an additional, evaluative stage between the experienced state and the behavioural response. This leads not to immediate approach or withdrawal behaviour, but rather to a predisposition to this behaviour. It would appear that humans do automatically evaluate a stimulus as attractive, or aversive, and do become physiologically ready to act accordingly, but do not necessarily enact the impulse. We are able to override the automatic behavioural responses by mobilizing more complex forms of approach-avoid motivation. As examples of such complex forms, the authors mentioned “personal goal” and strategic calculation (p.80). Both of these examples imply a capacity to create mental representations of future possibilities and to link them with what is happening in the present.

In their analysis of approach and avoidance motivation, Elliot and Covington (2001) did not specifically mention meaning. However, the complex forms of motivation mentioned appear to be consonant with the conceptualization of meaning proposed by MacGregor and Little (1998), and Baumeister and colleagues (2013). They proposed that meaningful thought enables individuals to go beyond the stimulus-response impulses provided by the immediate environment. Baumeister and colleagues suggested it provides individuals with the means to imagine their actions situated in a far broader context that extends temporally through past, present and future (p.506). They can connect their actions with places, circumstances, individuals and ideas that are not immediately present. Hence, goals through time are proposed as a key feature of PM: “the pursuit of goals and fulfillments through ongoing involvements and activities that are interlinked but spread across time may be central to meaningfulness” (p.507). From their research they tentatively concluded that people reporting high levels of meaningfulness tended to make positive contributions to society and to be good at self-regulation even when their reported levels of happiness were low (p. 515).

From an evolutionary perspective this sense of motivation and reward suggests that seeking meaningfulness may well have had adaptive effects. This would certainly need to be the case if, as Klinger contended (2013), it is a legacy of evolution and is part of the way the brain is organised. On a personal level in the present, PM supports and rewards self-regulation, enabling individuals to transcend the stimulus-response inflexibility of most animals and bring their cognitive skills to bear. In evolutionary terms this is likely to have conferred benefits in terms of both reproduction and survival. In modern life, self-regulation is an important factor in Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) and is essential in environments full of temptation and distraction. On a group level, from an evolutionary perspective the correlation of PM and meaningfulness with pro-social behaviours would be consistent with the imperatives of group cohesion and survival In the modern world, from a social perspective, self-regulation is arguably essential for productive collaboration in virtually everything from sharing public spaces to any collective endeavour.

In conclusion

Meaning is far more than words and their definitions in dictionaries. These are merely culturally-agreed sounds and symbols that are associated with specific external objects and events, and with internal experiences. They are embedded in networks of learned associations or meanings that are primarily intuitive, non- cognitive and out of conscious awareness. Intuition and non-cognitive processes precede and shape the words that are felt to correspond most closely to the experienced meanings.

The brain seeks, continuously and unconsciously, to find stable connections between percepts from its experiential environment. It builds these connections into representations or meanings that enable it to understand and predict events. When these meanings are experienced as reliable through time and relevant to the individual, they may be regarded as “personal meaning”. In both common parlance and psychology, this is referred to as “meaningful” and “meaningfulness”. This experience is particularly felt, and valued, when it is aligned with an individual’s self-concept, and when that self-concept is situated in a social context.

“Meaningfulness” provides an individual with the means to identify important goals and purpose, the motivation to pursue them, and affective evaluation of progress towards them. It provides mental representations linking the past and the present to possible futures, thereby enabling an individual to evaluate reflexive impulses and act in pursuit of meaningful self-relevant goals. It is not dependent on transient affect, so it provides stability through time, even in the absence of positive affect. Meaning is more associated with eudaimonia than with hedonia.

It is possible to infer from the current adaptive effects of meaning and from its widespread presence across cultures, that the drive to seek and make meaning has been an integral part of human life for many millennia. It is highly likely that it played an essential role in the survival and evolution of our species. This in itself makes meaning even more meaningful.

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