Fundamentals of integrationism and foundations of meaning

Abstract

My thesis addresses the long-standing concern with meaning, namely, the discrepancy between its discernibility as a phenomenon and the opaqueness of its nature, from the vantage perspective of integrationism, an approach to communication founded by Roy Harris. It has been shown convincingly that the concern with meaning is more than just a linguistic, semiological, or semiotic issue. The study of the nature of meaning has become the holy grail of philosophical enquiries, too. Every approach to meaning presupposes certain philosophical views. Hence, in Chapter One, I reconstruct a complete edifice of the integrational philosophical views, locate its position in the history of ideas as aligned with the neo-Kantian-Fichtean phenomenology and existentialism, and adduce anthropocentric and ontogenetical psychological studies to consolidate its position. In Chapter Two, I review different schools of theories about meaning, attributing the unsurmountable obstacles encountered by the depersonalized – systemic, formalist, and decontextualized – approaches, to their problematic philosophical presuppositions, and pinning down what can be regarded as substantial precedents for the insights into language and communication that enable an integrational account of meaning. Then in Chapter Three, on the basis of the research done in the first two chapters of the thesis, I delineate an integrational account of meaning, which pinpoints the foundations of meaning and their philosophical implications and relates the nature of meaning to given features of human beings and human activities, explains the vital importance of personalized and contextualized factors, and explores feasible ways of including those factors in theorizing. My conclusion is that the nature of meaning is embedded in what we are as human beings. Therefore, understanding meaning is predicated on understanding ourselves.