This book looks at a long-standing question about "meaning" and the human experience — specifically, why meaning seems easy to recognize but hard to fully explain, especially from the perspective of integrationism.
Fang’s book pins down the fundamentals of Roy Harris’s integrational linguistics and explores the relation between the nature of meaningfulness and human condition – the given features of human beings and human activities. The book rebuilds the main ideas behind the integrationist philosophy, placing them in the tradition of neo-Kantian, Fichtean phenomenology and existentialism. Fang also uses research from psychology, focusing on human-centred and developmental studies, to strengthen the arguments.
The chapters review different theories of meaning, attributing the insurmountable obstacles encountered by the depersonalized – systemic, formalist, and decontextualized – approaches to their problematic philosophical presuppositions. The book also points to earlier thinkers who had important insights into language and communication, supporting an integrationist view of meaning.
The text further pinpoints the foundations of meaning and its philosophical implications within the human context. It explains the vital importance of personalized and contextualized factors, and explores feasible ways of including those factors in theorizing to ultimately conclude that the nature of meaning is embedded in what we are as human beings.
This book is a valuable read for anyone interested in integrationism, language theory, or the deeper questions about how meaning works.