Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chapter 1 investigates what we are asking when we ask about meaning in life. I begin via conceptual-linguistic analysis to arrive at a pretheoretical account informed by survey results and common intuitions. I precisify the account to avoid overlap with other concepts like happiness, pleasure, and moral praiseworthiness. The result is close to Susan Wolf’s account. I give a detailed summary of her account that stresses our agreement concerning (1) methodology, (2) the importance of both a subjective and objective condition, and (3) the motivational force of meaning. I end the summary with an objection: Wolf is merely describing a hybrid good rather than giving a full account of meaning. I then make the case for my claim that meaning is not merely another good to add to the list of things that make a life go well, but instead a matter of how the goods in a life are organized. When we ask about meaning in life, we are asking about how the goods of a life are related to one another, and I defend what I call robust narrative meaning in life: a view that builds on Helena de Bres’s influential narrative account. My account foregrounds narrative as a means of explaining the importance of significance, purpose, and intelligibility in our explanation concerning the content and import of meaning in life. Chapter 2 asks how it is possible for a group to lead a meaningful life, as a group. I begin with a quick recounting of the meaning of “meaning” in more general terms than what was seen in Chapter 1. The goal is to take a bigger picture view of meaning that remains neutral on some of the more controversial claims from Chapter 1. Instead, my focus is on the coherence of group meaning. I give accounts of “social group” and “group life” before proceeding to make the case for the viability of social groups bearing the property of meaning in life. I consider and reject summativism about group meaning before defending the joint commitment account of the meaning of a group’s life. Chapter 3 investigates the possibility and implications of group immortality. I consider two widely-cited objections to individual immortality – namely, excessive boredom and very bad events – and argue that neither objection applies in the case of immortal (or very-long lasting) group lives. I end by unpacking an important upshot: individual participation in (good) immortal groups is an underexplored way to add meaning to an individual’s life.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".