Although there has been a significant increase in interest in (and acceptance of) the question of life's meaning among analytic philosophers in the last thirty to forty years, the increasing literature appearing in the form of journal articles, anthologies, and edited collections has only begun to be joined by a small but steady stream of monographs more recently. Moreover, a number of the monographs that have been published are orientated towards offering popular-level exposition of various significant positions in the pre-existing literature, rather than pursuing a sustained and rigorous argument for a single view. T. J. Mawson's excellent book is of this less common latter type, and focuses on two theses; the first is a metaphilosophical (or, for those who dislike that term, ‘second-order’) thesis asserting a form of what Mawson calls ‘polyvalence’ regarding the question of life's meaning (which form he calls the ‘amalgam thesis’), the second is a defence of a qualified ‘optimism’ regarding what God's existence would contribute to the meaning of individual humans’ lives.

Before giving a summary of the book's contents which elaborates on these theses and their relation, I shall comment on the manner in which it is written. Throughout Mawson shows careful sensitivity to detail and distinctions characteristic of a high-quality discussion in analytic philosophy. This virtue often has a corresponding vice – some analytic philosophy can be rather dry – and it is much to Mawson's credit that he sugars the pill with a relaxed, conversational style where he can afford this without foregoing precision. He sometimes lightens his discussion with humour, anecdote, and a little satire; whether the last of these will strike you as shrewd or as mordant will depend on whether it is your particular ox being gored, I suspect – I was amused by the ribbing of R. M. Hare, but somewhat deflated by the similar treatment of Continental philosophy.

While most monographs use the introduction as a place to give the reader a sense of the shape of what is coming and how the chapters relate to one another, the closest Mawson comes to this kind of signposting is in his brief conclusion at the end of the book. Positioned as it is, however, this does little to help the reader to check his or her position whilst in the thick of the philosophical fray. There are occasional and helpful chapter summaries at the end of some chapters, but, without chapter titles, it is nevertheless sometimes difficult to see where we are going. Mawson's discussion of a number of points is subtle, and so one can at times lose sight of the wood for the trees. In a civic-minded move then, I offer an attempt at a chapter-by-chapter summary that will, I hope, help prospective readers better engage with a book that deserves careful engagement.

In the introduction Mawson outlines some of the major moves in the debate between optimists and pessimists about how God's existence would affect our lives’ meaning. This outline not only sketches well-worn moves, but offers new discussion of those moves, refines distinctions, and traces interrelations in interesting ways. Our appetites thus whetted and the stakes defined, Mawson sets the stage for his metaphilosophical thesis in chapter 1. He starts with an overlooked sociological question: why do we constantly call for an answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ even when we are sure that any answer will be unsatisfactory?

Mawson wants to understand this constant dissatisfaction, even if he cannot (by necessity) remove it, so that we may at least ‘be satisfied with our dissatisfaction’ (24). The view that the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ makes no sense, and hence no answer can be given to it, is dismissed by way of a potted history of ‘analytic’ philosophy's discussion of that question in the twentieth century, running through pragmatism, positivism, and ordinary language philosophy up to modern ‘meaning in life’ theorists such as Susan Wolf and Thaddeus Metz. Mawson's history tells the story of increasing congeniality to the view that the question makes sense, with philosophers today having reached the stage at which they can offer and assess differing theories of what brings our lives meaning. But with the new-found credibility of the old question comes the old problem for the new answers: why do none of them seem satisfactory?

Mawson's diagnosis of this problem in chapter 2 is to say that we must recognize that the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is really several questions, each with its own (different) answer. To use Mawson's preferred terminology, the question must be understood as being polyvalent (at the level of both connotation and denotation). There are many meanings of life. Moreover, Mawson's polyvalence theory is also what he calls an ‘amalgam’ theory, in so far as he believes that some (though not all) of the different meanings of life are related with metaphysical or logical necessity, and so cluster together into larger wholes. In this he differs from ‘grab-bag’ polyvalence, which claims that the only links between the different meanings are causal, nothing stronger.

Chapters 3 and 4 contain the arguments for polyvalence, divided into three streams. First, we have arguments for isolating different meanings of the words ‘meaning’ and ‘life’ in the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’; these differences indicate differences in the connotation of the question, and, since it is implausible to think that these various connotations will have the same answer, they indicate differences in the denotation as well. Second, when considering the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ as a whole, we see – both intuitively and in the literature – that a number of different meanings appear to capture part, if not all, of what we think we mean by that question. Again differences in connotation argue differences in denotation. Third, polyvalence about the question best explains the stubborn counter-examples that plague extant theories even while we feel that those theories say something true and valuable.

In chapter 5 Mawson argues that when asking about the meaning of life, we are unlikely to have a prior detailed grasp of the different things we are asking. If we are presented with a list of possible meanings, we might realize that some were ones we had not thought of originally, but, now we are presented with them, we would like them to be incorporated into our concerns regarding the question of life's meaning. Whether or not we feel that an answer genuinely speaks to our concerns may be a vague matter, however, and so there will probably always be some dissatisfaction with the set of possible meanings we are willing to recognize.

Chapters 6 and 7 expound the concept of ‘amalgamation’ that differentiates Mawson's polyvalence from ‘grab-bag’ versions. Suppose we can construct a chart of all possible questions that the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ could be taken to connote alongside their answers, where entries on the chart are ranked (and Mawson gives reasons for supposing they will be ranked) by depth – that is, by how central to our concerns when asking the question we think they are. Mawson argues, using detailed examples, that logical and metaphysical connections between certain meanings show that two or more meanings either cluster together (‘amalgamate’) or exclude one another. Ultimately, Mawson thinks there will be several such clusters, and that these relationships will affect the rankings on our chart. For example, a lower-ranked meaning might rise up the rankings once we find out that it is a necessary presupposition for a much higher-ranked meaning.

Whilst chapter 7 focuses on cases in which logical or metaphysical connections bind together two (or more) meanings, chapter 8 explores a specific case of two meanings which exclude one another, or are inversely proportional. Mawson's example here pertains to God, and so we see Mawson's linking of his metaphilosophical thesis with his ‘first-order’ thesis of optimism: that God's existence would provide a net gain in meaningfulness to our lives (though to some more than others). The example concerns the meaning that accrues to our lives in virtue of our having self-creative autonomy: Mawson argues that, to the extent that God increases the meaning of our lives in so far as He assigns us a purpose in a larger scheme of things, so He reduces the meaning of our lives in so far as this assignation precludes us from exercising such self-creative autonomy over the purpose of our lives. These two sources of meaning conflict with one another, and the metaphysical necessity of the conflict means that not even an omnipotent God can circumvent it.

Nevertheless, Mawson continues to believe that God's existence brings a net gain in meaning to our lives in two ways, outlined in chapter 9. First, God adds to life's meaning when we construe ‘life’ in a cosmic sense, by explaining why any contingent beings exist at all. Second, and more importantly, God adds both quantitatively and qualitatively to the meaning of our lives where those lives are construed individualistically. Quantitatively, by guaranteeing us each an eternal heavenly afterlife (Mawson is a universalist, a position he has defended more fully in his Belief in God), God increases meaning in our lives by increasing the quantity of life. In making our lives go on for longer, God makes certain meaningful aspects of them go on for longer. Mawson accepts that an eternal heavenly afterlife may reduce the meaning of our individual lives in certain other respects, but nevertheless thinks that God's bestowing such an afterlife on us is a net gain in meaning. Our individual lives also gain meaning qualitatively in so far as the existence of God will bestow ‘ultimate significance meaning’ on each of them. This is a deep kind of meaning which involves us bringing about significantly positively evaluable consequences when viewed in the widest context we can conceive.

Finally, in chapter 10 (as noted earlier, the separate conclusion is a few pages briefly summarizing what has gone before) the book considers how we should react to our assessment of some meanings of life as being more deep, more central to our concerns, than others. Given the incompatibilities between some meanings, we will realize that some meanings of life can only be bought at the expense of others, and so we must make trade-offs. Although we must consider how to maximize the amount of overall meaningfulness in our lives, Mawson outlines some reasons for thinking that there will be no simple decision procedure to guide us in doing so.

So much for the summary. It seems to me that the main critical seam to mine regarding Mawson's book is a tension in his own metaphilosophical position of amalgam polyvalence. Several elements of the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many seem to hover in the background of the discussion, and Mawson is clearly aware of this. At times he notes the need to avoid linking his polyvalence's various meanings so closely as to collapse into monism, on the one hand, and to avoid them being so loosely tied that his position collapses to grab-bag polyvalence, on the other. Much of Mawson's careful, subtle work in the book is in the service of walking this tightrope, and, it seems to me, many of the most interesting critical questions to be asked of his project, both general and specific, concern whether he has been able to complete this high-wire act successfully.

For example, given that, for Mawson, the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ has many connotations and many denotations, what is it about these various questions (and answers) that makes them connotations (and denotations) of that specific question? What characteristic ties them all together? Mawson, after all, rejects any interpretation of his amalgam polyvalence theory as entailing that the question is, in the words of Joshua Seachris, ‘a largely ill-conceived placeholder for a cluster of related requests, and thus, not really a single question at all’. The worry will be, however, that if we can specify some general characteristics that the various questions that ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean all must have in common, then by appeal to these characteristics we can formulate some general monist meaning of the question that encapsulates the question of life's meaning, which will leave Mawson's position not unlike the ‘monist pluralisms’ of philosophers like Wolf or Frankfurt, from whom he wishes to distinguish himself (see Mawson, 44–45). Mawson's response shows awareness of this problem; the feature he ascribes to all possible connotations of the question is that they speak, at least in part, to our concerns when we ask the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’. Now, the ‘we’ who possess these concerns are specified by Mawson as the vast majority of competent language-users, but I wonder if more needs to be said here. It does not seem immediately obvious that, just because the connotations that comprise possible interpretations of a question derive from the concerns of the vast majority of competent language-users who ask the question, these interpreted questions form more than a conjunctive question or list of conceptually unrelated questions. The only reason I can think of why they would (except by happenstance) would be because we, qua the vast majority of competent language-users, accept some proposed connotations and reject others because we are relying implicitly on some substantive criterion to sort genuine connotations from ersatz ones. If so, presumably we can state the criterion explicitly, and then we are back to monism. (I do not think Mawson would want to appeal to the logical or metaphysical connections he finds between different meanings as tying them together, as he explicitly denies that all meanings are tied in this way to one another (48, 108). Moreover some meanings will be logically/metaphysically connected to putative meanings that we would not want to count as genuine meanings, so such a criterion would be neither necessary nor sufficient. Even if each meaning is tied to another, but no meaning is tied to all meanings, that could still lead to a conjunctive list of more abstract questions; a mixture of the two dangers that we considered above.)

A point on the tightrope where I would like to press more rigorously concerns Mawson's examples in chapter 7, which seek to establish amalgam rather than grab-bag polyvalence by showing that non-causal (i.e. logical or metaphysical) relationships of support obtain between some of the differing sorts of meaning that exist. Mawson gives several such examples, noting correctly that even one will be enough to show that our polyvalence should be of the amalgam rather than the grab-bag variety. I have worries with a couple, but my main anxiety is with the first; in introducing this example Mawson thinks that his reader will respond with an incredulous ‘Huh?’, and, indeed, I did.

The example concerns the idea of meaning as being something about one's life that makes it worth continuing: call this ‘meaning^w’. Mawson believes that meaning^w can appear in an objectivist version (‘meaning^wo’) and in a subjectivist version (‘meaning^ws’), and that both versions constitute separate kinds of meaning. Hence a life may exhibit either kind without exhibiting the other. However, Mawson also wants to say that one of these kinds of meaning is a necessary condition of the other. His contention is that the apparent contradiction between these statements is dissipated when we observe that these meanings can be had in one of two modes: in one mode, one is the necessary condition of the other, in the other mode, it is not.

Meaning^wo is present if one's life is characterized by, say, aspects such as having good friendships or a fulfilling job, even if one does not see any value in these characteristics oneself. Meaning^ws is present if one does see such value in certain aspects of one's life, even if they do not in fact make one's life worth living. Mawson thinks it clear that a life can have one of these versions of meaning but not the other: an example of the former would be a depressive, who does not see his life as worth living, although it contains aspects that objectively make his life worth living; an example of the latter would be an obsessive miniature teapot collector who finds his life accruing teapots immensely valuable, but is objectively mistaken in this belief.

Mawson's mode distinction separates meaning simpliciter from meaning for the individual concerned. When discussing meaning qua having a purpose, Mawson notes that having a purpose gives us meaning in this sense simpliciter, but we may not appropriate that purpose to ourselves, thus failing to have meaning in the for-the-individual-concerned mode. Now Mawson claims that the objective version of one's life having worth-continuing-with properties can come in both of these modes (call them ‘meaning^wo1’ and ‘meaning^wo2’ respectively), and in the for-the-individual-concerned mode, this objective version is a variety of the subjective version. If so, then life's having meaning^ws is a necessary condition for life's having meaning^wo2. And, consequently, life's having meaning^wo2 will entail its having meaning^ws.

I have a worry with Mawson's claim that meaning^wo can be a variety of meaning^s, even if we agree that this is the case only for meaning^wo2 specifically. I find it hard to see how, if we have two distinct sorts of meaning, one can, in one mode, be a variety of the other – at least when the nature of these distinct sorts seems to conceptually exclude their identification (even if not their co-exemplification); it seems that for a type of meaning to be objective precludes it from being a version of subjective meaning at one and the same time, even if we say it is a version only under one mode. The fact that x appears under a given mode cannot change x’s essential nature, surely (or else it is not x that appears under that mode), and the essential nature of an objective version of meaning is that it is not subjective. Mawson says that we have an analogy here with epistemology: meaning^wo2 is a variety of meaning^ws ‘in the way that knowledge is a variety of belief’ (102). But I find this analogy uncongenial; if we say that knowledge is a variety of belief in so far as it involves belief, then the analogy is uncongenial because the concepts of ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ are not mutually exclusive in the way that ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are. If we say that knowledge is a variety of mere belief, this seems to make the analogy fit, but the problem now is that knowledge is not a variety of mere belief, and so the analogy does not assuage any worries we have about objective meaning under a certain mode being a variety of subjective meaning.

But let us move to specifics. We are discussing here meaning of the following type: ‘there being something in one's life that makes life worth continuing with’. Now the objective version of this meaning is that one's life in fact does have something in it that makes life worth continuing with, even if one does not recognize it. The subjective version of this meaning is that one's life appears to one that it has something in it that makes that life worth living, even if it in fact does not. The objective version under the simpliciter mode would, it seems to me, be the objective version I have just described – the default description of the objective version is a description of it in the simpliciter mode. But the objective version under the for-the-individual-concerned mode is harder to make out. When Mawson introduces the for-the-individual-concerned mode he introduces it in the context of a different type of meaning: meaning qua having some sort of purpose. In that context, whether one has this meaning in the for-the-individual-concerned mode (in addition to the simpliciter mode) depends on whether one can appropriate the purpose that one's life objectively has to oneself. So the for-the-individual-concerned mode appears to require some act of appropriation of the objective characteristic that one's life has (in the simpliciter mode). The problem now arises as to what that could be when we are considering meaning^w. Interestingly, Mawson does not give an example of this (unless I have overlooked it). And it is hard to see what it could amount to. In the teapot collector example, which is meant to display meaning^ws but not meaning^wo, the collector clearly appropriates (if this is the right word) to himself the apparent worthwhile characteristics of teapot collecting, even if these are indeed only apparent and not really worthwhile. So appropriation cannot be the distinguishing characteristic between meaning^ws and meaning^wo2. The only difference I can see between these two versions of meaning^w is that, although from the perspective of the individual, life is experienced in exactly the same way when either version is present, there is a factual difference in so far as when meaning^wo2 is present the individual is appropriating something that really is worthwhile, and when only meaning^ws is present the individual is appropriating something that is only apparently so. The sole difference between the two is that if meaning^ws is present, meaning^wo1 cannot be; if it were, then we would not have meaning^ws at all, but rather meaning^wo2.

But then we have a problem for the claim that meaning^ws is a necessary condition for the presence of meaning^wo2. For meaning^wo1 is also a necessary condition for the possession of meaning^wo2, as otherwise the latter collapses into meaning^ws. But meaning^ws and meaning^wo1 are incompatible, as I sought to establish in the last paragraph. So we have a paradox; meaning^ws both is and is not a necessary condition for meaning^wo2.

I think we can relieve the appearance of paradox by observing that we cannot have both meaning^ws and meaning^wo2 present at once. The reason for this resembles the reason why we cannot have both knowledge that p and mere belief that p (as opposed to belief that p) at once. In both cases we have a characteristic (belief and appropriation respectively) that is wholly constitutive of one concept (mere belief and meaning^ws), but only partly constitutive of another (knowledge and meaning^wo2). The other constitutive characteristics of these latter concepts actively exclude the sole possession of the initial characteristic as wholly constitutive of those concepts; all defining characteristics of a concept are essential to it. So it would be a mistake to say that where we have meaning^wo2 this also entails that there is a separate version of that meaning, namely meaning^ws, present, in the same way that it would be a mistake to say that where we have a Singapore Sling on the table this also entails that we have a separate glass of neat gin on that table. A glass containing a measure of gin may be a characteristic of both a glass of neat gin and of a Singapore Sling, but the nature of a Singapore Sling precludes any neat gin (as opposed to gin) being in it (although of course you can put neat gin into it, or into the other ingredients for a Singapore Sling in a glass, but after that the gin is no longer neat).

I do not think this is the end of the matter; I have only sketched my concern with this example, and, as Mawson himself notes, even one example of two separate types of meaning being linked logically or metaphysically will prove amalgam polyvalence over grab-bag polyvalence. Given that he gives three or four examples in chapter 7, even if I am right about this one, there would be more work to do to defend grab-bag polyvalence.

There is much more to say about Mawson's book, but I will close with a recommendation. This is an important contribution to the literature, written by a philosopher with a comprehensive understanding of the field, and containing a wealth of provocative lines of thought. The metaphilosophical issues regarding life's meaning have been comparatively underdeveloped even in the burgeoning recent literature, which includes only a few discussions of real depth and significance (such as Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life, chapter 2). Given his careful and original discussion of these issues, I would say that Mawson's book is indispensable for any philosopher interested in the question(s) of life's meaning.