This chapter articulates what methodologism as pragmatism means. A central tenet of this view is that doing is constitutive of both meaning and knowing. Methodologism holds that meaning and knowledge arise from following a method – a procedure oriented towards achieving the desired outcome of fixing beliefs or keeping rational conversation going. This framework applies to all epistemic practices. Moreover, methodologism asserts that what is known is not independent of how it is known, thereby bridging the gap between ontology and practice. This line of thought has important precedents in the work of William James, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, and others. Crucially, it is the community of practitioners who determine what counts as correctness or incorrectness. Given the diversity of communal rules and regimes of reasoning, pluralism emerges as a natural consequence. Membership in and choice between communities thus carries normative weight. Discursive rationality allows for comparisons between communities in terms of their rationality. Ultimately, it is not merely useful but an ethical obligation – a societal duty to uphold rational practices as a condition of human flourishing.

When working with patients primarily in a medication management context, one might wonder, “Does meaning matter in prescribing?” Medications can hold a wide range of symbolic meanings for our patients. A person’s hopes and fears about a treatment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, reflecting feelings about oneself, one’s social system, and representing the working alliance with treaters. Furthermore, the meanings we as clinicians hold can also influence our patient’s response to treatment. Although the meanings clinicians ascribe consciously or unconsciously to prescribing can facilitate improvement, other meanings have the potential to negatively affect a patient’s response. In the following chapter we will highlight several meanings of medication that may affect patient attitudes and experiences, discuss how to approach some of these beliefs, outline steps toward the integration of meaning – making in psychopharmacologic encounters, and discuss how countertransference dynamics inherent in the prescribing process can contribute to treatment resistance and poor response to treatments.

How do words change their meaning? This chapter examines semantic change, change in meaning. It reveals the various ways in which words change their meanings and explains what is behind each kind of change, with telling examples from the history of English.

This chapter discusses what it means for a word to have meaning. Starting with the classical traditions in the West and the East about the nature of meaning, the connections between the word and the object it refers to (reference), and a set of inherent and defining properties which determines the referent (sense). It then moves on to the modern analysis of types of meaning, and introduces the way linguists characterize word meanings through semantic analysis. Major lexical relations, including hyponymy/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy and homophony, are discussed. This chapter also introduces the notion of collocation.

This explores the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) as an example of entanglements of spirituality and psychopathology, and looks at ‘spiritually significant voices’ (identified by those who hear them as having spiritual/religious significance). Some have proposed making a differential diagnosis between ‘genuine’ spiritual experiences and mental illness, but the criteria for making such distinctions can be controversial and misleading, based on a false presupposition that the two are mutually exclusive. Research shows that patients identify some experiences as both part of an illness and spiritually significant. Patients with a psychiatric diagnosis are often subjected to epistemic injustice, wherein their claim to know things (e.g. spiritually) is discredited owing to prejudice associated with their diagnosis. A case study explores entanglement of spirituality with AVHs and considers implications for assessment/treatment. Voices of this kind may be meaningful for those who hear them, whether or not associated with a diagnosis, and affirmation of this and patients’ positive spiritual coping, where possible, can be a positive factor in promoting recovery.

Reflective civics is a duty and delight for free people, especially Americans, given our founding principles viewing citizenship as not only a right but also a duty and a matter of sacred honor. American schooling K-16, and civic culture, can redress our recent deficits of civic health and of individual mental and spiritual health by emphasizing the higher meaning provided throughout the study of, and civil discussion about, citizenship and self-government in both civil society and public affairs. Then sections on (a) Civic Friendship and Replenishing America’s Civic Capital – including renewal of civil society and voluntary associations; (b) A Sputnik Moment for Academia: Restoring a Higher Civics – emphasizing the need for professors and higher education leaders to provide guidance and a good example on renewing civics, and supporting its renewal in K-12 schooling and civic culture; and (c) Lincoln’s Higher Call – that a renewed civics across K-16 and American culture should emphasize the consensus-forging figure of Lincoln, his magnanimity and statesmanship in the Second Inaugural in particular, calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

In the last chapter the authors provide an overview of all aspects of a Recovery Resilience Practice that will contribute towards a sustainable recovery-oriented lifestyle. In this chapter the reader will consolidate their Recovery Resilience Practice and see how to use it to support any recovery program or pathway. As highlighted throughout the Workbook, the central aim of a Recovery Resilience Practice is to remove the hindrance that obstructs one’s capacity to access Recovery Capital and apply recovery skills as well as provide a practice that can help one deal moment-by-moment with stress, high-risk situation, triggers, or any troubling situations. In short, a Recovery Resilience Practice removes the hindrance to one’s innate resilience and capacity for flourishing and assists in achieving recovery and life goals. The last chapter provides an overview of how the workbook assists individuals in recovery to have greater self-awareness of their unhealthy and healthy coping styles and prompts them to evolve to a place of greater self-awareness so that they can make more informed decisions about their lives and efficaciously deal with life’s challenges.

In this chapter there is a focus in the expectations or Requirements that sustain an addictive lifestyle. It highlights that in addition to fueling resentments, Requirements also affect how one relates to potential high-risk situations, triggers, and stressful events in general. Chapter 1 of this Workbook highlighted that oftentimes it is not the situation or event itself that creates emotional distress, but the Requirements individuals have (often automatically and out of awareness) for the situation or event that activate their I-Systems. Thus, a Recovery Resilience Practice does not focus on changing any given situation (crucial insofar as many distressful situations or triggers may be unavoidable) but focuses instead on changing the “who” one brings to that situation – the Natural Functioning self or I-System Functioning self.

Until recently, Wilfrid Sellars’s connection to pragmatism was seen mostly as tangential by analytic pragmatists influenced by him and by anti-analytic ‘classicalist’ pragmatists alike. Recent scholarship in the history of pragmatism, however, has begun to recover him as a genuine member of that tradition. Similarly, John Dewey, whom no one would challenge as a genuine pragmatist, is often seen by classicalists as fundamentally opposed to the kind of analytic philosophy that Sellars represents and by analytic pragmatists as having some good ideas but not very successfully bringing them to fruition. This too is conventional wisdom best overturned. A fresh-eyed interpretation of Dewey’s work shows that Dewey is a major influence on the development of Sellars’s pragmatism, namely that Sellars’s account of conceptual intentionality in nature is both a critical reaction to and development of Dewey’s naturalistic view of conceptual meanings. In particular, Sellars’s account of rule-following behavior and pattern-governed behavior builds upon Dewey’s account of the relationship between conceptual activity in reasoned discourse and intelligent habits of action in ordinary affairs. By illuminating this influence of Dewey on Sellars, we see that Sellars and Dewey are in the same pragmatist tradition of thought about mind in nature. Further, appreciating this influence shows that Sellars’ view departs from an important tenet of Dewey’s pragmatism, and in doing so makes his view vulnerable to an objection that Dewey’s is not.

This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

Several prominent Anglo-American philosophers – the concept theorists, as I shall call them – argue that to engage rationally in inquiry, one must grasp and apply non-linguistic entities called concepts, which, when properly combined, yield non-linguistic entities called propositions, or thoughts that are true or false. Arguments of this sort have a long history that extends at least as far back as Plato. What is distinctive of theorizing about concepts since the late 1930s, however, is its reliance on methods of metalinguistic semantic analysis first devised by Alfred Tarski. My goals in this chapter are to explain this reliance and to reconstruct and evaluate a small but representative selection of the most influential philosophical views on concepts since 1945.

Wittgenstein was associated with conceptual analysis and it is widely presumed that that there is a Wittgensteinian account of concepts, yet sustained treatments of the topic in his work are difficult to find. My contribution shows that this irony is more apparent than real. Wittgenstein discussed concepts at some length in material from the early 1930s and manuscripts and lectures from his final period. On that basis I discuss Wittgenstein’s answers to five crucial questions about concepts – concerning their definition, possession, individuation, function and how best to investigate their nature. Wittgenstein and thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him (Frege, Dummett, Peacock) have contributed substantially to our understanding of concepts in two ways: first, methodological reflections on how to approach philosophically contested concepts, the concept of a concept included; secondly, elucidation of the nature and role of concepts through their connections with linguistic meaning, explanation, understanding, abilities and rules.

Conceptual engineering is, prima facie, the engineering of concepts. But what are concepts? And in what sense, if any, can they be engineered? In this chapter I introduce conceptual engineering and then distinguish three different understandings of concepts. The first, prevalent in parts of cognitive science, is the psychological account, which sees concepts as psychologically real cognitive structures in individuals’ minds. The second, with historical connections to the pragmatism of Carnap, is the semantic account, which sees concepts as semantic meanings determined by conventional principles of use. The third, rooted in Frege’s rationalism and in anti-individualism, is the representationalist account, which sees concepts as publicly accessible components of thought, determined ultimately not by use but by direct relations between individuals and the world. Disagreements over the nature, target and possible implementation of conceptual engineering are, I will claim, ultimately grounded in the more fundamental disagreement over the nature of concepts.