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8 books match the query 'Meaning (Psychology)'
A Process Model
Eugene T. Gendlin; Foreword by Robert A. Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2018
A Process Model, Gendlin’s magnum opus, offers no less than a new alternative to the dualism of mind and body. Beginning with living process, the body’s simultaneous interaction and identity with its environment, Gendlin systematically derives nonreductive concepts that offer novel and rigorous ways to think from within lived precision. In this way terms such as body, environment, time, space, behavior, language, culture, situation, and more can be understood with both great force and great subtlety.
Gendlin’s project is relevant to discussions not only in philosophy but in other fields in which life process is central—including biology, environmental management, environmental humanities, and ecopsychology. It provides a genuinely new philosophical approach to complex societal challenges and environmental issues.
Called to Care?
Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful WorkCindy L. Cain
Rutgers University Press, 2026
Health care workers are burned out. Health care leaders know that workers are burned out but do not yet have the right tools to fix the problem. Called to Care? argues that we can mitigate burnout by examining what is most meaningful about health care work. Using interviews and observation of a wide range of health care workers, Cain shows that workers who care for our most vulnerable adults find their work to be meaningful when they are able to connect to the work and make progress on something that matters. In most cases, these meaningful experiences are also consistent with better care for patients. And yet organizational practices, policy environments, and cultural meanings get in the way of meaningful work, creating burnout. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Called to Care? illustrates that workplaces can and should align meaningful work experiences with quality care for patients.
Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning
A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the SubjectiveEugene Gendlin
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning addressed the unavoidable variety of conceptual formulations and other questions that have now become central.
Explanation and Power
The Control of Human BehaviorMorse Peckham
University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Explanation and Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The meaning of any utterance or any sign is the response to that utterance or sign: this is the fundamental proposition behind Morse Peckham's Explanation and Power. Published in 1979 and now available in paperback for the first time, Explanation and Power grew out of Peckham's efforts, as a scholar of Victorian literature, to understand the nature of Romanticism. His search ultimately led back to—and built upon—the tradition of signs developed by the American Pragmatists. Since, in Peckham's view, meaning is not inherent in word or sign, only in response, human behavior itself must depend upon interaction, which in turn relies upon the stability of verbal and nonverbal signs. In the end, meaning can be stabilized only by explanation, and when explanation fails, by force. Peckham's semiotic account of human behavior, radical in its time, contends with the same issues that animate today's debates in critical theory — how culture is produced, how meaning is arrived at, the relation of knowledge to power and of society to its institutions. Readers across a wide range of disciplines, in the humanities and social sciences, will welcome its reappearance.
Symbols that Stand for Themselves
Roy Wagner
University of Chicago Press, 1986
The Construction of Negotiated Meaning
A Social Cognitive Theory of WritingLinda Flower
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994
Based on five years of close observation of students, writing and collaborative planning—the practice in which student writers take the roles of planner and supporter to help each other develop a more rhetorically sophisticated writing plan—foremost cognitive composition researcher Linda Flower redefines writing in terms of an interactive social and cognitive process and proposes a convincing and compelling theory of the construction of negotiated meaning.
Flower seeks to describe how writers construct meaning. Supported by the emerging body of social and cognitive research in rhetoric, education, and psychology, she portrays meaning making as a literate act and a constructive process. She challenges traditional definitions of literacy, adding to that concept the elements of social literate practices and personal literate acts. In Flower’s view, this social cognitive process is a source of tension and conflict among the multiple forces that shape meaning: the social and cultural context, the demands of discourse, and the writer’s own goals and knowledge.
Flower outlines a generative theory of conflict. With this conflict central to her theory of the construction of negotiated meaning, she examines negotiation as an alternative to the metaphors of reproduction and conversation. It is through negotiation, Flower argues, that social expectations, discourse conventions, and the writer’s personal goals and knowledge become inner voices. The tension among these forces often creates the hidden logic behind student writing. In response to these conflicting voices, writers sometimes rise to the active negotiation of meaning, creating meaning in the interplay of alternatives, opportunities, and constraints.
The Meaning of the Built Environment
A Nonverbal Communication ApproachAmos Rapoport
University of Arizona Press, 1990
"Fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order." —Design Book Review
"This is the second edition of a book first published in 1982. . . . Enthusiastic and inquiring as the reader is brought into the writer's thought processes." —Progress in Human Geography (England)
"It has merits not to be found in any other book in this much-discussed and little understood subject, to wit: it is short, it is simple, and it is useful. It is even, in parts, entertaining....a book which will help architects to do their job better." —Architecture Australia
The Senses Still
C. Nadia Seremetakis
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller.
C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.