The comprehensive measure of meaning: Psychological and philosophical foundations

Abstract

The topic of meaning has been of interest both in philosophy and psychology. The psychology research community has put forward a number of instruments to measure meaning. Considerable debate has taken place within philosophy on the objective versus subjective status of meaning in life and on the global versus individual or personal aspects of meaning. Here, we make use of an emerging consensus in the psychology literature concerning a tripartite structure of meaning as cognitive coherence, affective significance, and motivational direction. However, we enrich this understanding with important distinctions drawn from the philosophical literature to distinguish subdomains within this tripartite understanding. We use the relevant philosophical distinctions to classify existing measurement items into a seven-fold structure intended to more comprehensively assess an individual’s sense of meaning. The proposed measure, with three items in each subdomain drawn from previous scales, constitutes what we put forward as the Comprehensive Measure of Meaning. We hope that this measure will enrich the empirical research on the assessment of, and on the causes and effects of, having a sense of meaning.