FROM birth to death, discovering, creating and communicating meaning is our full-time job as humans. Meaning helps us make sense of both our private world and our public intellectual world. But what do we mean by “meaning”? Can we hope to understand it?
For nearly three decades, George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California, Berkeley, and I have surveyed mountains of evidence showing that most of our cognition and meaning-making goes on well below the level of conscious awareness. This is why we argue that to discover the nature and sources of human meaning we must explore our…
