Abstract

Berčić’s proposal for a pluralistic normative account of meaning of life offers a fine point of entry into the problematic of meaningfulness. When given the coherentist twist he briefly suggests, it nicely fits with intuitions of many wise people from classics in philosophy to contemporary psychologists who work on the topic. In this paper we discuss his normative sketch and attempt to supplement it with a sketch of metaphysics and epistemology of meaningfulness along response-dependentist lines. The account proposed here claims that being meaningful in objective sense is being such as to cause the experiential response of meaningfulness in slightly idealized, suitably sensitive observers under suitable circumstances. The response locates the relevant event or item in the space of meaningfulness, analogous to color-space.