This section discusses a selection of cognitive biases – distortions to our judgement identified by empirical psychology – and relates them to metaphysics.

This gives a fairly detailed account of the problems with metaphysics, which are not only due to its separation from all evidence, but also its psychological effects.

How belief (like desire and meaning) can be integrated, not just through having more coherent beliefs but also by recognising that they might be wrong.

How practice can help to integrate meaning.

An introduction to archetypes. What Jung calls ‘resolved’ archetypes are also integrated ones.

How meanings can be fragmented just as desires can be in conflict, and how they can also be integrated.

Continues the criticism of representationalism, showing its link to metaphysics. Discussion of the way this blocks understanding of the objectivity of emotion.

Explains some of the negative effects of representationalism (the traditional theory of meaning that is not embodied) on philosophy, religion and ritual.

Explains the embodied meaning theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This provides an alternative way of understanding meaning based on our bodies that has huge implications for our thinking.

Why meaning is an important subject that relates to other issues and enshrines false dichotomies. At the basis of these false dichotomies is the split between cognitive meaning (‘dictionary meaning’) and emotive meaning (‘meaning of life meaning’). In our experience, no such split occurs.