Chapter 14 examines international legitimacy as a system of reference that influences how actors (primarily states and individuals) experience meaning in the international sphere and, to some degree, at the national level. As a way to unpack what to understand in how a sense of legitimacy can function as a reference and framework of meaning in an international system, this chapter focuses on three points: how the start of an international order can impact its legitimacy, which leads me to argue that it can happen in three ways: force, negotiation, and a combination of the two, each of these ways having an impact on how the sense of legitimacy of international order is perceived; how, once in place, the sense of legitimacy in an international system influences actors (their behavior, identity and values); and how the scope and depth of legitimacy internationally can vary with time and circumstances.

Attachment theory offered a solution to a long-term problem in developmental psychology; namely, the lack of evidence for stability in behavior from infancy to later life. What turned out to be essential was to focus on the emotional quality of early relationships. “Security,” or confidence in the availability and responsiveness of caregivers, is what predicted later functioning. Such “trust” becomes the core for building an organized system of meaning. Assessing the history of responsiveness, the quality of the attachment, and later child and adult outcomes, all hinge on attending to the meaning of behavior. None of this works without that. This work leads to a new understanding of how human development is organized.

The emerging awareness of self and other, especially with regard to compatible and conflicting aims, opens up dramatic new meanings for the toddler. Being able to be deliberately contrary gives the child experience with disruption and repair of the relationship and lets them explore the boundaries of appropriate behavior. The toddler also has a beginning capacity to control impulses and manage behavior, but doing this adequately requires continued scaffolding and guidance from parents. Meanings surrounding parental reliability brought forward from infancy impact how readily children now accept parental guidance. At the same time, clear, firm, and warm guidance can increase the child’s confidence regarding parents. This is how the transactional model works.

From cradle to grave human beings actively strive to abstract meaning from experience. The meaning making capacity builds step-by-step, beginning in the earliest years. At each phase of life, new capacities emerge and previous limitations in meaning making can be overcome. By adolescence all of the basic tools for making meaning have been acquired. All that remains to be achieved is the wisdom that comes from accrued lived experience in the subsequent years. Increasingly, a narrative identity may be formed.

Before the infant can even engage in intentional behavior, it is embedded in a pre-existing meaning system, brought forward by parents. By caregivers responding appropriately to the meaning of infant behaviors, giving them signal value, the infant is fitted into this system. Intentionality then lets the infant experience such contingencies more directly, and this begins the process of the co-construction of meaning in relationships

“Competence” is defined as “doing well,” and “resilience” is defined as “doing well in the face of adversity.” Without a developmental approach, based in meaning, these terms are merely labels for what is observed, and the definitions are circular. How do you know some children are resilient? They are doing well in adverse circumstances. Why are they doing well? Because they are resilient. Research shows that competence and resilience are in fact developmental constructions, built up age by age. Children who do well in high stress families, or who rebound from a period of difficulty, do so because they have a history of earlier positive support and/or changes in current circumstances. They maintain or reclaim positive expectations based on experience. This work paved the way for studies showing that early experience is not erased by developmental change and that adaptation is a product of the entire, cumulated history of experience, as well as current circumstances.

Trauma refers to an event or series of events that overwhelms the capacities of the person. Trauma disrupts all developing systems from brain to self. Trauma is especially devastating in the early years because of the nature of development. Development is cumulative and follows the principle of differentiation. Basic forms are laid down and then refined; therefore, there is a lasting impact of early disruption. Trauma can be especially devasting with regard to meaning making, because the major impact of trauma is to compromise integration. Integration is precisely what meaning making is. When early integration is compromised, gaps in the mind in the form of dissociation will result.

As researchers of family relationships have long suspected, it is now demonstrable that ways of parenting are carried across generations and that this cannot be reduced to genetics. A focus on meaning was the answer, because it is not specific parental practices that show continuity; rather, it is the distilled meaning of experiences. Warmth, hostility, or boundary violations can be shown in many ways. Your son may show warmth to his daughter in a very different way than you showed it to him. But the experience of warm care (or hostility) is carried forward. Research shows such continuity even from the first two years of life before the maturation of declarative memory. Similarly, the pattern of disorganized attachment shows continuity across generations, even though the signs of disorganization may vary. Studies show that this continuity is mediated by the tendency of those with disorganized attachment to dissociate and later behave in frightening ways toward their infants, which is then related to their disorganized attachment.

Development is complex. Individual meaning systems are dynamic, and change can happen at any age. But even change is lawful and is conditioned by one’s history of meaning making. Self-fulfilling processes are part of the nature of adaptation. Those that bring positive expectations to social encounters often have new positive social experiences. As argued in the beginning, meaning lies at the center of a rich life. Those who have a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a coherent, integrated life story have what can be described as meaningful lives.

The power of meaning is revealed in diverse arenas from health and wellbeing, to economics, to the way children engage their worlds, to the organized worldviews of adults. The goal of this book is to go beyond past work on meaning and social relationships by considering comprehensive developmental data at each phase of life that was not previously available.

Age-by-age, it is the meaning of experience that is carried forward. Memory is “constructive.” Details of events are often left behind and different events are synthesized into “scripts” or generalizations about the self and the world. It is these abstracted meanings and scripts that guide behavior. The nature of individual adaptation is such that others will react to one’s way of seeing the world (and therefore behaving) such that pre-existing viewpoints are often confirmed.

Constitution-making acts of persons and institutions are the primary objects of constitutional interpretation. The primary result of constitutional interpretation is an account of the meaning of those acts. This chapter offers an explanation of the prodigious creativity of constitutional courts that involves two elements. First, we all equivocate concerning the meaning of a constitution, treating it variously (or at the same time) as the signification of constitution-making acts, and/or as the significance of the constitution as a framework of governance. Secondly, creativity results from interpreters’ ways of resolving the tension between the rule of constitutional law (that is, adherence to a rule-governed framework of governance) and the demands of constitutional justice (that is, the array of principles of justice in governance that the constitution ought to secure). The boundaries of constitutional interpretation are put in question by the equivocation between meaning as significance and meaning as signification, and by the tension between the rule of constitutional law and the demands of constitutional justice.

My work has been primarily located in two fields, both characterized by heated disagreements when I entered them. In child language research the nativist view was the default position in the late 1960s and through the next couple of decades. But in 1967 I studied adult input to children, in service of understanding its contributions to language acquisition. By the 2020s the notion that certain features of adult-child interaction are instrumental in language development has been robustly supported by multiple lines of work. I first got involved in thinking about literacy development in the mid-1990s during a time of conflict between what was then framed as “phonics” versus “whole language.” That conflict resurfaces with depressing regularity and is currently characterized as a struggle to implement the “science of reading.” The complexities in the reading domain are far greater than in language acquisition because of the larger role of educational publishers and school administrators in determining a course of action.

Oscar Barbarin has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Maryland, and North Carolina as well as Tulane University. His scholarship examines social context, ethnicity and child development, particularly the impact of racism and material hardship on socioemotional development. He has studied the development of children with life-threatening illness, urbanization in South Africa, and quality of early childhood settings. His research has centered on boys of color and the identified auspicious conditions that promote their mental health, social competence and emotional resilience. These conditions include (a) systems of caring, (b) structures supporting their self-regulation of behavior and emotions, and (c) interpretive frameworks by which affirming familial relations, culture and spiritual values provide boys of color a sense of connection, purpose, and an understanding of their place in the world. He has proposed that paradoxical attributions are a key cognitive strategy in maintaining emotional balance by affirming personal agency.

This paper presents the main topics, arguments, and positions in the philosophy of AI at present (excluding ethics). Apart from the basic concepts of intelligence and computation, the main topics of artificial cognition are perception, action, meaning, rational choice, free will, consciousness, and normativity. Through a better understanding of these topics, the philosophy of AI contributes to our understanding of the nature, prospects, and value of AI. Furthermore, these topics can be understood more deeply through the discussion of AI; so we suggest that “AI philosophy” provides a new method for philosophy.