The Problem with Meaning

“The Problem with Meaning, the remarkable work by Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, belongs to that small lineage of texts that shift the conditions under which the mind operates. It is not merely read—it is endured, walked through, revisited, and ultimately lived with. This book enters a moment in which humanity’s various crises—ecological, political, psychological—are often described as external forces acting upon us. Tobias and Morrison take a different view. They argue that these crises originate not from the world but from the architecture of the human mind. What we are confronting, they propose, is not simply climate change or species extinction, but the cumulative effects of millennia of conceptual errors. Our epistemology has become an ecological threat. What distinguishes this work is not only its breadth, which stretches across evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, and ethics, but its coherence. They have traced many of the filaments that connect them: the ongoing attempt of a single species to interpret its own consciousness in a world that never asked for such interpretation.” – From the Foreword by Dr. Con Slobodchikoff, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Northern Arizona University, CEO of Zoolingua, Director, Animal Language Institute, CEO of Animal Communications Ltd., Author of Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals (St. Martin’s Press 2012) and Lead Author, Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society (Harvard University Press 2009)