Philosophers once dismissed questions about meaning in life as conceptually confused. Only language and related phenomena, it was thought, can have meaning; thus, to ask about the meaning of life is to misapply the concept. Recent work by Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, Aaron Smuts, and others has brought new attention and respectability to the topic. However, while talk of life meaning is no longer considered nonsense, most theorists continue to assume that such talk has nothing to do with meaning in the ‘sign’ sense that applies to language. In this paper I argue that this assumption is not well justified and that reflection on the example of Sherlock Holmes's life can help us to see why.
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Charles Repp (2018) studied this question.
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