Announcing: The Meaning Lab
An Initiative for Furthering the Scientific Study of Meaning
The Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow Institute is intended as a new research hub dedicated to the scientific study of meaning. It aims to support early-career scholars and para-academics who would contribute pioneering work to the nascent, interdisciplinary field of meaning research. Through the aid of community resources and discussions, publishing and promotional efforts, grants and scholarships, it is my hope that the Meaning Lab can help advance research into topics like relevance realization, meaning in life, wisdom, moral and evaluative reasoning, faith development, and more.
The Meaning Lab situates itself as part of and in service to an emerging paradigm in the natural and human sciences. This paradigm includes frameworks like David Wolpert and Artemy Kolchinky’s theory of semantic information, Terence Deacon’s theory of teleodynamics, Karl Friston’s free energy principle and active inference, Donald Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology, Gary Cziko’s universal selection theory (UST), Gregg Henriques’s Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), Bobby Azarian’s Unifying Theory of Reality (UTOR) and integrated evolutionary synthesis, John Vervaeke’s theory of relevance realization (RR), James Gibson’s theory of affordances, Jason Ananda Josephson Storm’s hylosemiotics, David Chapman’s theory of meaningness, and many others. Such frameworks articulate meaning and meaning-making processes in scientific and naturalistic terms by identifying their emergence out of the functional energy-information dynamics relating individual entities to their contexts of viability and flourishing.
Drawing on insights from across this paradigm, the Meaning Lab will offer its resources to young scholars looking to contribute novel research to this interdisciplinary field of study. Offerings will include symposia (virtual and potentially in-person), research funding, promotional efforts (e.g., interviews on the Metamodern Meaning podcast), options for collaboration and networking, short research residencies, and overall increase in visibility of researchers operating in this space.
This GoFundMe campaign was created to help get this initiative off the ground. The current goal is to raise $50,000 in the next year. To this end, in the coming weeks I will be reaching out to various organizations and foundations to see if they are interested in supporting this initiative so as to create a continual resource pool for ongoing meaning research.
Below is a description of the Lab’s pilot initiative: my own project proposal for a doctoral program I hope to begin this year under the supervision of open and relational theologian Thomas Jay Oord. For those familiar with my Evolution of Meaning series published here on Substack, this research is dedicated to advancing that work, and will be key to the findings published in subsequent volumes. Here is a presentation summarizing the project:
Title: The Evolution of Meaning: Measuring Complexification of God-Concepts and Notions of Ultimate Concern at the Individual and Collective Levels
Researcher: Brendan Graham Dempsey
Type of Project: Ph.D. dissertation; supervisor: Thomas Jay Oord​​
Abstract: With his extensive research into the psychology of religion and meaning-making, James W. Fowler offered a model of meaning structures for assessing how individuals construct their sacred images and sense of ultimate concern. In his later work, he would posit parallels between these structures and the evolution of faith paradigms from the premodern, modern, and postmodern periods of Christian thought. These sociological claims were suggestive but, compared to his psychological study, undertheorized and not systematically pursued. This project would attempt such a systematic analysis, applying a Fowlerian lens to the historical evolution of Western religious thought—from its premodern origins in the ancient Near East to its post-Enlightenment transformations and on into its critical revaluations in postmodernity. Qualitative analysis of these developments will be buttressed by quantitative measurements of hierarchical complexity, a neo-Piagetian metric that can be used to assess parallels between the available psychological data and the historical literature.
Whether you’re interested in my work and want to support my project, or if the prospect of a broader institutional support structure for young scholars in meaning studies is something you’d like to contribute to, please consider donating to this campaign.
Fantastic, and much needed! I will be donating.
Bravo! Bravissimo!