Fund Brendan's PhD and the Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow

As my work on the "meaning crisis" in contemporary culture has drawn me further and further into the academic study of meaning itself, I have felt increasingly called to try and contribute something of significance to the scholarly understanding of the development of meaning, value, and the sacred in human culture. For me, this has meant integrating my degrees in religious and cultural studies with frameworks from big history, complexity theory, cognitive science, and developmental psychology. Now, having finally found a properly interdisciplinary PhD program--one supervised by leading process scholar Thomas Jay Oord, no less--the time has come to take the next step in my career and pursue my doctoral degree.

At the same time, I have been incredibly inspired by other young scholars in the emerging metamodern paradigm of meaning research and began to wonder how I might help bring greater visibility and resources to the various amazing projects currently underway in this rather diffuse network. When I realized that my PhD prospect would require some fundraising efforts, it occured to me that the occasion could potentially serve a broader goal of helping not just me and my work, but others' as well.

This is the idea that spawned the creation of the Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow Institute.

The Meaning Lab is intended as a new research hub dedicated to the scientific study of meaning. It aims to support early-career scholars and para-academics like myself 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/worldview 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. All of these 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 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, and overall increase in visibility of researchers operating in this space.

https://www.skymeadowinstitute.org/meaning-lab

This GoFundMe campaign is to help get this initiative off the ground. While my own project can serve as the guinea pig to get this endeavor going, I hope it is only the first in a series of fully or partially funded projects through Sky Meadow's Meaning Lab. In the coming weeks I will be reaching out to various organizations and foundations to see if they are interested in supporting this broader initiative so as to create a continual funding pool for ongoing meaning research.

So, whether you're just 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, a donation to this campaign would be much appreciated.

As for my project proposal, here are the details:

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: 2-year 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 faith 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.

For a video summary, see above, or click here.