MEANING LAB
at Sky Meadow Institute
Introducing the Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow Institute.
The Meaning Lab is intended as a research hub dedicated to the scientific study of meaning. It aims to support early-career scholars and para-academics contributing 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, the Meaning Lab will 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.
As the Lab gets organized, we are seeking funding and support from like-minded foundations and donors. Our current aim is to raise $50,000 before officially launching with our pilot research project (described below).
If you are interested in becoming a founding contributor to the Lab, we invite you to get in touch directly, or to donate either to our GoFundMe campaign or via the Institute webpage.
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PILOT PROJECT (2025)
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
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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.
Funding Need: $15,000
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