Brendan Graham Dempsey | Metamodern Spirituality | The Development of Meaning (w/ Theo Dawson) @BrendanGrahamDempsey | Uploaded August 2024 | Updated October 2024, 5 hours ago.
Neo-Piagetian scholar Theo Dawson joins me to discuss her profound contributions to the field of cognitive developmental psychology. Building off the insights of Piaget, neo-Piagetian researchers have developed impressive frameworks for understanding human learning. Dawson's work has offered a way to quantitatively model such frameworks — an advance which has allowed her to refine the developmental metric of "hierarchical complexity" with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Using this refined metric, the development of semantic information in human linguistic content over time can be mapped. Could such data reveal a pattern to the way human (systems of) meaning complexify through history? Using her computerized scoring system ("CLAS"), I am working on a so-called "Cultural Complexity Index" (CCI) for assessing the evolution of human meaning systems across the cultural record. By measuring a representative sampling of literary works from the dawn of human civilization to today, can we reveal the ways in which not just conceptual meanings but concepts of meaning have evolved?
0:00 Introduction
0:57 The Legacy of Piaget's Theory of Learning
5:42 Dawson's Early Neo-Piagetian Work: A Turn to Quantitative Modeling
22:01 Refining a Scale of Hierarchichal Complexity
27:34 Making a Developmental Dictionary of Meanings
39:48 Scoring Textual Responses on a 1300-Point Scale
49:01 Towards a Map of Meanings: Capacity vs. Content
55:14 Our Project, The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI): Measuring the Historiogenesis of Meaning
1:07:23 Conclusion
Neo-Piagetian scholar Theo Dawson joins me to discuss her profound contributions to the field of cognitive developmental psychology. Building off the insights of Piaget, neo-Piagetian researchers have developed impressive frameworks for understanding human learning. Dawson's work has offered a way to quantitatively model such frameworks — an advance which has allowed her to refine the developmental metric of "hierarchical complexity" with unprecedented precision and accuracy. Using this refined metric, the development of semantic information in human linguistic content over time can be mapped. Could such data reveal a pattern to the way human (systems of) meaning complexify through history? Using her computerized scoring system ("CLAS"), I am working on a so-called "Cultural Complexity Index" (CCI) for assessing the evolution of human meaning systems across the cultural record. By measuring a representative sampling of literary works from the dawn of human civilization to today, can we reveal the ways in which not just conceptual meanings but concepts of meaning have evolved?
0:00 Introduction
0:57 The Legacy of Piaget's Theory of Learning
5:42 Dawson's Early Neo-Piagetian Work: A Turn to Quantitative Modeling
22:01 Refining a Scale of Hierarchichal Complexity
27:34 Making a Developmental Dictionary of Meanings
39:48 Scoring Textual Responses on a 1300-Point Scale
49:01 Towards a Map of Meanings: Capacity vs. Content
55:14 Our Project, The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI): Measuring the Historiogenesis of Meaning
1:07:23 Conclusion
