Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Lanning, Kevin

Abstract

As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the study of consciousness is informed by a variety of scholarly perspectives that, when integrated, deepen our understanding of consciousness as a functional system of semiotic communication. This thesis explores linguistic behavior as a manifestation of collective consciousness via the incorporation of theory from psychology, sociology, and philosophy into an analytical framework for studying consciousness. Using this analytical framework, I present an analysis of patterns of linguistic behavior from online religious communitas on reddit.com. I analyze the patterns of linguistic behaviors in this data using tokenization and semantic analysis techniques, revealing the divergent manifestations of identity in each collective consciousness. Ultimately, I find a striking similarity between the language used across all the subreddits, but the differences between them validate the consideration of these as divergent interpretants of collective consciousness.

Comments

Includes bibliography.

Extent

84 p.

Identifier

FA00003723

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