From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Fri 25 Oct 2002 - 20:16:24 GMT
All:
Def Meme = a unit of cultural inheritance
Some problems with that definition:
1) "Inheritance" is, OC, used metaphorically here. It might be better to
speak of transmission, since inheritance suggests vertical transmission,
while horizontal transfer is a significant part of memetics. But
"transmission" does not suggest evolution. This and that. "Inheritance"
is OK, no?
2) "Culture" is not well defined. But it is defined well enough to
fuzzily specify the domain of memes. Good enough.
3) "Unit" means a single thing. It also suggests indivisibility. To say
that a meme is a unit can be faulted on both counts.
As a constituent of culture, a meme is a part of a network, connected to
other constituents of culture. Sever these connections and you no longer
have a meme. This is so even if you say that an artefact is a meme. For
instance, there are pre-industrial tools that no one knows how they were
used ("The Evolution of Useful Things", by Henry Petroski). They are no
longer used nor replicated, and are, at best, fossils of memes. In a
sense, cultures are indivisible, and none of its constituents are units.
Years ago I went to talk by a visiting linguistics professor who said,
"The utterance is the language." He was not talking literally, of
course, but was referring to the indivisibility of language. There were
several linguists and philosophers in the audience, but none faulted him
for that statement.
Nonetheless, linguists have their units: phonemes, morphemes, etc. The
holistic nature of language, culture, and, indeed, the universe, does
not prevent useful analysis into units, even if that analysis leaves
loose threads in any given case.
Such analysis may lead to units at different levels: organs, cells,
chromosomes, genes, molecules, atoms, protons, electrons, for instance.
Units at one level may be constituents of units at a higher level.
Analytical units, then, need not be indivisible.
There is a special problem with memes as analytical units, however,
which Vincent alluded to: the level problem. Morphemes (such as "morph",
"eme", "ad", "lude", "philo", "soph", and "er") and phonemes (such as
"m", long "e", "d", and short "a") are both, arguably, memes. They are
units and they are culturally inherited. But at the same time, phonemes
may be considered as constituents of morphemes. For instance, long "e"
and "m" make up "eme". If they are both memes then we have memes
constituting other memes. What kind of units are those?
In practice, this is not a problem as long as you are clear about which
level you are talking about. For a long time I considered memes as units
for different levels, and it was fine to have memes for one level
composed of memes for a lower level. But there is an alternative that I
find attractive.
A linguistic unit, the lexeme, has the same problem of levels. Lexemes
include words but can be larger or smaller:
> A lexeme is the minimal unit of language which
>
> has a semantic interpretation and
> embodies a distinct cultural concept.
(
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsALexeme.htm
)
In particular, catch-phrases, such as "Give me a break!" are lexemes
that are composed of lexemes. Sydney Lamb ("Pathways of the Brain"),
speaks to this problem of level for lexemes: "The process of
lexicalization is typically a gradual one: The first time a new
combination is formed by a speaker, it must be constructed as a
combination of units previously learned. . . . But for subsequent uses
it need not be constructed again if it is remembered as a unit. (p. 165)
"Now, a lexeme can begin to have a life of its own from a semantic point
of view as soon as it is treated as a unit. (p. 167)"
Earlier he says, "Lexemes are the units *which are learned . . . as
units.* (p. 31)"
As the title of his book indicates, Lamb takes a neuro-cognitive
perspective. For him a lexeme is a functional unit, which is remembered
and learned *as a unit*.
Similarly, we may consider memes to be those constituents of culture
that are inherited *as units*. This functional definition does not
commit us to a neuro-cognitive perspective, but it does avoid the level
problem of analytical units. :-)
Ciao,
Bill
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