Criticisms of Blackmore's approach

From: Diana Stevenson (dianaxf@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 07 2000 - 13:12:32 BST

  • Next message: Bill Spight: "Re: Criticisms of Blackmore's approach" 

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From: "Diana Stevenson" <dianaxf@hotmail.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Criticisms of Blackmore's approach
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 05:12:32 PDT
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    Paul wrote:

    <Try Liane's (Gabora) thought provoking peer reviewed, review of Sue
    Blackmore's Meme Machine published in the Journal of Artificial Societies
    and Social Simulation

    http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/2/2/review2.html

    It all depends of course on how you define imitation - depending on whether
    you are an ethologist, comparative psychologist, cognitivepsychologist or
    social psychologist - there are very different definitions thatrange from
    any form of behavioural matching to only social (vicarious)learning of
    something entirely new (Blackmore's definition).

    The argument for the latter is made in Blackmore's paper in the Journal of
    Memetics.>

    Thanks for this link, Paul - there is much in Gabora's review and webpage
    which will be of help.

    I'm not sure whether the range of definitions of "imitation" that you give
    could encompass the transmission of religious behaviour and belief from
    parents to children, for example. Children generally do not imitate their
    parents' behaviour in church: they have to be constantly told to sit still,
    be quiet, have respect etc. Beliefs have to be explained and reinforced,
    and objections countered.

    Even your widest definition: "any form of behavioural matching" implies
    action by the imitator with little input from the person being imitated.
    This may be how babies learn language, how early hominids learned tool-use
    and how clothes fashions spread, but doesn't it leave out the active side of
    much of cultural transmission over the past 4,000 years?

    I think insisting that memes are spread mainly by imitation is misleading -
    take Stephen Pinker for example. I don't have "How the Mind Works" to hand
    but in his few paragraphs on memes he writes to the contrary of the
    conscious hard work involved in learning, discovery, teaching, persuading
    others of your ideas and getting them known to a wide audience. He says
    something like "a culture based on imitation would be a poor culture indeed"
    though that might be a quote from someone else - I'll have to look it up.

    If Pinker is unimpressed by "imitation" or doesn't understand what
    memeticists mean by the word this is cause for thought. The meme as a "unit
    of cultural transmission" as Dawkins first put it may be a much more useful
    definition than the later "unit of imitation".

    Diana
    ------

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