Re: Is there any meme left to talk about !?

From: derek gatherer (dgatherer2002@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri 21 Nov 2003 - 09:10:34 GMT

  • Next message: Bpmatt1@aol.com: "Re: Is there any meme left to talk about !?"

      http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/geertz.html
    > This is a fascinating paper, which in the past few
    > days has clarified many of my thoughts about
    > memetics. It is easy to see how Geertz's thoughts
    > on ideologies can be applied to memetic sociological
    > theory.

    Yes, but wrongly. Geertz was a pioneer (the paper you cite is from 1964) of the ideational theory of culture
    - ie. the notion that culture exists inside people's heads, and that artefacts and behaviours etc are epiphenomenal in some way. The descendent of this school in memetics are the 'internalists' who maintain that memes are all in the head too. There are numerous philosophical problems with this of varying degrees of severity, but most importantly it puts memetics in a methodological impasse, as internalism requires memetics to be a quantitative science of entities that cannot be quantified.

    Gosh, it's been ages since I've been able to post on this subject. Feels like 1998 all over again!!

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