From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon 26 Jan 2004 - 06:31:57 GMT
>[Memetics] Like genetics it has to be embedded in a larger
>sociobiology/evolutionary psychology/culture context to be
>meaningful. Perhaps we should talk about the memetic model instead. If
>you want to contribute to this area of study, the first chapter of _The
>Adapted Mind_ http://folk.uio.no/rickyh/papers/TheAdaptedMind.htm is
>essential background. You certainly won't get anywhere trying to develop
>memetics themes within the SSSM.
If you wonder why memetics has not been much accepted by the social
sciences . . . .
"Thus, despite some important exceptions, the social sciences have largely
kept themselves isolated from this crystallizing process of scientific
integration. Although social scientists imitated many of the outward forms
and practices of natural scientists (quantitative measurement, controlled
observation, mathematical models, experimentation, etc.), they have tended
to neglect or even reject the central principle that valid scientific
knowledge-whether from the same or different fields-should be mutually
consistent (see Cosmides, Tooby, & Barkow, this volume). It is this
principle that makes different fields relevant to each other, and part of
the same larger system of knowledge. In consequence, this insularity is not
just an accident. For many scholars, it has been a conscious, deeply held,
and strongly articulated position, advanced and defended since the
inception of the social sciences, particularly in anthropology and
sociology. Durkheim, for example, in his Rules of the Sociological Method,
argued at length that social phenomena formed an autonomous system and
could be only explained by other social phenomena (1895/1962). The founders
of American anthropology, from Kroeber and Boas to Murdock and Lowie, were
equally united on this point. For Lowie, "the principles of psychology are
as incapable of accounting for the phenomena of culture as is gravitation
to account for architectural styles," and "culture is a thing sui generis
which can be explained only in terms of itself. ...Omnis cultura ex
cultura" (1917/1966, p. 25-26; p. 66). Murdock, in his influential essay
"The science of culture," summed up the conventional view that culture is
"independent of the laws of biology and psychology" (1932, p. 200).
"Remarkably, while the rest of the sciences have been weaving themselves
together through accelerating discoveries of their mutual relevance, this
doctrine of intellectual isolationism, which has been the reigning view in
the social sciences, has only become more extreme with time. With
passionate fidelity, reasoned connections with other branches of knowledge
are dismissed as ignorant attempts at crude reductionism, and many leading
social scientists now openly call for abandoning the scientific enterprise
instead. For example, Clifford Geertz advocates abandoning the ground of
principled causal analysis entirely in favor of treating social phenomena
as "texts" to be interpreted just as one might interpret literature: We
should "turn from trying to explain social phenomena by weaving them into
grand textures of cause and effect to trying to explain them by placing
them into local frames of awareness" (1983, p. 6). Similarly, Edmund Leach
rejects scientific explanation as the focus of anthropology: "Social
anthropology is not, and should not aim to be, a 'science' in the natural
science sense. If anything it is a form of art Social anthropologists
should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth. ..." (Leach,
1982, p. 52). These positions have a growing following, but less, one
suspects, because they have provided new illumination than because they
offer new tools to extricate scholars from the unwelcome encroachments of
more scientific approaches. They also free scholars from all of the arduous
tasks inherent in the attempt to produce scientifically valid knowledge: to
make it consistent with other knowledge and to subject it to critical
rejection on the basis of empirical disproof, logical inconsistency, and
incoherence. In any case, even advocates of such avenues of retreat do not
appear to be fully serious about them because few are actually willing to
accept what is necessarily entailed by such a stance: Those who jettison
the epistemological standards of science are no longer in a position to use
their intellectual product to make any claims about what is true of the
world or to dispute the others' claims about what is true.
"Not only have the social sciences been unusual in their self-conscious
stance of intellectual autarky but, significantly, they have also been
relatively unsuccessful as sciences. Although they were founded in the 18th
and 19th centuries amid every expectation that they would soon produce
intellectual discoveries, grand "laws," and validated theories to rival
those of the rest of science, such success has remained elusive. The recent
wave of antiscientific sentiment spreading through the social sciences
draws much of its appeal from this endemic failure. This disconnection from
the rest of science has left a hole in the fabric of our organized
knowledge of the world where the human sciences should be. After more than
a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of
half -digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical
generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level
theories expressed in a babel of incommensurate technical lexicons. This is
accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the single largest trend is
toward rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans."
===============================================================
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