From: Douglas Brooker (d.brooker@laposte.net)
Date: Wed 30 Nov 2005 - 16:10:40 GMT
Davi Johnson wrote:
>>>Are
>>>relatively enduring concepts/terms/ideologies
>>>like "equality" or "liberty" also memetic,
>>>
>>>
>>Ask yourself, are they information? Do they replicate? Do
>>
>>
>they influence
>
>
>>human behavior?
>>
>>
>
>That is largely my question: ARE they information (and in
>what sense)? Because it seems that something like "equality"
>is very polysemous, and that enhances its longevity. It is
>attractive to people because its meaning seems so grounded,
>or evident, but it tends to get deployed with very different
>connotations and effects. So my difficulty is trying to
>think _what_ about equality is memetic (or what defines
>equality as a meme): is it the term itself, and its
>replication is enhanced by this perceived universality of
>meaning? Or is it something about the information it
>embodies. And if the latter is the case (which seems more in
>line with memetics, to my understanding), how to pinpoint
>the "essence" of the meme, given its variable usage
>throughout history and across contexts.
>
>
>
It seems that they are information - a very large amount of information,
but the question remains, how does a memetic analysis gather data about
this information and what then does it do with it, how does it organise
it.
The difficulty seems to be ascertaining what 'essence' is, in a memetic
context, that is unique from ordinary understanding that can be acquired
by looking at the historical and contextual information about the term a
detailed linguistic analysis might reveal. So far, I've not seen any
useful general perspective provided by memetics on this front. What I
am looking for is some precise, uniquely memetic measure of the
evolution, that can be used not only for a single term, but for other
terms and phenomena.
For words like 'equality', one alternative starting point, as hoary as
it may be, is Gallies' 'essentially contested concept'. This seems to
work best just as a point of departure. Adopting this outlook suggests
becoming once removed from direct participation in the propagation of
the semantic content of the term. Ecc is about the social structure of
words in action: commonality (use of the term) encompassing disagreement
about specific meaning. Where's the memetic essence here?
Terms like 'equality' may have an iconic status in some societies, which
gives them a leg-up on replication, for a time at least. One might
think the iconic status is also a part of the term's essence, it's
'buzz'. But legal terms like 'due process' 'natural justice' and 'le
principe de la contradiction' however iconic they may be, have evolving
legal meanings, so the circumstances (and possibility) of evolution may
be a part of its essence that affects iconic status.
The iconic status is not a constant. 'Due process' 'natural justice'
and 'le principe de la contradiction' are known to have been dormant in
some historical periods and to have come to life in others. The Magna
Carta has a lot of 'buzz' in England, but if you look at its actual
history you will find that all but three sections have been repealed by
Parliament. Is there a memetic essence to this phenomena? The
emotional force of the MC is far more potent than the few remaining bits
that have some legal status.
Due process appears in the US federal constitution and most state
constitutions, but you'll find variations in its meaning and the bundle
of 'rights' the term entails. Can territoriality bear on the
determination of essence? (compounded by the many different rights
imputed to due process, at different points in time).
This assumes the study is empirical rather than conceptual. But
judicial practice is not consistent in the application of 'accepted
meanings' of due process, so a theory-practice dichotomy arises. This
is especially true with 'equality'. A basic division of users'
communities is between legal and lay sits atop essential differences of
opinion within each of these two communities and in the interaction of
communities and the subdivisions of each.
If ones approaches the term conceptually - looking for 'essence' in the
term itself - as scholars of analytical jurisprudence might - chances
are you are participating in the maintenance and propagation of the term
('internal point of view', as legal scholars say) on a different basis
than the memeticist with an empirical orientation (external point of
view), who nonetheless by making it an object of study, indirectly
participates.
The problem seems to be that it is next to impossible to isolate the
'essence' of terms like 'equality' or 'due process' until one has
accumulated adequate data about its usage, semantic content and iconic
status and their distribution geographically and historically. Having
done this, a comparative analysis provides another level of meaning.
(in my example 'due process' 'natural justice' and 'le principe de la
contradiction' refer to American, English and French legal concepts that
generally cover the same territory, but which have features unique to
the three legal jurisdictions.)
Once you've acquired this data, the value of a further memetic analysis
seems elusive. If it is to be a memetic analysis, it would have to
offer insights only accessible through memetic analysis and that are
also of value to non-memeticists. Reading this list for the past few
years, I'm still in the dark about what a meme is, what a memetic
methodology consists of and what insight it promises.
The theoretical approach that seems to have come closest to providing
some entry into this kind of term's essence is Marcel Mauss' 'total
social fact'. The problem is that achieving the understanding the
'total social fact' concept describes is problably empirically
impossible to realise - like Borges' map. I suspect that memetics is
subject to the same constraints.
Douglas Brooker
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