Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA00478 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 20 Oct 2000 11:53:53 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745AA6@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Wimsatt on memes at the Uni Pittsburgh Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 11:51:41 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi William,
Thanks for the comments (and the refs. in the other post).
>
>
>I'm not so much concerned about those theoretical frameworks--I
agree with
>you, they're weak--but with the raw stuff that those frameworks are
meant to
>explain. Consider, for example, Spike Lee's current movie
_Bamboozled_. The
>movie has a documentary side to it, with lots of film clips and
photos from
>the history of film and minstrelsey. One might call these "memes."
And, of
>course, there are books about film history, about the images of
African
>Americans in films, and there are books about minstrelsey, etc. The
people
>who wrote those books had to do research on the memes they talk
about.
>I don't see memeticists reading and talking about those kinds of
books, nor
>doing any research into the primary artifacts on which such books
are based.
>Judging from the published memetics literature and from
conversations on
>this list, it seems unlikely to me that a card-carrying memeticist
would
>bother to get his or her hands dirty with the basic stuff of
culture.
I think this may be because some see such external artefacts as simply
exemplars of a particular process, such that the specifics of any artefact
aren't as interesting as that process. So, for example, those who studying
cognition and learning of language aren't necessarily concerned with which
language is learned, but how language is learned. For some, memetics is
similar in that external elements are merely indicators of the process at
work, and aren't necessarily interesting in and of themselves. For example,
Aaron Lynch's book uses lots of examples of particular religious beliefs and
practices, not because they're interesting in and of themselves, although
they may be, but because they're illustrative of his notion of the
epidemiology of ideas.
>Long before Darwin came along there were naturalists who went out
and looked
>at plants and animals and made collections of them and classifed
them and
>quarreled about classification, etc. And of course Darwin himself
did a lot
>of work like that. Well, there are lots of people who do the same
kind of
>thing with paintings and poems and sonatas and flying buttresses
and
>Jacquard looms, etc. But memeticists do not avail themselves of
this
>"natural history" of cultural stuff, of memes.
I think you're right here that more needs to be done, and in some fields has
been done, to record and classify cultural phenomena, but one of the
problems I think has been that the most prominent works on memetics so far
have been to varying degrees 'popular science' books where that kind of
empirical rigour isn't really the goal. The goal is more about presenting
and elucidating an idea/theory with illustrative examples, rather than via
highly detailed retrodictive analysis.
>Like I said, it's not the "knowledge" I'm concerned about. It's
the raw
>data. Memetics seems to be mostly a coffee-klatcsh for theorists
who wish
>to remain unsullied by observations. Orthodox memetics is a genre
of
>science fiction.
Well, it's blue skies research and theorising. Maybe it'll turn out to to
have been a huge mistake on all our parts for even considering it, maybe
it'll be the making of something significant. Until we start operationally
researching its claims we won't know either way for certain. (After all
cloning was science fiction until a couple of years ago, and now we're not
far way from having bodies to use for spare parts, although all the
moralists will no doubt stop us doing that).
Vincent
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