Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id XAA07872 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 23 Oct 2000 23:43:17 +0100 User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 18:42:42 -0400 Subject: Re: Wimsatt on memes at the Uni Pittsburgh From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Message-ID: <B61A2C08.52D7%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745AA6@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> 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.
The question for Aaron and others doing similar work is whether or not they
have, in fact, done anything that hasn't been done by people interested in
the diffusion of ideas, etc. Memetics has this theoretical superstructure,
but that theory doesn't do much of anything. It's like a set of brand
identifiers, you got Pepsi Cola and you got Memetic Cola. It's the same old
flavored syrup, just different words.
>
> 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.
But they're presenting a popular account of something that simply doesn't
exist as a well-defined technical discipline.
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 23 2000 - 23:44:41 BST