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In a message dated 12/2/2001 5:16:14 PM Central Standard Time, Scott Chase
<ecphoric@hotmail.com> writes:
> Lynch may have. Here I am struggling with pinning down all the terminology
> and he goes and drops it altogether. I was probably premature in tackling
> his concept as his was more of an abstraction, suiting his purposes.
> >
> >The many-many mapping from lower level
> >to higher is a problem in genetics and in memetics that needs to be
> >addressed.
> >
> It seemed you were touching on something which I couldn't quite
articulate,
> along the lines of bridging the memory/culture divide and how memory units
> would relate to cultural units. I've been hoping to delve deeper into
> Gatherer's, Lynch's and your articles, when my time budget allows. Lynch
has
> changed his a couple times now. The Cloak stuff is much
> appreciated...something else needing more delving on my part.
Hi Scott.
My apologies for leading you to spend time on my "mnemon" neologism and then
dropping it. I had already been thinking of dropping it, but your recent post
and John Wilkins's comments helped convince me that the word was simply not
serving the objective of good communication. A neologism, it seems, can loom
as a big distraction in the middle of a text, drawing attention away from
what is new in the thesis of a paper and toward the idea of a new entity or
structure being proposed to go with the new word. With both the word "meme"
and "mnemon" gone from the main text of my paper, the idea of a new structure
or mental entity might not come to mind and distract readers any more. I view
responsibility for good communication as falling primarily on the author of
an article, so I did not like to see you struggling to pin down a small piece
of terminology if it could be avoided. I also realized that if you were
struggling with my neologism, then surely many other intelligent readers
would also struggle.
--Aaron Lynch
http://www.thougthcontagion.com
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