Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id MAA25097 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 25 Jan 2002 12:03:19 GMT From: <salice@gmx.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 12:57:16 +0100 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Selfish meme? Message-ID: <3C51562C.920.1A6411@localhost> In-reply-to: <LAW2-F18ZDgC81TbdkS0000e7ee@hotmail.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 24 Jan 2002, at 19:46, Grant Callaghan wrote:
> As far as meaning is concerned, words used as examples have no meaning
> because they are not being used to say anything. In the example above, I am
> not really saying I read a book yesterday. I'm just using the sentence to
> display the relationship between a word and its position in a sentence.
> Position determines the part of speech, not the word itself. You wouldn't
> know what part it is without the words that preceed and follow it. So what
> meaning it has is wholely dependent on how I use it.
Good point, but i'd say a meme still stays the elementary basic
cultural unit and meaning gets constructed out of a number of
different memes. "Book" is one meme and stays the same in all
the sentences but the meaning is different because it has different
memes around it.
It's like with genes. One allele is really nothing, not much can be
constructed out of it. To construct an organism a number of genes
have to work together to form it. The organism would be
comparable to the meaning in memetics.
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