Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19980906133407.007209e4@popmail.mcs.net>
Date: Sun, 06 Sep 1998 13:34:07 -0500
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Aaron Lynch <aaron@mcs.net>
Subject: Re: On Gatherer's behaviourist stance
In-Reply-To: <v03102801b21863e359c3@[194.109.13.153]>
At 06:09 PM 9/6/98 +0200, Ton Maas wrote:
>>One way to keep every body happy in this debate would be to use not the
>>behavioural contagion metaphor, nor the thought contagion metaphor, but the
>>SOCIAL CONTAGION metaphor - which implies neither bare-foot behaviourism or
>>universally rejected 19th century introspectionism. The SOCIAL CONTAGION
>>metaphor would include the spread of both internal states (beliefs,
>>thoughts, attitudes and intentions, and, critically, their resultant
>>behaviour between individuals i.e. it is a social process. I know this
>>seems a wishy washy middle point between you, and that happy couple Aaron
>>and Richard - but I think by looking at memetics as an explanatory framework
>>with an innovative heuristic device might prove to more useful, rather than
>>becoming to pre-occupied over the unanswerable question over the ontological
>>status of a meme.
>
>How eloquently spoken! It seems to me we're finally getting somewhere :-)
>
>Ton
In addition to those objecting to the word "thought," there are always
going to be people who object to the term "contagion," too. These will
often be people fixated on the negative connotations, not the positive
connotations of the word. They ignore such phrases as "contagious joy,"
"contagious laughter," etc., and ignore the fact that even beneficial
microbes are still contagions. When the term "contagion" is applied to
venerated ideas and traditions, such as religion, it generates particularly
irrational responses--even in some former believers and complete
non-believers.
No matter how many times I say that thought contagions are not the only
kind of cultural replicators, there will probably always be people building
straw-man arguments asserting that thought contagion theory somehow
specifies no other kinds of replicators. Sure, I take the term "meme" to
refer to an information replicator in the brain, after Dawkins's 1982
definition. I also have personally chosen to specialize on thought
contagions. Yet my 1998 paper offers a number of terms more general and
more specific than the word "meme," to encompass a wide range of non-mnemon
replicators.
Does quark theory insist that quarks and gluons are the only kinds of
elementary particles? No. They do not need to be the only kinds of
elementary particles to be important subjects of study. Nor does insistence
that "quark" refer to just one kind of particle somehow imply that there
are no other particles worthy of study.
Does memetics theory insist that memes are the only kinds of cultural
replicators? No. They don't need to be the only kinds of cultural
replicators in order to be important subjects of study. Does Dawkins's
insistence that "meme" refer to just one kind of cultural replicator imply
that there are no other cultural replicators worth of study? No. (Indeed,
he even discusses computer viruses in his revised 1989 edition of The
Selfish Gene.)
Does thought contagion theory insist that thought contagions are the only
kinds of cultural replicators? No. They don't need to be the only kinds of
cultural replicators in order to be important subjects of study. See
sections 10 and 11 of Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution at
JoM-EMIT. Does my insistence that only certain kinds of cultural
replicators be called "thought contagions" mean that there are no other
cultural replicators? Again, no.
If science needs more than one word to describe more than one specific
class of cultural replicator, then this does not in any way "retard" the
science any more than does the variety of particle names in physics. If
anything, confusion and vagueness have been responsible for holding back
progress during the two decades following first publication of the word
"meme."
--Aaron Lynch
http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/thoughtcontagion.html
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