Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 08:57:06 +0200
From: Mario Vaneechoutte <Mario.Vaneechoutte@rug.ac.be>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: On Gatherer's behaviourist stance
Bill Benzon wrote:
> At 5:09 PM 9/14/98 -0500, Aaron Lynch wrote:
>
> >replicators identified with the word "meme." A far more productive
> >approach, if he wishes to pursue it, would be to try to ask a very
> >prominent behaviorist to coin a new behavior-centered term and publish it.
> >
>
> This is a rather striking statement. Why should someone who wants a new
> term ask a prominent thinking to coin and publish? Are prominent thinkers
> the only ones allowed to have new ideas and coin new terms?
Actually, once you are an authority, you should be forbidden to publish :-).Too
many wrong definitions are taken for granted because some authority published
them (see my struggle against 'replicator': wrong, wrong, wrong, but
ineradicable since Dawkins used it).
One should be twice as critical about what authorities write or say, because
we have a tendency in ourselves to accept more readily what an authority
(Dawkins, Dennett) says! We should defend ourselves against ourselves.
Authorities should help us by being very careful about what they publish.
Mario
>
>
> William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
> 708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
> Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
>
> ===============================================================
> 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 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