From: "Paul Marsden" <PaulMarsden@email.msn.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: The race is on
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 09:56:03 +0100
Mario wrote
>The last thing I would defend is pure mental memetics, and my reaction
>against Gatherer's suggestions is that he (and Paul) is likely to make the
>opposite error by studying only behaviour and artefacts, which are not
>comprehensible and not interesting when you don't take into account the
reasons
>why people behave this or that way.
This is a good point - and it is an issue that can be resolved by seeing how
the data fits the theory.
You, argue that "behaviour and artefacts...are not comprehensible and not
interesting when you don't take into account the reasons why people behave
this or that way don't."
I argue the polar opposite, that we can understand much human behaviour
without reference to any internal beliefs, that imitation
is_a_sufficient_mechanism_ to_ explain_ much_ human_behaviour. And
critically, I argue that this is an interesting and *legitimate* domain of
investigation for memetics (contra Lynch) for all the reasons I have already
bored you with.
I am not saying that what you, or Aaron, or Derek or anyone else is doing is
not memetics, all I am saying is that what I am doing - that is studying how
culture spreads through the social world through a process of variation,
imitation (replication) and selection is memetics. As a corollary to this I
add that the only methodological possibility currently open to me in
operationalising this memetic program is to measure objectified culture,
i.e. behaviour (including verbal behaviour).
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
e-mail PaulMarsden@msn.com
tel/fax (44) (0) 117 974 1279
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission:
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
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