Which is more operationally vacuous:....?

...meme theory or intelligent design? (that is, which is harder to test)

That is, which proposal is less likely ever to come up with a testable hypothesis?

Another question: doesn't meme theory show a basic ignorance of the difference between social science and natural science? For it tries to gain an understanding of cultural phenomena (shared thoughts, practices and goals) by comparing them to the kinds of things you might find in the bottom of a test tube.

Well those are two different sorts of cultures!

Who needs to thematize meaning, intentionality, evidence and TRUTH (especially universal and necessary truth)? Let's drop all of those themes from our study of religion and society: let's instead treat cultural patterns like viruses!

To borrow from HLA Hart, this is like trying to understand a traffic signal by noting patterns of stopping and starting but ignoring the possibility that the light functions as a sign: self-stultification. To this criticism one might reply that one can find interesting patterns in compliance/non-compliance with commands only by quantifying behavior. Granted. Patterns that come to prominence through this sort of analysis become interesting, however, only when related it to distinctively human modes of action (wishing, hoping, trying, deceiving, comparing, etc.)

This motivates me to look into RD's book to see if he is being reductionist or just making ad hoc use of a metaphor.

Here's a general description of a potential problem: one can describe the subhuman anthropomorphically and then claim to shown how the so-called higher level, such as human agency, is nothing more than a complex set of interactions by material components at the lower level.

Back to memes: he is most likely not reducing the anthropological to the chemical. But inasmuch as he relies precisely on the likeness of purported memes to genes in order to come up with his insights, he might be engaging in a kind of reductionism. At least to the point that they ignore questions of evidence, truth, meaning, etc. or anthropomorphically find something akin to that in viruses. And to the extent that he must point out disanalogies between the two to come up with an interesting explanation, his use of meme-gene analogy is trivial, beside the point.

If there is a kind of reductionism going on, then it would be ironic to have been proposed by RD, as he also claims to be a proponent of "good reductionism," which, I believe, consists of allowing for different descriptive levels, and not reducing one level to the other (while still holding on to some ontological reductionism, which is a theme for another post). It seems that any attempt at meme theory has to navigate between reductionism and triviality.

Then again, he is a biologist trying to understand a domain other than his own: perhaps he is like the a carpenter who only a hammer for a tool: to him every problem looked like a nail. Or rather, he prefers to describe everything else as nails and then point out the differences. This flower is a special kind of nail... a rather soft one, and multicolored....etc.

Then again, in order to be consistent, I may have to quit referring to anti-theists who also believe in human rights, freedom and justice--while denying that humans are anything more than a harmonious arrangement of molecules--as parasites.

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others. But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and may eventually go out of existence. The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual. The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being. In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han...

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