Re: virus: maxims and ground rules
Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Mon, 10 May 1999 01:36:51 +0100
At 17:27 09/05/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
>
>Dave Pape wrote:
>
>> What's the level of agreement on "there is no such thing as absolute,
>> knowable, non-cultural-group-specific truth"? I think we should start our
>> maxims nihilist & self-contradictory, then work our way up.
>
>I'd be willing to accept that as a maxim for purposes of the Virus
project. I'm
>not saying I believe it to be true (with either a capital or a lower case t),
>just that I'll accept it as ground rule.
I'd sort of like to describe memeticists' beliefs in memetic terms- when I
was writing that last post I stopped short of suggesting we talk about
"meme lineages that've reached evolutionary stability in our corner of
cultural space" rather than "maxims" as such. Trouble is, that kind of
terminology's really heavy-handed.
How about if we preface the maxims, or footnote them, saying that where we
say maxim and true, what we really mean is evolutionarily stable or
memetically dominant? Hmm...