Dave Pape wrote:
> 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.
And mandating its use could inhibit the spontaneous development of a more facile terminology.
> 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?
Well, there may well be some evolutionarily stable or memetically dominant propositions that we choose not to accept as maxims. We could stipulate that acceptance of a maxim (and we don't have to use maxims to create the proposed framework, so I'm certainly not wedded to idea that our initial common ground has to be stated as a set of maxims) does not imply the belief that the "accepted" proposition is true.
-KMO