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Forschungsseminar - Sommersemester 2013
Studierende und andere Interessierte sind herzlich willkommen.

Dienstag, 11.06.2013
18:30 s.t. – 20 Uhr
Gebäude 23.21 Raum 02.22

Mag. Christian J. Feldbacher

(Universität Düsseldorf)

What is a Meme? A Partial Characterization by Analogical Concept Formation

Abstract
As evolutionary theory originally aimed at an explanation of the diversity of species, cultural evolutionary theories aim at an explanation of cultural diversity. To achieve this goal, cultural evolutionary theorists try to generalize and abstract the framework of evolutionary theory. By such an abstraction they hope especially to systematize the domain of cultural studies and shed light on very general principles underlying cultural phenomena.
One highly important method of abstraction used by those theoreticians is the method of analogical concept formation: With the help of analogies they try find regularities in the cultural domain and then extract common features of the domains into a generalized theory of evolution. The perhaps most famous analogy between these domains is settled at their very bottom, namely at the level of replicators:
Where evolutionary theorists ground many investigations on genes, cultural evolutionary theorists very often ground their investigations on so-called “memes“. But, whereas biologist's use of the expression “gene“ is – at least in several areas – quite uniform, Memetician's use of “meme“ is not: it ranges amongst others from units of books, brains etc. (cf. Dawkins 1976) via ideas (cf. Dennett 1992) to representational contents (cf. Distin 2005). This talk aims at a clarification of these uses and an extraction of a common meaning of this expression.

Speaker
Research Fellow at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy/University of Duesseldorf (research topic: meta-induction). Master studies at the University of Salzburg on definitions and reductions in first-order theories.