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193 C H A P T E R 1 0 Naturalizing Mimetic Theory Jean-Pierre Dupuy MIMETIC THEORY AS SCIENCE This chapter is about Mimetic Theory (MT) and its efforts to constitute itself as science. Its proponents know quite well that MT is not only a science. But if it is even partly a science, with as ambitious a goal as to account for everything from “the neuron to the eschaton,”1 then it cannot shy away from confronting established scientific paradigms. Among its closest neighbors and potential rivals we find an emerging and powerful paradigm that results from the convergence of many disciplines: cognitive science, most especially cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology; life sciences, in particular the neurophysiology of cognition; evolutionary theories and their many ramifications , in particular into the human sciences; the so-called “sciences of the artificial,” most notably artificial intelligence and artificial life (aka synthetic biology); and a good chunk of the human and social sciences under the sway of the rationalistic paradigm (economics, game theory, rational choice theory, and the like)—not to mention the philosophical disciplines that cement those fields and hold them together, or the technologies that implement them, thereby increasing the power that human beings exert over the natural world, including themselves. For want of a better word, I will call this paradigm the “dominant paradigm,” since its avowed ambition is to conquer the vast continent of the sciences of humanity lato sensu. 194 Jean-Pierre Dupuy The encounter of MT with the discovery of “mirror neurons” illustrates the relative lack of preparedness of the former for this kind of confrontation. Many were the proponents of MT who enthusiastically and hastily claimed that it had found there its biological foundations and that its validity had thereby been proven. This claim is at best naive for at least two reasons. In the first place, all but the most die-hard reductionists would agree that the proposition “Man is a super-mimetic animal” is self-evidently true even if the biological mechanisms responsible for it remain unknown. An analogy might be illuminating. After the works of such geniuses as Sadi Carnot, Lord Kelvin, and Clausius, the scientific world was certain that the so-called second law of thermodynamics (i.e., in an isolated system the state function known as entropy cannot decrease) was indeed a universal law of physics, and that, for instance, the efficiency of a steam engine producing work from heat was limited by an absolute threshold given by a certain formula. However, the attempts to account for this principle in terms of the properties of a collection of molecules whose degree of agitation could be measured by the Kelvin (or absolute) temperature— all those attempts that constitute what is known as statistical mechanics—failed miserably until fairly recently. But those were challenges for, and failures of, statistical mechanics, not at all for the second law of thermodynamics. In 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote: “There is none of his [man’s] higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.”2 The truth of this proposition is beyond any reasonable doubt. It is therefore a challenge for the neurosciences, and cognitive science more generally, but not for MT, to account for this fact. A would-be cognitive science that would prove incapable of it should simply be discarded. Accordingly, in the last few decades, numerous researchers in the cognitive and social sciences have made significant strides in focusing on and illuminating the generative and foundational nature of human imitation or mimesis.3 These more recent areas of research are significant for the necessary revisions their work requires of the “dominant paradigm” in cognitive psychology that was founded, more or less, without seriously taking the effects of mimetic processes into consideration. Can these more recent areas of research prove the validity of Mimetic theory, for instance via the discovery of neonatal imitation or mirror neurons? As I have just explained, I believe the problem to be poorly posed. To be sure, Mimetic theory might as well benefit from the discoveries of developmental psychology and neuroscience, but certainly not claim that the existence of say, mirror neurons proves its validity. We are dealing here with a situation that is commonly found in science, that is, the underdetermination of theories by facts. Naturalizing Mimetic Theory 195 I see the possible synergy between Mimetic theory and imitation research in cognitive science at another...

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