[From: Bruce Nevin (Thu 930923 08:45:44 EDT)]
( Rick Marken (930922.1300) )
agreement is not understanding (as
proven so dramatically by Carver, Scheier, et al). I think
that the best way to see if people understand PCT is to watch
what they DO, not what they SAY.
Rick, you have showed us that you can't tell what someone is doing by
watching what they are doing. Look at Greg's suggestion in this light.
How can you test whether Wickens is controlling a perception of
perceptual control? Wouldn't you have to engage him in some sort of
dialog in order to do that?
One test for a controlled variable -- that's all I ask.
Or maybe you can tell what Wickens is doing (or failing to do) by reading
his papers? Surely, the appearance of verbal agreement can be
misleading. But might his statements disclose (even communicate) his
controlled perceptions? Is his control of the correlation of his
statements (linguistic perceptions) with nonverbal perceptions evidence
as to what nonverbal perceptions he is controlling?
In the late 1940s, Zellig Harris devised the "pair test" for identifying
phonemic contrast in a language, and various substitution tests for
arriving at a segmentation of speech into discrete elements that
represent the contrasts. These are clearly examples of the test for
controlled perceptual variables. Does this mean Harris understood
perceptual control? (I would agree with you and judge that his actions
as described in his words show an understanding of perceptual control,
even though he does not use those words.) Chomsky and Halle say (said)
they recognize the fundamental importance of the pair test for
linguistics. Does this mean that they understand perceptual control?
Study of their writings suggests to me that this is little more than
verbal agreement, with little or nothing to underwrite it in their
practice.)
But there's something more to be seen in Harris' tests. You can witness
disturbances and countervailing behavioral outputs without actually being
the author of the disturbances. This is a valid (naturalistic) form of
the test. A linguist doesn't have to substitute sound a' for sound a in
an otherwise-same short utterance and ask whether the two are equivalent;
she can observe sound a' occurring in that frame and observe that
speakers and understanders of the language perceive it as a repetition of
the "same" utterance with sound a. (Speakers of a given language have
difficulty perceiving such non-contrastive sound differences, and when
learning a foreign language have the greatest difficulty recognizing and
producing sound differences that are contrastive in the new language but
not in their own. Contrasts are controlled perceptions, non-contrastive
differences are not. Harris' tests identify which differences disturb
controlled perceptions and which do not.)
This opens wide possibilities for applying the Test in interactions with
people. A person wrestling words into correspondence with his or her
perceptions is resisting disturbances, and because of the social
availability of language the disturbances and the resistence to the
disturbances are unusually visible. A perception of the audience
understanding and agreeing is a complex and easily disturbed perception,
the control of which requires one to make (some of) one's other
controlled perceptions available to the audience.
Is this how you know that Wickens does not understand perceptual control?
If Wickens and others are very close, do you object to others helping
them to recognize perceptual control and its importance? Are you
committed to a perception that it is useless to try to do so? Have you
any purpose in interfering with their doing so? If someone told you that
they perceived something you were doing as such interference, would you
resist the perception that it was interference, or would you agree to do
that thing a bit differently, just to be on the safe side?
Bruce
bn@bbn.com (still)