another problem for me with PCT; there are more perceptions than words

CSGnet Archive CSG2008
1

(Jim dundon 01.27.01.1300est)

Two rules used to substantiate PCT are.

1 No faithing. Everything must be proven

2 No just knowing; Everything must be proven

So how do you know Bill, as you said to me not long ago, that,

“there are more perceptions than words”

Applying your rules to your own statements, as I assume you did, this must have been a proven statement. Would you share the proof with us?

Or was/is that statement made outside of the framework of PCT? I don’t see how it could be since “ALL behavior IS the control of perception”.

Or, maybe you were’t behaving when you made that statement.

best

Jim

2

[Martin Taylor 2008.01.27.13.36]

Since Bill has said he has removed himself from this interaction, whereas I think it worth continuing (at least for a while), I take it upon myself to respond to

(Jim dundon 01.27.01.1300est)

Two rules used to substantiate PCT are.

1 No faithing. Everything must be proven

2 No just knowing; Everything must be proven

I dealt with these a few minutes ago [Martin Taylor 2008.01.17.13.20].

So how do you know Bill, as you said to me not long ago, that,

"there are more perceptions than words"

Applying your rules to your own statements, as I assume you did, this must have been a proven statement. Would you share the proof with us?

There are answers to this at different levels of discourse. One natural answer is that a single counter-example proves the point -- the tendon stretch in a muscle while walking. Bill mentioned another in his interchange with me: the perception of the feeling of a forkful of spaghetti approaching the mouth. Here's another: the difference between the way lake water as opposed to sea water swirls around rocks when the waves are moderate (a personal observation that I have never been able to express in words, but one that is obvious to anyone who has spent hours as a child sitting on rocks watching the water swirl).

Another level of answer is that it takes extraordinary evidence to support an extraordinary claim. An extraordinary claim would be the contrary, that there are no perceptions other than words. Unless that claim could be proved, we would necessarily assume that there exist perceptions that are not themselves words.

Yet another approach to an answer is to ask the theoretical question of how words come to be if a preverbal or nonverbal living thing can have no perceptions (which is the implication of the contrary claim). If a satisfactory answer to that question can be found, it would have to be tested to see whether the proposed mechanism actually does apply to living beings.

Remember, PCT applies not only to wording humans. It applies to squirrels, ducks, snakes, trees, flowers, jellyfish, bacteria... According to PCT, they all control their perceptions in the same way humans do, by acting on their environment to bring their perceptions nearer the reference values for those perceptions. We assume (we don't "know") that they don't have words to describe their perceptions.

Or was/is that statement made outside of the framework of PCT? I don't see how it could be since "ALL behavior IS the control of perception".

But not all perception is controlled, according to PCT. Numerically, only a tiny proportion fo our perceptions is controlled at any moment.

Or, maybe you were't behaving when you made that statement.

That comment makes you sound more like a troll than a gadfly.

Or, in PCT terms, the comment seems as though it is intended to disturb somebody's controlled perception in such a way that they will break off communication with you. I next apply PCT, and ask myself what perception you might be controlling whose error would be reduced by having someone break off communication with you. I hypothesise that it might be a perception of some part of your self-image, that you have a theory that is really good and all-encompassing but that other people are not smart enough to understand, and so they stop communicating when you expose them to your theory.

I'm quite likely to be wrong. But that's the guess I hazard at this point.

Martin

3

[Jum Dundon] Applying your rules
to your own statements, as I assume you did, this must have been a proven
statement. Would you share the proof with us?

[Martin]There are answers to this at different levels of discourse. One
natural answer is that a single counter-example proves the point – the
tendon stretch in a muscle while walking. Bill mentioned another in his
interchange with me: the perception of the feeling of a forkful of
spaghetti approaching the mouth. Here’s another: the difference between
the way lake water as opposed to sea water swirls around rocks when the
waves are moderate (a personal observation that I have never been able to
express in words, but one that is obvious to anyone who has spent hours
as a child sitting on rocks watching the water swirl).
[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0209 MST)]

Martin Taylor 2008.01.27.13.36

In for a penny, in for a pound.

All good examples of noverbal perceptions. But behind all words are other
perceptions, mostly nonverbal, and there are levels of perceptions above
the level of words, too. I was introduced to these ideas by reading
“Science and Sanity” by Alfred Korzybski in high-school,
followed by “The Tyranny of Words” by Stuart Chase, then all
the other “General Semanticists.” I gradually learned to look
behind words to try to discern their referents, and was considerably
embarrassed at first to discover how many words I used whose meanings
were nothing but other words – dictionary definitions without
experiential backing. I used to read dictionaries for recreation. That
was something of a mistake. It was searching for the nonverbal meanings
that eventually led me, years later, to all the levels of perception that
I have tried to define.

Consider a word like “red.” The meaning of this word is the
color that you see when you look at an object which you describe as being
red. The color that you see is not a word; it is a color. The same goes
for other sensations, as well as intensities, configurations,
transitions, events, relationships, categories (that’s a tough one),
sequences, programs, principles, and system concepts. I used those terms
to refer to classes of perceptions, but to see what they mean requires
putting the specific words for items in those classes aside, and looking
at the perception that is there when the words are silent. A is
“above” B when a certain relationship between A and B is seen,
but you can’t see that relationship by looking at or hearing the word
“above”. You have to look at A and B and the relationship
between them and turn the words off. Like this:

A

B

Of course words, too, are perceptions, so it is possible that the meaning
of a word is another word: “adjective” is an obvious example.
Unfortunately, it is all too easy to get stuck in the levels where words
are attached to classes of perception, and become obsessed with that
level, so that the entire universe apears to consist of words and nothing
but words. The same sort of thing happens when a person gets stuck at any
level, events or principles or any of the others. The whole world appears
to be organized at that level, and everything in that world is accounted
for – there is no room for anything else. What has happened is that
awareness has lost its mobility, perhaps being pinned in place by
some problem at the level in question, so the lower and higher levels
become inaccessible to consciousness.

I think that is what has produced Jim Dundon’s scheme, which is not a
theory, but a restriction of awareness that needs to be addressed so
mobility can be recovered. That is what I meant, and all I meant, by
referring (inadvertently in public) to Jim’s
“problem.”

Best,

Bill P.

4

[Martin Taylor 2008.01.28.10.11]

[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0209 MST)]

Martin Taylor 2008.01.27.13.36

In for a penny, in for a pound.

All I can say to this is that I'm glad the Brits didn't switch to the Euro :slight_smile:

Lovely post.

Martin