[From Bill Powers (951118.0630 MST)]
Peter Burke (951117.1500) --
I am constantly amazed about the real lack of attention to the
question of (re)organization in the PCT model.
What did you think of Ch. 14 in B:CP?
As Rick Marken pointed out, studying REorganization can't really be done
until you have a good model of organization. This rather elementary
observation seems to have escaped the attention of most traditional
behavioral scientists. If you don't have a model of organization that
allows you to use performance to measure specific system
characteristics, how can you hope to translate _changes_ in performance
into _changes_ in system characteristics?
Learning has traditionally been studied by seeing how fast or under what
conditions or to what degree an organism acquires the ability to perform
a specific experimenter-defined task -- running a maze, pressing a bar
to get food, answering test questions, solving puzzles. But none of
these studies has enabled anyone to say what is different about the
organism after learning has taken place. The cat is in the box; the cat
learns to get out of the box. In the process, the cat takes less and
less time to get out of the box. Next problem.
Research about learning has typically asked "What are the conditions
that influence the speed and accuracy of learning?" But before the
answers to that question can make any sense, one must first know how to
characterize what is learned. Before learning, an organism is behaving
in a certain way. After learning, it is behaving in a different way. So
something inside the organism must have changed; its organization has
changed in some way. Furthermore, if you apply exactly the same
conditions to a rock, you will find that it doesn't change its behavior
at all. Obviously, it's not the "conditions" that make learning
possible; it's some property of the system under study. Learning is not
a consequence of external conditions acting on an organism; it's an
indication of an internal process that organisms can carry out and rocks
can't. Learning is something an organism does, not something that the
environment does to it.
In my opinion, studying reorganization has to wait until we have a good
model that can explain how ordinary stable behavior works. That's what
PCT is about, right now. We have to understand how a person can drive
through traffic to work every day, design and build a house or an
electronic circuit or a spaceship, carry out the normal routines of
daily life. The appearance of variability and uncertainty in the
behavior of organisms is largely a consequence of our ignorance;
organisms typically spend most of their time producing highly regular
and repeatable consequences with great precision. What has misled
scientists into thinking that behavior is nine parts variability and one
part orderliness is the fact that they have focussed on actions, which
vary with every disturbance, instead of the consequences that the
actions create, which vary hardly at all. PCT shows us the orderliness
in behavior, and suggests a model of organization that explains how it
can be that actions vary while their consequences remain under control.
When we have mined the vast lodes of orderliness that are to be found in
the behavior of organisms, we will then be equipped to attack the
problem of changes in organization.
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Best,
Bill P.