Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data...)

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

···

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.Â

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623
MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
Â

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do
you perceive to be in the article?
Â
BP: From my angle, the
misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion
of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy
it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.Â

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production
to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.Â

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

Â

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.Â

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph

. But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.Â

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next. Â

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.Â

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.Â

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

BestÂ

Rick

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[bnhpct]

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05Â –

RM:Â

all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.Â

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

···

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.Â

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623
MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
Â

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do
you perceive to be in the article?
Â
BP: From my angle, the
misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion
of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy
it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.Â

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production
to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.Â

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

Â

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.Â

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph

. But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.Â

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next. Â

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.Â

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.Â

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

BestÂ

Rick

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[Abbott]

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

···

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

The observable behavior – moving the ppen in a circle – is controlled, or to state it from the point of viiew of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Bruce

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-09_12:40:54 ET]

Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT) –

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for.

Symbols always have a ‘read-out’ in words, for example when a mathematician ‘reads out’ a mathematical formula (expresses what it says using words). You offer here an interesting read-out of the meaning of the colon, kind of a specialization of its use in definitions.

Does that reading allow you to follow Rick when he says “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”?

I’ve always sensed a pugnaciousness in that title, Behavior: The control of perception, putting the blindingly obvious right up in the face of those who will not see. Even just a decade or so after that seminal 1960 paper he had experienced more than a few unwilling to see the obvious. Not to mention his co-authors attempting to commandeer the theory.

In the Preface to B:CP (in the last paragraph of the original 1973 Preface), Bill spells out clearly what he intended by the title Behavior: The control of perception. He says:Â

Behavior is the process by which organisms control their input sensory data. For human beings, behavior is the control of perception.

This is where I earliest got the understanding that behavior is what the entire control loop does. Note also that Bill read the colon out as “is”, not as “has the function of”.

···

/Bruce

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

Â

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Â

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05Â –

Â

RM:Â all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

Â

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

Â

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

Â

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

Â

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

Â

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.Â

Â

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

Â

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

Â

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Â

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

Â

The observable behavior – moving the pen in a circle  “ is controlled, or to state it from the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Â

Bruce

Â

Â

Â

Â

[Abbott]

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1320 EDT)]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-09_12:40:54 ET]

Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT) –

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for.

Symbols always have a ‘read-out’ in words, for example when a mathematician ‘reads out’ a mathematical formula (expresses what it says using words). You offer here an interesting read-out of the meaning of the colon, kind of a specialization of its use in definitions.

Does that reading allow you to follow Rick when he says “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”?

No. The “behaviorâ€? in question is the behavior of organisms – what they do. This is what psycchological researchers have been trying to explain, and which Bill Powers developed PCT to explain.  The “behavior of controlled quantitiesâ€? is behavior in the sense you mentioned earlier, such as the behavior of gasses.

I’ve always sensed a pugnaciousness in that title, Behavior: The control of perception, putting the blindingly obvious right up in the face of those who will not see. Even just a decade or so after that seminal 1960 paper he had experienced more than a few unwilling to see the obvious. Not to mention his co-authors attempting to commandeer the theory.

Yes; in fact, I considered making the same point in my previous post.

In the Preface to B:CP (in the last paragraph of the original 1973 Preface), Bill spells out clearly what he intended by the title Behavior: The control of perception. He says:

Behavior is the process by which organisms control their input sensory data. For human beings, behavior is the control of perception.

Is it the process by which they control, or control itself? Bill is being inconsistent here. The process by which organisms control requires that they produce actions that act on controlled quantities so as to oppose changes to those quantities produced by disturbances or to change those quantities to follow a changed reference value. We could call this behavior “control behavior,� I suppose, but the behavior in question is what the organism is observed to be doing when controlling, not the control loop itself.

It is of course the process that determines those actions, based on those deviations of perception from reference.

This is where I earliest got the understanding that behavior is what the entire control loop does. Note also that Bill read the colon out as “is”, not as “has the function of”.

If that is what Bill meant, then I disagree with his use of “behavior� to refer to something other than the actions that the organism is observed to be engaging in. Behavior is the thing to be explained, and control the explanation. I think he meant that “behavior� (actions) is (control) behavior (behavior that exerts control over perceptions).

Bruce

···

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

The observable behavior – moving the pen in a circle – is controlled, or to state it fromm the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Bruce

[rsmarken]

···

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM:Â

all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

 RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).Â

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.Â

Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

Â

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.Â

Best

Rick

Â

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

/Bruce

–

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.Â

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623
MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
Â

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do
you perceive to be in the article?
Â
BP: From my angle, the
misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion
of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy
it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.Â

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production
to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.Â

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

Â

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.Â

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph

. But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.Â

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next. Â

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.Â

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.Â

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

BestÂ

Rick

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_18:18:51]

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

BA: I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled.

RM: It's kind of hard to see another person's perceptions. How do you think Bill came up with the idea that observable actions are the means by which perceptions are controlled? I think he came up with it in the same way one would come up with the idea that a thermostat controls its perception of room temperature; by seeing that room temperature is controlled (a controlled quantity) and that the thermostat's actions (turning the heater on and off for varying amounts of time) are crucial to that happening.

BA: Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

Â

BA: The observable behavior – moving the pen in a circle – is controlled,

RM:: Isn't the person doing that too? I agree that the word "behavior" can be confusing because it is used to describe both the means and the ends produced by these means. Which is why, in PCT, "behavior" is defined as "controlled results of action" or simply "control" That is, what we call "behavior" is what are called controlled quantities in PCT. Even what we see as the actions that keep controlled quantities in their reference states are themselves controlled quantities. The only actions that are not themselves controlled quantities are muscle contractions that are the ultimate means of producing any observable behavior (controlled quantity) from arm gestures to political gestures.Â
BestÂ
Rick
Â

···

or to state it from the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Â

Bruce

Â

Â

Â

Â

--
Richard S. MarkenÂ
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_18:35:24]

···

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1320 EDT)]

Â

BA: The “behaviorâ€? in question is the behavior of organisms – whaat they do. This is what psychological researchers have been trying to explain, and which Bill Powers developed PCT to explain. The “behavior of controlled quantitiesâ€? is behavior in the sense you mentioned earlier, such as the behavior of gasses.

RM: Think if it in terms of reverse engineering the thermostat. What is it that you want to explain about the behavior of the thermostat? From a PCT perspective, the main thing to explain is the fact that room temperature is seen to a controlled quantity – a variable that is maintained in a reference state, protected from disturbance. If you saw that the reference state of this controlled quantity were changing – say it was 68 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night – then this is the behavior you (as a PCTer studying thermostats) would be interested in. What you would be doing is studying the behavior of a controlled quantity.Â

Â

BA:Behavior is the thing to be explained, and control the explanation. I think he meant that “behaviorâ€? (actions) is (control) behavior (behavior that exerts control over perceptions).

RM: I’m pretty sure he meant that behavior is control and control theory is the explanation of this controlling.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

Â

Â

Â

Â

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

Â

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Â

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05Â –

Â

RM:Â all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

Â

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

Â

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

Â

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

Â

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

Â

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.Â

Â

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

Â

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

Â

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Â

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?â€? ‘I am drawing a circle,â€? the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

Â

The observable behavior – moving the pen in a circle – is co controlled, or to state it from the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Â

Bruce

Â

Â

Â

Â

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Down…

···

From: Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Thursday, June 7, 2018 4:40 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Cc: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com
Subject: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research.

HB : Well I doubt that “controlled quantites” (eg.controlled variables, e.g. perceptual signals) are rarely measured because few people are doing PCT research. I think it’s more problem in defining what other people control (what reference state for the perception they set). I understood that you thought the same.

RM (2013) : But the intentional behavior that occurs in real life often involves the control of variables that are impossible to represent as simple function of physical variables, e.g., the honesty of a communication or the intimacy of a realtionship. A quantitative approcah to the TCV will not work when trying to study such abstract variables…

HB : I thought it’s clear that there are difficulties when we want to find out what other people control in their real life. Usualy they don’t do TCV but anyway there is some natural “instinct” that tells people what others might be controlling and whether it could affect their control. That’s probably what is important in real life of people. How to control opitmal.

RM : But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities.

HB : What exactly does this mean and where Bill wrote that ??? What a construct : “all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. Does this mean that behavior is produced by “controlled quantites”.

What exactly did you mean by this ? Does this mean that “perceptual signal” as “controlled quantity” are “controlled variables” that direct behavior or “controlled quantites produce behavior”. This is in accordance to your behavoristic ideas of “stimulus-respons”.

We can maybe conclude that “Perceptual signal” is formed on the basis of stimulus from environment and produce behavior which is “the behavior of controlled quantities”. So it looks like that It’s stimulus that “creates” perceptual signal and perceptual signal or “controlled quantiy” cause behavior. Is this what you meant by your briliant definition.

How this is in accordance to PCT definition of control ?

Bill P (B:CP):

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

HB : I think that the only we find out what “purposeful behavior” is that we must compare what you wrote with what Bill wrote about PCT. If we want to talk about PCT I hope you agree that we must have some references that will tell us whether we are in accordance with PCT or not.

So is your statement “Behavior of controlled quantities” in accordance with definition of control ?

HB : What is your “purposefull behavior of controlled quantity” for in control loop ?

From definition of control I’d say that “actions” or “purposefull behavior” means cancelling the effects of disturbances so that organism achieves and maintains predefined state e.g. “intrinsic variables” in genetically determined reference states. That’s how organisms survive.

Purpsosefull behavior is the result of “errors” in intrinsic variables. As we know from Bills’ definitions “errors” are eliminated with internal and external effectors.

Activity of external effectors are usually called in PCT actions.

So “Purposeful behavior is result” of discrepancy between references and perceptual signals that carry informations about state of “intrinsic variables”. By the way. I hope now you understand why Martin was right.

RM (earlier about Martin) ….perceptual signals that are analogs of a subset of those quantities – presumably the ones that, when controlled, allow us to keep our intrinsic variables under control.

Bill P :

ERROR : The discrepancy between a perceptual signal and a reference signal, which drives a control system’s output function. The discrepancy between a controlled quantity and it’s present reference level, which causes observable behavior.

Purposeful behavior is produced as the result of comparison between reference and “controlled quantity” (perceptual signal). See above.

Purposefull behavior is connected to the state in the organism. If error occurs in internal varaibels organism will try to eliminate them with internal and external effectors. That’s what PCT definition in about.

So as purposefull behavior is concerned it’s important to understand how organisms function not how “external environment is controlled by behavior”.

HB : Well we can see that purposeful behavior is not “the behavior of controlled quantities” but the means by which organism keep perception near genetically defined reference levels.

Rick. You obviously don’t intend to stop bugging with your “behavior is control” which you of course never proved. Where can you write down in your brain that in PCT “Behavior is not control”, “Perception is controlled”

RM : That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself.

HB : Stop bullshitting Rick. Ha,ha you and Bill Powers. This is a joke of century. As I said before your RCT and Bills’ PCT are bilion years away.

Bill and you Rick has so little in common as theory is concerned. You have your RCT (Ricks’ Control Theory) which is about “Control of behavior” and Bill created PCT (Perceptual Control Theory).

RCT (Ricks Control Theory) definition of control loop

1. CONTROL : Keeping of some »aspect of outer environment« in reference state, protected (defended) from disturbances.

2. OUTPUT FUNCTION : controlled effects (control of behavior) to outer environment so to keep some »controlled variable« in reference state

3. FEED-BACK FUNCTION : »Control« of some »aspect of outer environment« in reference state.

4. INPUT FUNCTION : produce »Controlled Perceptual Variable« or »Controlled Perception«, the perceptual correlate of »controlled q.i.«

5. COMPARATOR : ???

6. ERROR SIGNAL : ???

PCT Definitions of control loop :

Bill P (B:CP):

1. CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

Bill P (B:CP):

1. OUTPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that converts the magnitude or state of a signal inside the system into a corresponding set of effects on the immediate environment of the system

Bill P (LCS III):…the output function shown in it’s own box represents the means this system has for causing changes in it’s environment.

Bill P (LCS III):

1. FEED-BACK FUNCTION : The box represents the set of physical laws, properties, arrangements, linkages, by which the action of this system feeds-back to affect its own input, the controlled variable. That’s what feed-back means : it’s an effect of a system’s output on it’s own input.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. INPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that receives signals or stimuli from outside the system, and generates a perceptual signal that is some function of the received signals or stimuli.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. COMPARATOR : The portion of control system that computes the magnitude and direction of mismatch between perceptual and reference signal.

Bill P (B:CP)

1. ERROR : The discrepancy between a perceptual signal and a reference signal, which drives a control system’s output function. The discrepancy between a controlled quantity and it’s present reference level, which causes observable behavior.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. ERROR SIGNAL : A signal indicating the magnitude and direction of error.

HB : Or do you think your RCT is right ? Prove it… If you changed your mind you can show us what your changes are about in your new theory. I understand that people change their minds.

Bill Leach where are you. Explain to Rick that “outputs or observable behavior” is not controlled. Rick just changed “Perceptual Control Theory” into “Behavioral control theory”. Do you agree ?

BL : ….but to then make the claim that the studied system is actually controlling its output is just plain wrong.

BL : The studied system is controlling whatever its perception of the aspect of of the environment to bring the perception of that aspect to within an acceptable tolerance to the reference value.

RM : Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: From my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

HB : You are manipulator of the worst kind Rick, and you’ll do everything to achieve your poor, little goals. You give a dame about PCT. It’s just a tool for your little ass to sit comfortable. Who is Rick Marken anyway ?

As I said before, most of Bills literature does not contain almost anything about that “Behavior is control”, because Bill couldn’t prove that. But he proved that we can’t directly control our muscle tension

RICK EMPHASIZING WEEKNES OF BILL POWERS AND MAKE DAMAGE

I don’t understand Rick why are you doing this to Bill. Why emphasizing his weekness ? We all know that Bill changed his mind some times. But I invited you for I don’t how many times that we try establish what Bill was really writing about. My hypothesis was 90:10. So my affirmation is that Bill wrote 90 % about “Control of perception” and in 10 %, although it can be lower, about that " we can control behavior".

By not establishing what is true you are making confussion and very bad publicity for Bill showing that maybe he didn’t know what he was writing about and that his theory is worthless because of so many antagonisms.

CAN WE REACH AN AGREEMENT ?

I have nothing from my support to Bills’ work. Even nobody said ever “thank you” for standing for Bill and offering solid ground for thinking about “control in humans”. We need some common “system of knowledge” that we can discuss about. Otherwise we see what happens when no “references” for common discussions are presented. Mostly Rick and Bruce are deviating with their private constructs and make such a confussion that nobody can put pieces together.

We need common ground for discussions otherwise discussions are total confussions as we can see from actual discussions about whether “behavior is control” or perception is controlled.

I offered “common ground” or references for the agreement for I don’t know how many times, but nobody agrees with my proposition that Bills’ definitions (B:CP) and diagram (LCS III) should be accepted as reference for discussions about PCT. Even Powers ladies don’t agree.

So who is left to support PCT ?

WHO SUPPORTS BILLS’ WORK AND WHO IS MAKING DAMAGE ?

For the last 5 years I was the one who most of his posts dedicated to Bills work. I can count on my fingers posts that involved Bills’ statements. Usually Rick opposed with his RCT theory, some times finding some statemenst that did enter doubt what is Bills’ real work.

If Bill would so much write about “Control of behavior” we would find it everywhere where we would open any of his literature. But statements about that we can “Control our behavior” are so rare that Rick have to search for years to find few statements among I’ll guess 20.000 which show to “Control of perception”.

HB : I just want to establish what Bill was really writing about and I’m all the time exposing his work opened for discussions. Almost everywhere in his literature I look I find mostly statements about “perceptual control”. So I have no problem with understanding that his work was about “Control of perception”. Rick is the main promulgator of RCT which oppose Bills PCT.

I’m tyred Rick of repeating this. I’ll still stand behind Bill as I did till now although it seems that I’m “lonely PCT rider”. So I don’t know whether I’ll continue with so intensivelly warn you about your discourses about “Control of behavior”. And it could happen that CSGnet will loose PCT navigation as many times happened in this 5 years.

It’s not good for Bill and his daughters that CSGnet loose navigation and slip into RCT. An incredible damage can be made. Damaging to Bill, his family, his theory and understanding of members on CSGnet what control in organisms means. I’ll not mention others who are oberving CSGnet.

WHAT IS PCT THEORY REALLY ABOUT ?

Rick you are delibrately choosing some rare cases where Bill maybe made a mistake and thus you are making look like Bill was confussed. Why are you doing this ? Why not check and prove what is true.

What was his majority work about ? I too would like to know. What is his theory really about ???

HB : I’m sure that majority of his theory is with no doubt showing that “Behavior is not controlled” but “Perception is controlled”.

So why delibrately searching for rare spots in his literature and CSGnet archives. Do you want to show that everybody could see that Bill was confused person who contradited himself and his PCT theory that “Perception is controlled” is worthless. How many times do I have to repeat that Bill changed his mind sometimes (very rarely and you are obviously seeking just those places which are very rare)

I’m sure if we’ll search and read Bills literature systematically, his theory is clearly presented at least in 90% of his work that “Perception is controlled”.

Exactly what do you want Rick ???

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT

HB : First you have to understand what “purposefull behavior” is. References are not in function of controlling behavior (as Carver and many psychologist beleive among also you), but in causing effects with action to environment so that perception (controlled quantity) would be near references. Purposefull behavior is thus behavior that is suporting achievement and maintaining of “predefined state” in organism where references are produced.

Bill P (B:CP):

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

And it seems that your friend Tim Carey thinks the same :

TC (2014) :

According to PCT, control is a process of acting to bring a perceived aspect of the world into a match with a mental specification for the state of that perception

RM : You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0).

HB : I’m sorry I don’t have time to read it. Maybe some other time. But I just made a fast tour and that maybe is a “shadow of old PCT Rick”.

RM : This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances.

HB : Well you omitted here the most important part how such consistence result are achieved :

RM ealier : ….that are preventing these disturbances from having any effect on these results. So what Powers was able to see was that the consistent results that we see people producing – the walking, opening doors, and lifting suitcases that seem to simply be “emitted” by the organism – are controlled results of the organisms outputs: controlled quantities or q.i.

HB : Consistent results are not achieved with “Control of behavior” but with “Control of Perception”.

Where are PCT analysis of walking and other behaviors which I asked you for ???. See my analyses of walking as the result of “Control of perception”. You don’t walk controlling your legs !!! You are just rotating your tongue and mixing air. Well in short you are “air-mixer”.

RM : These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

HB : Behavior does not produce any controlled results or controlled quantites. Behavior affects environment and produce in the face of disturbances perceptual signal.

It produces changes in perception which are matched to references and proceeded through “error” into “output function”.

Bill P (B:CP):

OUTPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that converts the magnitude or state of a signal inside the system into a corresponding set of effects on the immediate environment of the system

Bill P (LCS III):…the output function shown in it’s own box represents the means this system has for causing changes in it’s environment.

Bill P (LCS III):

FEED-BACK FUNCTION : The box represents the set of physical laws, properties, arrangements, linkages, by which the action of this system feeds-back to affect its own input, the controlled variable. That’s what feed-back means : it’s an effect of a system’s output on it’s own input.

HB : References and perceptual signals are producing consistent results . Why should be there any “controlled quantites” produced by “control of behavior” ? You seem to have problem with inderstadning what is controlled quantity…

Bill P :

The controlled quantity is defined strictly by the behaving system’s perceptual computers; it may or may not be identifiable as an objective (need I put in quotes?) property of, or entity in, the physical environment. In general an observer will not, therefore, be able to see what a control system is controlling

Bill P (B:CP)

ERROR : The discrepancy between a perceptual signal and a reference signal, which drives a control system’s output function. The discrepancy between a controlled quantity and it’s present reference level, which causes observable behavior

HB : You are good at manipulating Rick and I think you are doing it delibratelly to “protect your RCT work”. But isn’t it time that we try to accomplish some common agreement about what PCT is about on the basis of studying his literature and forming some reference statements about what PCT could be. So…

Do you agree with Bills and Marys’ Thesis about PCT and do you agree with Bills definitions (B:CP) and diagram (LCS III) or not ? I announced them at least 50 x on CSGnet.

Boris

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce

···

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Saturday, June 9, 2018 4:27 AM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN : In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

HB : Good. So I hope we agree that we should make PCT analysis.

BN earlier : We are here to investigate, test, demonstrate, and promulgate perceptual control theory

BN : I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

HB : So why didn’t you make PCT analysis ?

HB : I would say that your understanding is wrong. PCT is general theory about how organisms function

Bill P. at all (50th Anniversary, 2011) :

Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) provides a general theory of functioning for organisms.

HB : ….so what control loops in organisms do is “achieving and maintaining” predefined state. Behavior is not what control loop does. It’s part of control loops which supports achieving “homeostasis” necessary for survival. Other effectors that support “homeostasis” beside “behavior” are glands…

Bill P. at all (50th Anniversary, 2011) :

…the phenomenon of control takes center stage in PCT, with observable behavior playing an important but supporting role.

BN : You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

HB : How do we see from PCT definitions (B:CP) and diagram (LCS III) that “Behavior is control” ??? Is this again some of your private constructs.

PCT Definitions of control loop :

Bill P (B:CP):

1. CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

Bill P (B:CP):

1. OUTPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that converts the magnitude or state of a signal inside the system into a corresponding set of effects on the immediate environment of the system

Bill P (LCS III):…the output function shown in it’s own box represents the means this system has for causing changes in it’s environment.

Bill P (LCS III):

1. FEED-BACK FUNCTION : The box represents the set of physical laws, properties, arrangements, linkages, by which the action of this system feeds-back to affect its own input, the controlled variable. That’s what feed-back means : it’s an effect of a system’s output on it’s own input.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. INPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that receives signals or stimuli from outside the system, and generates a perceptual signal that is some function of the received signals or stimuli.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. COMPARATOR : The portion of control system that computes the magnitude and direction of mismatch between perceptual and reference signal.

Bill P (B:CP)

1. ERROR : The discrepancy between a perceptual signal and a reference signal, which drives a control system’s output function. The discrepancy between a controlled quantity and it’s present reference level, which causes observable behavior.

Bill P (B:CP) :

1. ERROR SIGNAL : A signal indicating the magnitude and direction of error.

HB : So Bruce could you explain to us how behavior is “controlled” ? What control loop exactly does ?

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

BN : Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity

HB : Perception of the controlled quantity ? What new construct is this ?

Perception is “controlled quantity”… This is only place where Rick is right. It’s part of the control loop where “Perceptual signal” or “controlled quantity” is produced.

Bill P (B:CP)

ERROR : The discrepancy between a perceptual signal and a reference signal, which drives a control system’s output function. The discrepancy between a controlled quantity and it’s present reference level, which causes observable behavior.

HB : Controlled quantiy in PCT is perceptual signal that is compared to references. We are “controlling” for reference level of controlled quantity.

BN :

–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

HB : If you were unable to follow Rick, I’m unable to follow you here.

Boris

/Bruce

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: from my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ (shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next.

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.

I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

Best

Rick

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce

···

From: “Bruce Abbott” (bbabbott@frontier.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Saturday, June 9, 2018 4:13 PM
To: CSGnet csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: RE: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

BA : I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception.

Bill P (LCS III):…the output function shown in it’s own box represents the means this system has for causing changes in it’s environment.

HB : Function of behavior is to affect environment in accordance to “error signal”.

BA : That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for.

HB : Right. But this is not tha same as you wrote before.

BA (above) : The function of behavior is to control perception.

HB : How is this related to "individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled.

BA : It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

HB : The fact that psychologist were missing “Control of Perception”, not “Control of behavior”. I’m sure that most of them like Rick think that we walk with controlling movements of our legs and eat or drink by controlling movements of the hands. In PCT that is not the case. We are changing perception to control in the whole loop.

Bill P :

Our only view of the real world is our view of the neural signals that represent it inside our own brains. When we act to make a perception change to our more desireble state – when we make the perception of the glass change from »on the table« to »near the mouth« - we have no direct knowledge of what we are doing to the reality that is the origin of our neural signal; we know only the final result, how the result looks, feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and so forth…It means that we produce actions that alter the world of perception…

HB : Please prove that you can control behavior. So it can be the way that you can prove that you can control perception. Behavior is not controlled. You said it couple times. Perception is controlled and the consequence as you wrote is that “an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions” are affected by output not controlled.

Bill P :

OUTPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that converts the magnitude or state of a signal inside the system into a corresponding set of effects on the immediate environment of the system

HB : Output is just means of controlling in the whole loop, it’s not “controlled actions”.

BA : Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?” ‘I am drawing a circle,” the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

HB : I agree with you that things get confusing because also Bill changed his mind some times and contributed to confussion. But can we try to put things on the right place by forming reference statements for PCT.

BA : The observable behavior – moving the pen in a circle – is controlled,

HB : Maybe we can say that the whole circle is controlling, and – moving the pen in a circle – looks like control movements. But Bill and Kent mostly used stability instead of term control. "Cancelling the effects of disturbances more looks like stabilizing environment than controlling

RM …here’s what Bill said in his letter to Phil Runkel:

I think it is essential to follow the course that Marken set. First we must establish control as a phenomenon. This is not a theoretical matter. We have to show that organisms actually do stabilize external variables of all degrees of complexity against disturbances, …-- William T. Powers

HB : Stability of external variables are transformed into perceptual signal which is controlled not “behavior”. We can maintain “circumstances” in some stable position, and we can maintain hand in some stable position, but not as “Control of behavior” because we can’t control muscle tension, but stability is achieved with “Controlling perception”.

What you see are actions to environment which are consequence of “Controlling perception” and affect envieronment and input so to stabilize it. Actions are just blind effects to environment not “controlled effects”. Let us keep Bills’ terminology as it’s about his theory.

FEED-BACK FUNCTION : The box represents the set of physical laws, properties, arrangements, linkages, by which the action of this system feeds-back to affect its own input, the controlled variable. That’s what feed-back means : it’s an effect of a system’s output on it’s own input.

BA : …or to state it from the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

HB : Right. Perception is controlled and as the consequence of the control in comparator is “error” signal which drives muscle tension with blind effects to environment. “Input function” just “register” blind effects. Not controlled effects.

Bill P (B:CP) :

…it si even more apparent that the first order perceptual signal reflects only what happens at the sensory endings : the source of the stimulation is completely indefined and unsensed. If any information exists about the source of the stimulus, it exists only distributed over millions of first order perceptual signals and is explicit in none of them.

Bruce

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce, Rick

···

From: Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2018 3:36 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_18:35:24]

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1320 EDT)]

BA: The “behaviorâ€? in question is the behavior of organisms – what they do. This is what psychological researchers have been trying to explain, and which Bill Powers developed PCT to explain. The “behavior of controlled quantitiesâ€? is behavior in the sense you mentioned earlier, such as the behavior of gasses.

HB : Behavior of organisms as “control” is defined in PCT definition of control

Bill P :

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

HB : You can see clearly that “behavior” is not defined as control of perception but as concequence of control in organisms. It does notr say that there are any “controlled actions”. The only way terminology can be “equalized” is to find some references for PCT to compare statements.

RM: Think if it in terms of reverse engineering the thermostat. What is it that you want to explain about the behavior of the thermostat? From a PCT perspective, the main thing to explain is the fact that room temperature is seen to a controlled quantity – a variable that is maintained in a reference state, protected from disturbance.

HB : Rick you are the main protagonist for changing Bills’ PCT. How can you “protect organism from disturbances” ??? And room temperature is not a “controlled quantitiy”. You can’t see “controlled quantity” (perceptual signal)Â in environment. Room temperature is perceived by people. How can you otherwise know about “room temperature” ?

Bill P :

The controlled quantity is defined strictly by the behaving system’s perceptual computers; it may or may not be identifiable as an objective (need I put in quotes?) property of, or entity in, the physical environment. In general an observer will not, therefore, be able to see what a control system is controlling

RM : If you saw that the reference state of this controlled quantity were changing – say it was 68 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night – then this is the behavior you (as a PCTer studying thermostats) would be interested in. What you would be doing is studying the behavior of a controlled quantity.

HB : Stop bullshitting Rick. We are talking about live organisms not about machines. Why all the time inventing new terminology if PCT terminology is quite clear. If the reference states for perception are changing it mean that perception is being controlled. How you control behavior ??? Explain to us and prove it.

BA:Behavior is the thing to be explained, and control the explanation. I think he meant that “behavior� (actions) is (control) behavior (behavior that exerts control over perceptions).

HB : In the diagram (LCS III) you can clearly see that behavior is coming after control of perception and is driven by “error” signal which is blindly affecting environment.

Bill P :

Our only view of the real world is our view of the neural signals that represent it inside our own brains. When we act to make a perception change to our more desireble state – wwhen we make the perception of the glass change from »on the table« to »near the mouth« - we have no direct knowledge of what we are doing to the reality that is the origin of our neural signal; we know only the final result, how the result looks, feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and so forth…It means that we produce actions that alter the world of perception…

HB : How can blind effects to environment control anything ???

RM: I’m pretty sure he meant that behavior is control and control theory is the explanation of this controlling.

HB : Show me from definitions below (B:CP) and diagram (LCS III) above how PCT can be about “behavior is control” ??? It was about “Control of perception”. You are just theorizing all the time (air-mixing) with no evidences…

Bill P :

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

Bill P (B:CP):

OUTPUT FUNCTION : The portion of a system that converts the magnitude or state of a signal inside the system into a corresponding set of effects on the immediate environment of the system

Bill P (LCS III):…the output function shown in it’s own box represents the mmeans this system has for causing changes in it’s environment.

Bill P (LCS III):

FEED-BACK FUNCTION : The box represents the set of physical laws, properties, arrangements, linkages, by which the action of this system feeds-back to affect its own input, the controlled variable. That’s what feed-back means : it’s an effect of a system’s output on it’s own input.

Best

Rick

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

The observable behavior – moviing the pen in a circle – is controlled, or to state it from the poiint of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Bruce

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce and Bruce…

···

From: “Bruce Abbott” (bbabbott@frontier.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Saturday, June 9, 2018 7:21 PM
To: CSGnet csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: RE: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1320 EDT)]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-09_12:40:54 ET]

Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT) –

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for.

Symbols always have a ‘read-out’ in words, for example when a mathematician ‘reads out’ a mathematical formula (expresses what it says using words). You offer here an interesting read-out of the meaning of the colon, kind of a specialization of its use in definitions.

Does that reading allow you to follow Rick when he says “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”?

No. The “behaviorâ€? in question is the behavior of organisms – what they do. This is what psychologiical researchers have been trying to explain, and which Bill Powers developed PCT to explain. The “behavior of controlled quantitiesâ€? is behavior in the sense you mentioned earlier, such as the behavior of gasses.

I’ve always sensed a pugnaciousness in that title, Behavior: The control of perception, putting the blindingly obvious right up in the face of those who will not see. Even just a decade or so after that seminal 1960 paper he had experienced more than a few unwilling to see the obvious. Not to mention his co-authors attempting to commandeer the theory.

Yes; in fact, I considered making the same point in my previous post.

HB : I don’t know why such theoretical guesses are needed, but as I see it it’s everything clear from his diagram (LCS III). Observable behavior (actions) is coming after “control of perception” in comparator.

In the Preface to B:CP (in the last paragraph of the original 1973 Preface), Bill spells out clearly what he intended by the title Behavior: The control of perception. He says:

Behavior is the process by which organisms control their input sensory data. For human beings, behavior is the control of perception.

HB : This is of course your interpretation of Bills words. Behavior is the process by which organisms control their input sensory data…

Bill P (B:CP):

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

HB : We have to make sure that all Bills’ work get some credibility in consistency of his statement. They have to show in same direction. Otherwise we are emphasizing his “changing mind” and contradictions in his theory.

Boris

BA : Is it the process by which they control, or control itself? Bill is being inconsistent here. The process by which organisms control requires that they produce actions that act on controlled quantities so as to oppose changes to those quantities produced by disturbances or to change those quantities to follow a changed reference value. We could call this behavior “control behavior,� I suppose, but the behavior in question is what the organism is observed to be doing when controlling, not the control loop itself.

It is of course the process that determines those actions, based on those deviations of perception from reference.

This is where I earliest got the understanding that behavior is what the entire control loop does. Note also that Bill read the colon out as “is”, not as “has the function of”.

If that is what Bill meant, then I disagree with his use of “behavior� to refer to something other than the actions that the organism is observed to be engaging in. Behavior is the thing to be explained, and control the explanation. I think he meant that “behavior� (actions) is (control) behavior (behavior that exerts control over perceptions).

Bruce

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

The observable behavior – moving the pen in a ciircle – is controlled, or to state it from the point of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Bruce

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

 the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that.Â

I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

···

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM:Â

all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

 RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).Â

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.Â

Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

Â

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.Â

Best

Rick

Â

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

/Bruce

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.Â

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623
MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
Â

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do
you perceive to be in the article?
Â
BP: From my angle, the
misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion
of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy
it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.Â

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production
to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.Â

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

Â

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.Â

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph

. But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.Â

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next. Â

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.Â

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.Â

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

BestÂ

Rick

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-06-10_22:36:19]

···

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

RM> the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that.Â

BN: I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

RM: You never have to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving or is in fact perceiving the controlled quantity. If you have found that a variable (quantity) is under control then whatever system is controlling it can certainly perceive it. Indeed, the variable that you find to be controlled – the controlled quantity – is presumably defined by the perceptual functions of the system that is controlling it. But once you have found that a variable is under control then you do have to make sure that the organism that appears to be controlling it is indeed controlling it, and you do that by making sure that the organism can and is affecting the state of that controlled quantity.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 1:48 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

–

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM:Â

all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM:Â So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

 RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).Â

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).Â

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.Â

Â

RM:Â Â consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

Â

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.Â

Best

Rick

Â

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.Â

/Bruce

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.Â

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623
MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
Â

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do
you perceive to be in the article?
Â
BP: From my angle, the
misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion
of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy
it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.Â

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.Â

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production
to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.Â

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

Â

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.Â

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph

. But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.Â

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next. Â

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.Â

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.Â

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

BestÂ

Rick

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[EetuP]

[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-06-11_08:53:00 UTC]

Rick, that sounds a little strange, doesn’t it?

First you find something in your perceptual environment which appears to be controlled_e (stabilized against disturbances). Then you test that it really is so. And only after that you ask what subject can perceive it and act upon
it. This is of course possible, but if I were researching some control system like a human being I would first study what that system might perceive and act upon and only after that whether it is controlling that or something else (which it can perceive and
act upon).

Eetu

• Please, regard all my statements as questions,

no matter how they are formulated.

···

[Rick Marken 2018-06-10_22:36:19]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

RM> the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence
that it is doing that.

BN: I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is
capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

RM: You never have to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving or is in fact perceiving the controlled quantity. If you have found that a variable (quantity) is under control then whatever system is controlling it can certainly
perceive it. Indeed, the variable that you find to be controlled – the controlled quantity – is presumably defined by the perceptual functions of the system that is controlling it. But once you have found that a variable is under control then you do have
to make sure that the organism that appears to be controlling it is indeed controlling it, and you do that by making sure that the organism can and is affecting the state of that controlled quantity.

Best

Rick

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 1:48 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean
when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of
the word.

RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to
see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control
and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the
phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled
quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled
limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is
controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory
to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual
input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are
controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.

Best

Rick

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying
that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

/Bruce

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical
variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference
12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to
be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is contro l.
By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that
behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: From my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the
basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through
“control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0 ). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms)
are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are
controlled quantities.

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the
case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control
theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from
having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled
quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the
beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately,
she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis
of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance.
Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation
is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant
when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is
the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ
(shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the
subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound
spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel
in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would
be where I would go next.

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict
between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.

RM> I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it.
But I may be wrong.

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled
in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior;
research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

Best

Rick

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

have nothing left to take away.�

                            --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce

···

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2018 4:26 AM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that.

BN : I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

HB : Which behavior you have in mind ? How orgsnisms perceive “controlled quantity” ? You mean that “controlled quantity” is something outside so that you can perceive it, affect it and so on ? Is this generally so ?

Bill P :

The controlled quantity is defined strictly by the behaving system’s perceptual computers; it may or may not be identifiable as an objective (need I put in quotes?) property of, or entity in, the physical environment. In general an observer will not, therefore, be able to see what a control system is controlling

HB : But if you Bruce has your own explanation about “Controlled quantity” we have to be clear about which “control theory” you talk about. As I see it you are talking about BNCT (Bruce Nevin Control Theory) where control happens outside like in Ricks’ case.

Can you see from any behavior in real life what people are really controlling. It can happen that references “cover” some entity in physical environment “like target”. But control process is going on inside not outside although stability in outer environment can show quite precisely consequences of control inside organism. In PCT control is defined as internal process. But you can make your own theory.

Bill P (B:CP):

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

HB : Maybe you can assume what people are really controlling. But you can’t generally see what they really control in their perceptual hierarchies and you can hardly predict behavior of people. But usual predicton of people is that other people will act “normaly”. But the cases where people don’t act “normaly” show us that people can change their mind when they want. And that makes them unpredictable.

If control in hierarchies would be so “observable” why Tim Carey and psychoterapist has so many problems in finding what people are really controlling so that can try to help them. It’s not that easy as you want to present “control in organisms” Bruce.

Boris

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 1:48 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.

Best

Rick

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

/Bruce

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: from my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ (shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next.

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.

I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

Best

Rick

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Bruce

···

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Saturday, June 9, 2018 6:46 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-09_12:40:54 ET]

Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT) –

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for.

Symbols always have a ‘read-out’ in words, for example when a mathematician ‘reads out’ a mathematical formula (expresses what it says using words). You offer here an interesting read-out of the meaning of the colon, kind of a specialization of its use in definitions.

Does that reading allow you to follow Rick when he says “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”?

I’ve always sensed a pugnaciousness in that title, Behavior: The control of perception, putting the blindingly obvious right up in the face of those who will not see. Even just a decade or so after that seminal 1960 paper he had experienced more than a few unwilling to see the obvious. Not to mention his co-authors attempting to commandeer the theory.

In the Preface to B:CP (in the last paragraph of the original 1973 Preface), Bill spells out clearly what he intended by the title Behavior: The control of perception. He says:

Behavior is the process by which organisms control their input sensory data. For human beings, behavior is the control of perception.

HB : Pitty. Why didn’t you read a few lines “before” this…¦.

Bill P. (B:CP) :

Rather, the central problem has been to find out a plausible model which can behave at all…. For example it will be shoown later that the brain does not command the muscles to act. That concept implies properties that the neuromuscular system simply does not have… There is just no way the brain can select a muscle tension that will produce one and only one behavioral effect, even if that tension is accurately produced. The result of this approcah is a model nearly devoid of specific behavioral content.

HB : It seems that central problem of PCT was how behavior really works or how orgsnisms and of course nervous system and neuromuscular connections really function.

BN : This is where I earliest got the understanding that behavior is what the entire control loop does.

HB : This is totaly wrong. Your understading was wrongly captured from Bills’ work. It’s not the behavior what entirely loop does but realization of references (goals) which are formed in organism and achieved with many means (glands, nerv ends, muscles).

HB : You are negating all Bills work. The entire loop and all control loops in organism including glands and “behavior” are for achieving and maintaining “survival” (prederminated state) or keeping “intrinsic variables” in genetically determined reference levels.

AS I see it, your problem is that you don’t understand PCT so you are making your BNCT theory.

Bill P :

CONTROL : Achievement and maintenance of a preselected state in the controlling system, through actions on the environment that also cancel the effects of disturbances.

Boris

Note also that Bill read the colon out as “is”, not as “has the function of”.

/Bruce

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 10:13 AM “Bruce Abbott” csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Abbott (2018.06.09.1010 EDT)]

From: Bruce Nevin (bnhpct@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Friday, June 8, 2018 10:27 PM
To: CSG csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05 –

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

(a) The most general sense is observed activity, changes, etc., even of inanimate objects. Examples: The behavior of gases, the behavior of light, the behavior of projectiles, etc.

(b) People, especially psychologists, talk more specifically about the behavior of animate things, referring to their actions and other behavioral outputs.

I very quickly came to understand that behavior is (c) what a control loop does.

You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving. We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving. It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

I have always understood the title of Bill’s book, Behavior: the Control of Perception to define the function of behavior, not to state an equality: The function of behavior is to control perception. That is, an individual’s observable actions are the means by which that individual’s perceptions are controlled. Control of perceptions is what behavior is for. It seemed to be the fact about behavior that psychologists of the behaviorist or cognitive persuasions were missing.

Unfortunately, things get confusing in that behavior has been used in two different senses: (1) actions, which vary as needed to compensate for deviations of the controlled perception from its reference value, and (2) the controlled results of those actions, i.e., what a person answers when asked “What are you doing?� ‘I am drawing a circle,� the person says, but what the person actually is doing is varying the contractions of certain muscles so as to perceive the pen being held in the hand trace a circle on the paper.

The observable behavior – movingg the pen in a circle – is controlled, or to state it from the pointt of view of the actor, her perception of the pen tracing a circle is controlled, and it is controlled by means of a properly coordinated series of appropriate muscle contractions that move the pen in a circle despite disturbances that may act to deflect the pen from that path.

Bruce

[_Boris_Hartman]

Down

···

From: Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2018 7:36 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Rick Marken 2018-06-10_22:36:19]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that.

BN: I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

RM: You never have to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving or is in fact perceiving the controlled quantity.

HB : Rick show how can organisms perceive “controlled quantity” ?

Bill P (B:CP) :

…it si even more apparent that the first order perceptual siignal reflects only what happens at the sensory endings : the source of the stimulation is completely indefined and unsensed. If any information exists about the source of the stimulus, it exists only distributed over millions of first order perceptual signals and is explicit in none of them.

HB : I understand that organisms produce “controlled quantity” (perceptual signal) :

Bill P :

The controlled quantity is defined strictly by the behaving system’s perceptual computers; it may or may not be identifiable as an objective (need I put in quotes?) property of, or entity in, the physical environment. In general an observer will not, therefore, be able to see what a control system is controlling

RM : If you have found that a variable (quantity) is under control then whatever system is controlling it can certainly perceive it.

HB : You have all the time problem that something is “controlled outside” and that you perceive “control” and form “Controlled Perceptual Variable”. And the biggest problem is that you want to make general theory out of this. It seems that it doesn’t work.

Bill P :

Our only view of the real world is our view of the neural signals that represent it inside our own brains. When we act to make a perception change to our more desireble state – when we make thhe perception of the glass change from »on the table« to »near the mouth« - we have no direct knowledge of what we are doing to the reality that is the origin of our neural signal; we know only the final result, how the result looks, feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and so forth…It means that we produce actions that alter the world of perception…

Bill P. (B:CP) :

Rather, the central problem has been to find out a plausible model which can behave at all…. For example it will be shown later that tthe brain does not command the muscles to act. That concept implies properties that the neuromuscular system simply does not have… There is jusst no way the brain can select a muscle tension that will produce one and only one behavioral effect, even if that tension is accurately produced. The result of this approcah is a model nearly devoid of specific behavioral content.

RM : Indeed, the variable that you find to be controlled – the controlled quantity – is presumably defined by the perceptual functions of the system that is controlling it. But once you have found that a variable is under control then you do have to make sure that the organism that appears to be controlling it is indeed controlling it, and you do that by making sure that the organism can and is affecting the state of that controlled quantity.

HB : Again. You have wrong picture how “control loop” works and how perceptual signal is formed.

Bill P (B:CP) :

…it si even more apparent that the first order perceptual signal reflects only what happens at the sensory endings : the source of the stimulation is completely indefined and unsensed. If any information exists about the source of the stimulus, it exists only distributed over millions of first order perceptual signals and is explicit in none of them.

HB : This is by my oppinon how PCT really works. And we have “new” evidences.

Boris

Best

Rick

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 1:48 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.

Best

Rick

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

/Bruce

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: from my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ (shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next.

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.

I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

Best

Rick

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[_Boris_Hartman]

Down

···

From: Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2018 7:36 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)

[Rick Marken 2018-06-10_22:36:19]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-10_22:25:20 ET]

the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that.

BN: I shied away from putting it in such absolute terms, having in mind the need to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving the controlled quantity, is in fact perceiving it, is capable of affecting it, and is in fact affecting it.

RM: You never have to demonstrate that the organism is capable of perceiving or is in fact perceiving the controlled quantity. If you have found that a variable (quantity) is under control then whatever system is controlling it can certainly perceive it.

HB : As I said before Rick. It seems that you have problem with understanding how “control loop” works. Try to start from a new point. Maybe you succed to understand very compalex theory. If everything would be so simple in in standard psychological terms like “Behavior is control” and there is “controlled aspect of environment” i doubt that Bill would wrote so many books an articles. You are trying to simplify it to much and you are getting wrong general result. Try another angle :

Bill P :

Our only view of the real world is our view of the neural signals that represent it inside our own brains. When we act to make a perception change to our more desireble state – when we make the perception of the glass change fromm »on the table« to »near the mouth« - we have no direct knowledge of what we are doing to the reality that is the origin of our neural signal; we know only the final result, how the result looks, feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and so forth…It means that we produce actionss that alter the world of perception…

Boris

Indeed, the variable that you find to be controlled – the controlled quantity – is presumably defined by the perceptual functions of the system that is controlling it. But once you have found that a variable is under control then you do have to make sure that the organism that appears to be controlling it is indeed controlling it, and you do that by making sure that the organism can and is affecting the state of that controlled quantity.

Best

Rick

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 1:48 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.

BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.

RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control. And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).

BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).

RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together; it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms. Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.

RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.

RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.

BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.

RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.

Best

Rick

It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.

/Bruce

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]

BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.

RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:

From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –

MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?

BP: from my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)

RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.

RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.

BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,

RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.

BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.

RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:

RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.

RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ (shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.

RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next.

BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.

RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.

I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.

BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.

RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.

Best

Rick

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery