[From Fred Nickols (2003.03.09.0843 ET)] --
Bruce Nevin's lengthy post is very, very meaty. I will re-read it several
times. For now, all I want to say is, "Thanks, Bruce, for an eloquent
explication of the context of control and the larger, contextual issues."
Fred Nickols
nickols@safe-t.net
www.nickols.us
···
At 10:11 PM 3/8/2003 -0500, you wrote:
[From Bruce Nevin (2003.03.08 15:13 EST)]
The Reference inputs at one level of the hierarchy are derived from error
signals from the next higher level. The result of reorganization over time
is that the reference values are whatever it takes to (in the aggregate)
control certain 'vital signs' at intrinsic reference levels - in other
words, to keep the organism alive.Of the infinite number of ways for a human body to do that, humans have
demonstrated a considerable diversity. Universally, this involves creating
and using various physical and social arrangements to make their
environment more stable and easier to control perceptions in. Physical
arrangements are cultural artifacts like houses and furniture. Social
arrangements are cultural artifacts that are not built of wood and brick.
Of what are they constructed? It appears that social arrangements are
systems of controlled variables (and reference values for them) that are
shared or complementary. The purpose of this discussion is to evaluate
what this means.Obviously, the two kinds of cultural artifacts are interrelated.
Obviously, all we know of either type is our perceptions, but the first
are perceptions of a presumed physical reality and the second are
perceptions of what is going on inside other control systems. There are
many consequences of this essential difference between "physical
realities" and "social realities", for example, the former are amenable to
direct feedback control through the environment, but may also sometimes be
inferred and imagined, whereas the latter are always inferred, always
imagined. Attempts to control the latter in ways that are appropriate to
controlling the former lead, usually pretty immediately, to conflict
between individuals. But we can control other perceptions by means of the
social arrangements in which we and our fellows participate, and in fact
that seems to be their purpose.Social arrangements contribute to stability of control and so ultimately
to maintenance of "vital signs" at intrinsic reference values by
mitigating conflict between individuals. Pace the metaphorical application
of "survival of the fittest" to politics and economics (Social Darwinism),
ability to cooperate is more important than competition is for survival of
species, that is, for successful rearing of young to adulthood. (Noted by
Darwin, Kropotkin, lots of more recent references. This is a particular
form of a more general principle of evolutionary benefit, seen e.g. in
development of invasive organisms to parasites to symbiotes to intrinsic
parts of the organism, the probable history of e.g. mitochondria and
organelles, digestive bacteria, etc.)A culture is a system of social arrangements and physical arrangements. I
hope that by the end of this there will emerge some sense of what it means
to call this a system, and why.We don't doubt that there is a physical reality corresponding to the
perceptions thereof which are all that we know of it. Why do we doubt that
there is a social reality corresponding to our perceptions of social
arrangements? Where do the social arrangements reside? In a sense, inside
each individual in the society. But in the same sense that's where the
physical artifacts of a culture also reside, or at least that which is
"cultural" about them.The physical arrangements that are characteristic in a given culture
involve objects that are really "out there" in the environment. Here is
the scapula of a deer, found among the household paraphernalia of the last
family of Yahi where they had been living in hiding in a cave. The museum
publication says its use is unknown, perhaps an ornament. Lela Rhoades, 86
years old at the time, looks at the picture and says "That's a hide
scraper. You use it to work the stuff off the inside of the hide." She
describes how her mother and grandmother would use such a thing, how she
had used one. Her hands shape gestures in the air against an imagined
surface in front of her. These many perceptual aspects of this physical
object are among the reference perceptions in her memory. Without those
reference perceptions, it is only a bone, identifiable by a biologist or a
hunter as a deer scapula. That which makes it a cultural artifact resides
in the reference perceptions of a participant in the culture. (And perhaps
all that remains now is a pale reflection in my words based on her
description.)The social arrangements in a culture involve physical presence of other
persons, and often of physical objects as well, so they are not entirely
or exclusively resident inside the perceptual hierarchies of people. But
absent individuals like Lela Rhoades, the social arrangements cannot
exist, no matter if other people lacking those culture-based reference
perceptions are standing in their places physically, just as that about
the deer scapula which is of the Yana/Yahi culture cannot exist without a
person like Lela Rhoades, no matter if people lacking those perceptions
hold that worn bone in their hands.How do those cultural references become established in an individual? For
an infant growing through childhood to maturity they already exist. Just
as the language of the community already exists in the talking and in the
minds of people around the child, the social arrangements are "out there"
in the environment. Whenever one controls perceptions by means that
involve interactions with others in a social context, in the very course
of employing those social means one develops and 'tunes' one's control
systems for perceptions of those social arrangements. This is
simultaneously how they become established as social arrangements. In the
course of controlling perceptions in a given socio-cultural context one
participates (with the others involved in the interaction) in maintaining,
continuously recreating, and exemplifying as a perceptible reality, that
socio-cultural context.To adapt Martin Taylor's demonstration about language (in the 1993 CSG
meeting, which anyone may review on the videotape), social artifacts are a
property of the society and not of the individual, even though they reside
only in the individuals. They represent a stable convergence of controlled
variables and reference values in the several control systems of a public.
They are social products, a stable outcome of the private learning
processes and public interdependent interactions of a number of autonomous
control systems. The artifactual nature of it is in its stability,
evolving through time.In the highest levels of the hierarchy are systems that control of
"expectations" of oneself and others - what kind of person controls these
kinds of variables at these levels by these kinds of means, whether I am
that kind of person or not, what's right, what's necessary, what can be
suffered and what must be protested and resisted, and so on. These
perceptions of character and role are the stuff of social realities.One of the ways in which systems of social arrangements (cultures) differ
from one another is in the extent to which the reduction of conflict
between individuals, by virtue of employing the greased skids of
expectability, increases conflict within individuals as a byproduct. This
is what Ruth Benedict was talking about in her adaptation of the medical
term "synergy" to the comparative study of cultures. People enacting a
culture with more synergy experience less conflict between selfishness and
altruism. Selfishness is controlling without concern for consequences to
others or controlling so as to interfere with others as means of enhancing
one's own ability to control. Altruism is controlling so as to enhance the
ability of others to control. In a culture that is very high in "synergy"
the only way to enhance one's own ability to control is by concurrently
enhancing the ability of others to control. This is not an ethical or
moral "choice" to be altruistic in such a culture, it's just the way
things work.When people who are enacting a culture that is low in "synergy" encounter
such a community, they perceive a bunch of suckers just begging to be
taken. There are many historical examples, e.g. in the encounter of the
Spaniards with the people of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the other islands
of the "West Indies", populations that were soon replaced, on most islands
completely, by slaves imported from Africa. We hear this expressed also in
cynical jeering references to various stories about living in heaven here
on earth just as soon as we get everybody to be nice, "yeah, right, and if
you believe that I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you,
real cheap."The extreme of low synergy is what is called a psychopath, or now I think
the term is something like "asocial disorder". There is a chilling
portrayal of one such in a recent book The Devil in the White City, about
a serial killer in Chicago (the main story actually is the great Chicago
World's Fair in 1893). I've heard it said that when you talk to these
people in depth they don't feel human - there's no "there" there. They
don't have any difficulty perceiving the social arrangements of their
society, indeed, they are extremely good at using them to manipulate and
con others. Autism and Asperger's Syndrome may involve some problems
perceiving social arrangements and controlling one's participation in
them. Probably most communities have individuals like these. In some
communities they are not so divergent from the cultural norm.A striking difference between simpler cultures of 'primitive' societies
and American culture, surely, and that of most of the industrialized
world, is that in the former, goods are produced when they are needed, and
in the quantity required. What is produced matches what is desired, and is
made available more or less when it is desired. An artisan whose craft
leaves him underemployed (and if that is the case it will typically be
traditionally the case for that craft) fills in with farming, hunting,
fishing, or the like. There is no creation of markets by advertising or
salesmanship. Wants are well understood and finite, whereas our conception
seems to be of infinitely cascading wants - when one want is fulfilled, a
kind of amorphous dissatisfaction or craving finds others that need
fulfilling. Related to this is that peculiar property of property in our
culture, and especially of money, that more is better. Of nothing in
nature is this the case, there is always some optimal quantity of any
good, and in the social arrangements of 'primitive' societies there are
mechanisms that prevent inordinate accumulation of wealth - distributing
it to relatives (something I saw repeatedly among the Native American
people I worked with, impoverished though they were), using it to finance
ceremonies, even burning it at funerals.Such differences are seen in the aggregate, as generalities about the
social arrangements of people in these communities as distinct from those
of people in those other communities. Norms are not controls. They are
normative, not determinative. So we may find an individual who wishes to
accumulate wealth who is frustrated in this by the social arrangements of
his environment, and we may find a sociopath in a society whose people
cannot distinguish altruism from selfishness because for them they are
inextricably one.We should not expect a culture to set reference perceptions and grow
control systems alike in all the individuals who participate in enacting
it. Anyone is capable of perceiving the elements and relationships of
another culture, no matter how exotic or alien, and even of controlling
those perceptions, given instruction into what and how they are, just as
anyone is capable of learning to speak a foreign language. They probably
will not gain the skill for native fluency, but probably no really great
differences in the perceptual control hierarchy are involved. Rather, some
capabilities (found in all populations, but not equally in all the members
of any population) are especially useful in the context of the social
arrangements of that culture, and others have little effect, are
pointless, or are even thwarted. Just as a deer scapula has only
decorative significance among us, if that. Even though the social
arrangements that are characteristic of a community are created by
individuals in the very actions by which they make use of those social
arrangements as means of controlling their individual perceptions, by that
very process those participating individuals enact, recreate, and
demonstrate those social arrangements to themselves and to others as
perceptible aspects of their environment. An odd bit of bootstrapping,
exemplifying the Buddha's metaphor of two reeds, neither capable of
standing upright on its own, twining together and creating an appearance
of upstanding solidity that is fundamentally illusory.I have said that internal conflict may be a cost of conformity to the
social arrangements of one's community. In addition, there can be conflict
between the individual and the social arrangements that are available in
the community. The social arrangements of a culture limit what is possible
to individuals when they require the cooperation of others in order to
achieve their ends, they may limit the range of what may be attempted, if
it requires cooperation, and they may limit what is (readily) conceivable
as a purpose. This is not simply another instance of internal conflict
within the individual, nor is it directly conflict between the individual
and other individuals, but rather something intermediate between the two,
and that observation is telling support, I think, for the claim that
cultural artifacts and social arrangements are a kind of social reality
that exists and is perceivable in the environment - however difficult they
may be to perceive distinguishedly because of our using them transparently
as means of controlling other perceptions.When my Russian friend Mike Mordkovich goes for a visit to Russia, he
starts drinking a lot of vodka. He drinks very little here, but when he is
in Russia it just seems the natural and right thing to do, get vodka and
drink it. He doesn't get especially drunk, he says, it's just part of
living there. But withal he is aware of this with his Americanized
perceptions, and he doesn't drink as much as he did before he emigrated,
when he lived in Russia all the time. When Asian-American students living
in America are tested for what is thought to be an East Asian culture
trait, it is not surprising that the correlation is only sufficient to
indicate that it is probably not due to chance. There is no genetic change
involved here.An American child is toilet trained through some process of instruction,
discipline, and possibly shame. Consider an alternative:
American observers had noticed that Chinese babies had learned, by the
time they were about six months old, to indicate that they wanted to
micturate [urinate]; yet they seemed to be treated very permissively, with
no attempt at toilet training. A Chinese mother explained that there
actually is such "training"; only it is the mother who "trains" herself.
When the baby wants to urinate, his whole body participates in the
preliminary process. The Chinese mother, holding the baby in her arms,
learns to be sensitive to the minute details of this process,and to hold
her baby away from herself at exactly the critical moment. Eventually, the
infant learns to ask to be held out. The mother neither tries to control
the baby, nor does she train the infant to control himself according to
imposed standards. Instead, she sensitizes herself to his rhythm, and
helps him to adopt social discipline with spontaneity, starting from his
unique pattern. What is interesting here is that as an end result of this,
the baby is "toilet-trained" at a very early age; but it has been an
experience of spontaneity for him and his autonomy has remained inviolate,
because his mother has had the sensitivity and the patience to "listen" to
him. (Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture, Prentice Hall/Spectrum 1959: 7-8)What might the consequences of this be in the development of the child?
What if this theme of respect for the child's autonomy is expressed not
just in this way but in many and diverse ways? Is this "autonomy of
others" a controlled perception and these are diverse means of controlling
it, or is it a coherence in the stable convergence that constitutes the
culture? Is it a controlled variable, or is it a byproduct of many control
systems arriving at a system of social arrangements that enables stability
in their social environment? I believe the latter is more likely, and that
therefore Testing it is not a simple and straightforward matter of
disturbance and observation of resistance. I don't know the answer to the
methodological issues here, but I do know that it is important to think
about them explicitly.Nisbett is talking about various sets of what are perceived as cultural
and psychological traits. What perceptions are being controlled, and at
what reference values, so that these perceived differences result (if they
do), remains to be seen. There are questions about at least some of the
claims. Lila Gleitman tells me that the claim about learning verbs before
nouns is suspect. She'll let me know what she finds out. The correlation
in at least one study by Heejun Kim is pretty low. A study that only shows
that a difference between two populations is probably not coincidental
("due to chance") would say to me that it is not a cultural norm among
Asian-American students living in America. Bill Powers (2003.03.06.0737
MST) raised the issue of exposure to the appropriate cultural influences.But even looking at a community uninfluenced by foreign interactions or
examples, should we expect that cultural norms amount to unanimity of
purpose? That is, to identical reference values for controlling the same
CVs? Again: "The way things are done here" provides means for cooperative
control and simultaneously limits the initiating, sustaining, and
successful concluding of cooperative control. What constitutes sufficient
evidence for a cultural artifact? What constitutes sufficient evidence for
culture "coloring" how people perceive and control their perceptions? And
how do you disturb a cultural perceptual variable?Take for example what Nisbett describes as a preference for "circular"
discourse rather than logical/dialectical linear argumentation. It is easy
to disturb such a proposed controlled variable simply by pressing an East
Oriental person for a "straight answer". In fact it happens quite a lot.
But their response to the disturbance often appears to be to try to cover
for the Westerner's bad manners with agreeable words which turn out not to
be entirely true, or at least not in the way in which the Westerner
interprets them. This in turn is a disturbance to the Westerner's
perception of how the conversation should go. But in the ordinary course
of events, each remains unaware of having caused any disturbance, since
what they are doing would not disturb their own control of how
conversations should go. So unless the PCT researcher has prior knowledge
of the subject's culture, a successful disturbance of the other's CV
appears simply to be unwillingness of the subject to cooperate.This situation is especially difficult because the object of investigation
- controlled variables in the use of language - is also the means of
investigating. This recursivity is more clearly evident (and also easier
to manage) when fewer variables are involved - say, if you stand at a
comfortable speaking distance from an Arab. This is a disturbance to their
value for the same CV (comfortable speaking distance), and they step
closer. This in turn is a disturbance to your control of that CV, and
(unless you have been informed in the matter, e.g. by reading Hall's The
Silent Language) you back up. You back up without particular awareness of
controlling the distance between you, perhaps conscious instead of a
feeling that he is aggressive; just as he then steps forward without
particular awareness of controlling the distance between you, perhaps
conscious instead of a feeling that you are unfriendly or evasive and
require persuasion.People living together in a community and in interdependent communities
may participate in reorganization of their shared culture. As above, a
culture may retain a dysfunctional system of controlled variables and
reference values; or through change in environment (social, physical) a
system of controlled variables and reference values may become
dysfunctional. (Examples e.g. in Ward Goodenough Cooperation in Change.)
But even though this mutually maintained system of variables and reference
values no longer meets the needs of individuals, it still meets their need
to have a shared system of controlled variables and reference values as a
basis for cooperation. As well, doing things in that way is part of being
this kind of person (as opposed to those other folks, perhaps), and
high-level systems for self-image, principles of right conduct, and the
like, are slow and difficult to change. Put in these terms this may seem
abstract, but there are many lively examples (see e.g. Jules Henry Culture
Against Man).Indeed, there is a tremendous body of documentation of different cultures
by anthropologists and ethnologists. Armed with such knowledge, a PCT
researcher could Test control of conversational distance, though a Test
for circularity vs. linearity of argumentation would be a challenge.
Nisbett has assembled a great number of such observations and has
generalized from them. Rarely would this amount to a demonstration of
perceptual control adequate for our science, if ever. But it remains an
open question how much divergence there may be between the controlled
variables and reference values of one individual being tested and the
stable convergence of social arrangements in a community in which that
individual participates. What standards of research apply, and how are
they to be applied? It does not seem to me to be obvious, but at the least
we need to distinguish one kind of phenomenon from the other, and not
demand that an emergent property meet the Test for a controlled variable./Bruce Nevin