[From Bill Powers (930513.0600)]
Chuck Tucker (930512) --
The problem with your views on knowledge, theory, and so forth is
that they are presented forcibly as a series of flat statements
of fact in a way that denies the very thesis you put forth. For
example:
Scientific facts and theories do <<not>> describe reality.
No scientist in any discipline, including physics, has
discovered, or can discover, any law or principle of
nature, or has or can gain knowledge of reality.
The only way you could know that these are true statements would
be to compare stated facts, theories, laws, and principles with
reality, and see that they differ from reality. Of course you
can't do this any more than you can prove that the facts and
theories etc. agree with reality. By flatly stating a truth about
experience, thought, and reality you are claiming to know a
universal truth, which is the same as claiming that you know
something about Boss Reality. Simply using negative statements
instead of positive ones does not make the pronouncements any
less a claim to objective knowledge. If there is a Boss Reality,
our thoughts about it are part of it.
It seems to me that part of your approach rests on certain code
words, like "problems" and "arrangements", which have a special
significance to you that isn't evident to me. "Making
arrangements," it seems to me, is nothing more than acting in
order to bring about some desired perception at some level. We
can arrange for relationships to exist (like propping a bucket of
water over a partly-opened door) in our perceptions, which we
expect to have certain consequences. To do this, we control for
physical relationships. Or we can arrange for certain rules to be
written down or stated which we expect (usually in vain) to have
certain logical consequences in the behavior of anyone who agrees
to or is subject to them; this is control of perceptions at the
logical level. "Making arrangements" is sufficiently vague a
concept that we can apply it at any level to anything at all,
even muscle tensions, which makes the concept less than maximally
useful.
As to "problems", what is a problem but a difference between the
way you perceive things and the way you wish to perceive them? I
don't see any special meaning in this word that indicates some
new factor that PCT ought to take into account but doesn't.
You offer terms like these as if they cut through all the fog and
explain the "realities" of human behavior in a simple and
comprehensive way. But no word can do that. Behind the words is
an understanding private to you. The understanding may or may not
be less imprecise than the words. The only way to make sure that
others assign the same understanding to the words is to be
explicit about what you mean by them, instead of relying on the
words by themselves to convey one clear meaning.
Writing the words down on cards and showing them to people is no
guarantee that the words will be understood to have the same
meanings by everyone who reads the cards. If you want to convey
meanings as accurately as you can, you have to use different
words, based on conversation with the person to whom you're
trying to convey a meaning. You have to try to judge from the
person's verbal comments and physical actions what the initial
words meant to the person, and make corrections by expressing the
same (to you) concept in new words that eliminate ambiguities.
When you show the person a card that says PUT THIS CARD BEHIND
THE DECK the person does not necessarily know what you mean by
"behind" -- there is a lot of space behind a deck. Also, the
person must put the card whereever it goes in some orientation:
face up or down, printing right-side-up or upside-down. The card
can be put behind the deck by turning the whole deck over. No
matter how explicit your terms seem to you, another person can
always assign them a meaning that was not in your mind when you
wrote the statements down. Words are not the precise instruments
that you seem to think they are.
One last point. When you say (as you often do)
People guide their actions by directions they give
themselves.
... I see a problem that you haven't given any signs of seeing. A
few days ago I saw a PBS program on a jazz festival in New
Orleans. One of the songs had in it something like this: "So I
said to myself, Self, what are you going to do?" This expresses
the same problem. Who is talking to whom when a person gives
directions or instructions to that same person? On what basis
does the GIVER of the directions think them up? Is there another
direction-giver that tells a second one what directions to give
the third one? Where do the directions come from in the first
place? How many "Self"s are there?
It seems to me that you're simply expressing a hierarchical
control relationship in which a higher system adjusts reference
signals for a lower one -- except that the way you express it, it
seems that the directions are always given in words, and that
they pertain to actions rather than perceptions, as if a given
action always has a predictable outcome. In fact, when you show a
person a card saying PUT THIS CARD BEHIND THE DECK, you are NOT
instructing the person what to do. You're describing a perception
that the person is supposed to bring about by some unspecified
means: the card is to move from where it is at the moment (on the
deck, in the person's right or left hand, on the table, in
someone else's hand) to a position perceived as "behind the
deck." The actual movements required to accomplish this end
depend completely on immediate circumstances, including where the
hand is that will move the card and where the card is. A
farsighted person might have to hand the card to someone else in
order to read it, and get the card to the described destination
by asking the other to do it, or asking to be handed the card
first. The instruction is not an instruction for an action, but a
description of a perception to be accomplished by an UNSPECIFIED
action.
···
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There is one aspect of the Boss Reality about which you can't be
mistaken. A color-blind person can have difficulties in agreeing
with others about the name to be assigned to a perception, but
there is no way for that person to be mistaken about the
APPEARANCE of the color. If you think the words "My name is not
Chuck Tucker" you may have a sense that this is a false
statement, but there can be no doubt about what the words are as
you think them -- that the statement is occuring in your
thoughts. You are in direct contact with one part of the Boss
Reality, the world as it appears to you. You can make statements
about that world that are mistaken in terms of some criterion of
truth, but you can't be mistaken either about having the
experience of that world or having the experience of making the
statements, whatever they are. Whether you make the statement "My
name is Chuck Tucker" or "My name is NOT Chuck Tucker" is
immaterial: you know without doubt that the statement is
occurring.
So there is a Boss Reality. The only question is whether anything
in this Directly Perceived Reality, as Bob Clark and I used to
speak of it, corresponds to something else. About that question
we can only guess, and adopt working hypotheses to allow a
consistent approach to experience.
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Best,
Bill P.