Collective perceptions

[From Bill Powers (2000.02.29.1041 MST)]

Paul Stokes (attachment on 2000.02.28)

The problem with your arguments concerning collective perceptions is that
you seem to confuse agreeing about what words to use with sharing a common
experience to which the words refer. In your example of the university, you
describe a few ways in which professors and students act (assuming that the
images I get from those words are the same ones you get), and say that any
normal person would understand that this is a "university." I can agree
that most people might use that word, but I still don't agree that they
would necessarily have the same perception of that to which the word
"university" points.

Your whole thesis seems contained in the fourth paragraph of your paper:

Perceptions and collective perceptions are part of the taken for granted
world of everyday life. They form the foundations on which the edifice of
common sense is erected.

I completely agree with that, yet I claim that people do not in general
know what other people mean by words, or how the world appears to other
people. As you say (paraphrased by me), they take it for granted that other
people experience a world just like theirs, but I claim that if we were to
do careful tests, judging not by the words people use but by the variables
they control, we would find that there is far less agreement than people
assume there is.

Of course you are quite right in saying that a lot of reality-testing goes
on, and that major disrepancies tend to be discovered because of conflicts
they produce. But simply eliminating conflict is not sufficient to prove
that one perception is like another, particularly at the higher levels of
organization. I think it is something of a miracle that we can communicate
as well as we do, or think we do. Yet even with all the communication that
goes on, getting an idea across to someone else is a difficult and chancy
business -- and I speak as something of an expert on that subject. People
may want to understand, but too often "understanding" means fitting a new
idea into their old ones, and they quit checking up on their understanding
when they get the pleasant feeling that they grasp what has been said. For
too many, this means being satisfied that nothing they knew before has to
be changed or abandoned.

I think there is another and more useful way to understand collective
perceptions -- Rick Marken mentioned it. Kent McClelland was also trying to
make sense of this notion, and particularly the notion of virtual reference
levels (which presupposes, to some degree, common perceptions).

In any group of people there will be some variables they all believe the
group is trying to control, particular _social_ variables such as
cooperation. There may, indeed, be some objective similarities in the
controlled variables as different people perceive them, and the reference
levels may, indeed, be somewhat similar -- at least in the respect of
setting them "high" as opposed to "low." But there will inevitably be
differences, both in the nature of the perception each person is trying to
control, and in the exact degree of that perception that is desired. These
differences will at times result in tension within the group, but if they
don't amount to outright conflict, the group can live with them.

We could say that a _collective_ perception is simply some sort of vector
average over all the perceptions that the individuals contain, and that the
_collective_ reference level is a similar average over all the desired
states (considered individually, each person having a desired state for his
own version of the supposedly common perception). From this we could see
the collection of people as a single _virtual_ control system controlling a
single _virtual_ perception relative to a single _virtual_ reference level
(for each dimension of the social interactions that we can define).

This concept can work when the individuals in the group are not in conflict
to the degree that none of them can act effectively. The virtual perception
being controlled by the group control action may not fit any individual's
perceptions perfectly, but each individual will perceive his own version of
the perception as being present to _some_ degree. And the virtual reference
level may not be quite right for any individual, but it may not depart too
much, operationally, from the state each individual wants for his own
perception. Thus all of the individuals in the group may end up feeling
some degree of error, and pushing to some degree to correct it, but if the
social interaction is successful the whole ensemble can be in an
equilibrium state, no person being too dissatisfied.

When an external disturbance occurs that tends to change the virtual
controlled variable, it will push that collective variable away from its
equilibrium state. It may help move the situation closer to a few people's
reference levels, but because the prior situation was in equilibrium, it
will cause greater errors in more people, and there will be a collective
error signal. That error signal will lead to actions by each individual to
correct his or her own _actual_ error signal (varying in size from one
person to another), and that will lead to a set of actions all of which
have a component, at least, opposed to the disturbance. So the result is
opposition to the disturbance by the _collective_ or _virtual_ control system.

This picture does not require either perceptions or reference levels to be
identical in all members of the social unit. All it requires is some degree
of similarity. I think this is a far more realistic idea than to claim that
different people can somehow "share" perceptions or reference levels. The
latter concept assumes that there is just one perception and one reference
level to be "shared", rather than a large collection of perceptions and
reference levels that are somewhat similar across a group.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Paul Stokes (2000.03.01.00.10) ]

[Bill Powers (2000.02.29.1041 MST)]

You wrote:

The problem with your arguments concerning collective perceptions is that
you seem to confuse agreeing about what words to use with sharing a common
experience to which the words refer. In your example of the university, you
describe a few ways in which professors and students act (assuming that the
images I get from those words are the same ones you get), and say that any
normal person would understand that this is a "university." I can agree
that most people might use that word, but I still don't agree that they
would necessarily have the same perception of that to which the word
"university" points.

I don't either. Who really knows? Social life does not work that way.

Your whole thesis seems contained in the fourth paragraph of your paper:

Perceptions and collective perceptions are part of the taken for granted
world of everyday life. They form the foundations on which the edifice of
common sense is erected.

I completely agree with that, yet I claim that people do not in general
know what other people mean by words, or how the world appears to other
people.

Redundant. See above.

As you say (paraphrased by me), they take it for granted that other
people experience a world just like theirs, but I claim that if we were to
do careful tests, judging not by the words people use but by the variables
they control, we would find that there is far less agreement than people
assume there is.

The important point is that people assume agreement and this seems to work
very well a lot of the time. We know that this has to be a fallible process.
Normal social life, however, is not concerned with our nit-picking and
manages successfully to do what PCT seems to assert is impossible to do.

Of course you are quite right in saying that a lot of reality-testing goes
on, and that major disrepancies tend to be discovered because of conflicts
they produce. But simply eliminating conflict is not sufficient to prove
that one perception is like another, particularly at the higher levels of
organization.

I am not trying to prove any such thing.

I think it is something of a miracle that we can communicate
as well as we do, or think we do.

Yet in many respects we do this incrediblly well. Just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) Some kinds of communication are highly
effective. How do you explain that?

Yet even with all the communication that
goes on, getting an idea across to someone else is a difficult and chancy
business -- and I speak as something of an expert on that subject. People
may want to understand, but too often "understanding" means fitting a new
idea into their old ones, and they quit checking up on their understanding
when they get the pleasant feeling that they grasp what has been said. For
too many, this means being satisfied that nothing they knew before has to
be changed or abandoned.

Yes. Individual to individual communication (ie communication that has not
become pert of the culture or meme-set) seems utterly fraught because of its
complexity.

I think there is another and more useful way to understand collective
perceptions -- Rick Marken mentioned it. Kent McClelland was also trying to
make sense of this notion, and particularly the notion of virtual reference
levels (which presupposes, to some degree, common perceptions).

I don't understand this notion. Can you provide references?

In any group of people there will be some variables they all believe the
group is trying to control, particular _social_ variables such as
cooperation.

This begs a lot of questions and assumes the very issue we are trying to
establish. What group, for what purpose? There is no such thing as 'any
group' devoid of a cultural context in which its existence has meaning and a
purpose.

There may, indeed, be some objective similarities in the
controlled variables as different people perceive them, and the reference
levels may, indeed, be somewhat similar -- at least in the respect of
setting them "high" as opposed to "low." But there will inevitably be
differences, both in the nature of the perception each person is trying to
control, and in the exact degree of that perception that is desired. These
differences will at times result in tension within the group, but if they
don't amount to outright conflict, the group can live with them.

This applies also to my account.

We could say that a _collective_ perception is simply some sort of vector
average over all the perceptions that the individuals contain, and that the
_collective_ reference level is a similar average over all the desired
states (considered individually, each person having a desired state for his
own version of the supposedly common perception). From this we could see
the collection of people as a single _virtual_ control system controlling a
single _virtual_ perception relative to a single _virtual_ reference level
(for each dimension of the social interactions that we can define).

How is this vector average controlled? Why should it exist in the first
place? How do people know they are having a collective perception?

This concept can work when the individuals in the group are not in conflict
to the degree that none of them can act effectively. The virtual perception
being controlled by the group control action may not fit any individual's
perceptions perfectly, but each individual will perceive his own version of
the perception as being present to _some_ degree. And the virtual reference
level may not be quite right for any individual, but it may not depart too
much, operationally, from the state each individual wants for his own
perception. Thus all of the individuals in the group may end up feeling
some degree of error, and pushing to some degree to correct it, but if the
social interaction is successful the whole ensemble can be in an
equilibrium state, no person being too dissatisfied.

This is a mystery. See above.

When an external disturbance occurs that tends to change the virtual
controlled variable, it will push that collective variable away from its
equilibrium state. It may help move the situation closer to a few people's
reference levels, but because the prior situation was in equilibrium, it
will cause greater errors in more people, and there will be a collective
error signal. That error signal will lead to actions by each individual to
correct his or her own _actual_ error signal (varying in size from one
person to another), and that will lead to a set of actions all of which
have a component, at least, opposed to the disturbance. So the result is
opposition to the disturbance by the _collective_ or _virtual_ control

system.

Frankly I am rather surprised that you actually go along with this stuff. It
just does not make sense.

This picture does not require either perceptions or reference levels to be
identical in all members of the social unit. All it requires is some degree
of similarity. I think this is a far more realistic idea than to claim that
different people can somehow "share" perceptions or reference levels.

I never said they did. Social life operates on the common-sense presumption
that they do. We know different of course (that this view is incorrect) so
how do we explain how effective the commonsense view frequently is?

The latter concept assumes that there is just one perception and one

reference

level to be "shared", rather than a large collection of perceptions and
reference levels that are somewhat similar across a group.

The assumption is all yours I am afraid.

I am very disappointed. All this proves is the veracity of Bill's point
about the fallibility of communication and that people are locked
interminably into the prisons of their own preconceptions. WI Thomas said
that if people define a situation as real it will be real in its
consequences. If PCT really is based in the the virtual solipsism that is in
evidence here then it is a miracle that any communication succeeds at all.
In doing so it affirms the cause of its own failure: a theory that asserts
the ubiquity of miscommunication cannot hope to disseminate itself. After
all, its only logical.

    Paul A. STOKES
    Department of Sociology
    University College Dublin

···

______________________________________________
    Tel: +353-1-7068233
    Fax: +353-1-7061125

[From Bill Powers (2000.03.01.0019 MST)]

Paul Stokes (2000.03.01.00.10)--

It looks as though we have reached a sudden divergence of opinions, with my
words meaning nothing to you. This would seem to be a good place to let the
discussion go for a while: it's not likely to go uphill from here.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Bruce Nevin (2000.03.02.00.1550 EST)]

I'm reluctant to intrude on this valuable exchange because I will be away
3/3 through 3/10.

Bill Powers (2000.02.29.1041 MST)--
I think it is something of a miracle that we can communicate
as well as we do, or think we do.

Paul Stokes (2000.03.01.00.10)--
12:46 AM 03/01/2000

Yet in many respects we do this incredibly well. Just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) Some kinds of communication are highly
effective. How do you explain that?

Paul Stokes (2000.03.02.00.29)--

Because people intertwine and co-ordinate their behaviours with others to
accomplish socially complex tasks we can, I think, strongly and reasonably
infer that social life works on the presumption of common understandings
(definitions of the situation) or collective perceptions and because to
assume the opposite does not make sense.

Bill Powers (2000.03.02.0445 MST)--

To me, that's not sufficient reason to conclude anything about the degree
of common understanding, unless you mean only the _feeling_ of common
understanding.

You're mixing two kinds of agreement here.

One kind of agreement is having language constructs in common (words,
sentences, discourses). This is what you get when you just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) But when you get past a bare recital of
historical "facts" to interpretations or expressions of attitude you will
find more divergence.

This is not the same as having in common the nonverbal perceptions with
which those language constructs correspond. As Bill says, even when we
agree there is an x in our shared environment, we can't verify that my
perception of x is identical to your perception of x. Even if we could
adequately clarify what we were trying to verify.

So why demand that this be what Paul means if it is unattainable? Perhaps
because it seems like such agreements are the aim of science: finding out
about Reality, and coming to agreement about it. But that is a much deeper
process than Paul is talking about.

Verbal agreements can be sufficient for cooperation without strict
verification of their referents because, as one or both of you have said, a
breakdown of cooperation is a sufficient test, and a successful
continuation of cooperation is pragmatically sufficient verification.

Parenthetically: this is why discussions here on this list *must* be
grounded in cooperative action and not merely limited to verbal exchange if
they are to avoid the kinds of difficulties that we see repeatedly in our
email archives. If two people exercise the same demo, that is a weak form
of cooperative action. Building and testing models is a much stronger form
of cooperative action. Interpreting the meaning of demos by projecting from
them to social situations is a shaky verbal exercise.

The construction of verbal agreements is also a kind of cooperative action,
but the verification is only word-deep.

[Paul, quoting WI Thomas -- I don't know who that is]

if people define a situation as real it will be real in its consequences.

I would say that people control their perceptions, with real consequences
regardless of the veridity of those perceptions. A person barricading the
door to keep out pink elephants is undoubtedly barricading the door. (And
as the joke goes, you don't see any pink elephants, do you?)

Furthermore, even if a social agreement involves illusions or delusions,
the agreement itself is a fact. So long as the people sustaining the
agreement can adequately control perceptions that matter to them, it may
not be important to the participants to verify that they mean the same
thing by their words or even that there is any "same thing" at all; we see
cases where it is important to protect the agreement from disverification,
and there is good reason to believe that we don't see all such cases,
including some in which we participate. This last is how non-PCT
psychologists and sociologists have sometimes been described here. Tritely:
this is antithetical to doing science. And as Bill has eloquently pointed
out on other occasions, we must guard carefully against wishful thinking,
premature closure, and all such forms of delusion as we identify controlled
variables, or whatever our object of investigation is.

To do science we test our agreements against the environment. Such tests
are the cooperative activities of science. The metalanguage of a science is
about those cooperative activities, the hypotheses, tests, models, and so
forth, what constitutes good science and how to do it. Agreements on the
metascience level of the science (how to do it) are harder to change than
are agreements on the object level of the science (what those things are
that we are investigating). This is why it is so hard to communicate PCT to
someone who is already committed to another way of doing science in the
same object domain. We demand of them that they breach professional
agreements with people who are important to them. It is a big hurdle. For
people without such commitments, PCT is not that hard to grasp -- or so it
has seemed to me.

But it is possible to investigate agreements as such quite apart from the
veridity of the agreements. As far as the participants know or care, they
are talking about the same thing, and that is sufficient basis for them to
carry on cooperating as they need to. Proof that they are actually talking
about the same thing is not relevant to a study of their agreements and of
their cooperative activities, and of ruptures to either.

        Bruce Nevin

[From Bill Powers (23000.03.03.0517 MST)]

Bruce Nevin (2000.03.02.00.1550 EST)--

You're mixing two kinds of agreement here.

One kind of agreement is having language constructs in common (words,
sentences, discourses). This is what you get when you just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) But when you get past a bare recital of
historical "facts" to interpretations or expressions of attitude you will
find more divergence.

This is not the same as having in common the nonverbal perceptions with
which those language constructs correspond.

You have my point exactly.

So why demand that this be what Paul means if it is unattainable? Perhaps
because it seems like such agreements are the aim of science: finding out
about Reality, and coming to agreement about it. But that is a much deeper
process than Paul is talking about.

Yes, but I claim that we must see the deeper picture in order to explain
why social systems fail to operate well when that is the case. Paul is
explaining how it is that social systems can (apparently) succeed even when
agreements are fundamentally false; I would like us also to explain how
these fundamental falsities enter into failures. The more _actual_
agreement we can achieve, the sounder will be the social system. Or so I
think.

Verbal agreements can be sufficient for cooperation without strict
verification of their referents because, as one or both of you have said, a
breakdown of cooperation is a sufficient test, and a successful
continuation of cooperation is pragmatically sufficient verification.

The outcome is as good as it is, is what you're saying. A lot of the time
it's acceptable to most of us, but it's never acceptable to all of us, and
at times the system breaks down locally and completely. I don't know what
the maximum size of "a society" is, but I suspect it's a lot smaller than
the United States or even Ireland. And even within what seems to be a
coherent social unit, conflicts are common. I don't think it's a good idea
to make them more likely.

The construction of verbal agreements is also a kind of cooperative action,
but the verification is only word-deep.

Bravo.

Furthermore, even if a social agreement involves illusions or delusions,
the agreement itself is a fact. So long as the people sustaining the
agreement can adequately control perceptions that matter to them, it may
not be important to the participants to verify that they mean the same
thing by their words or even that there is any "same thing" at all ...

When you say the agreement itself is a fact, the truth of that depends on
what you mean by "is" (evidently, judging from political commentary,
everybody in the country knows what "is" means except me and Bill Clinton
-- or maybe it's people named Bill. What Clinton was asking is whether "is"
refers to right now, today, or to conditions over the past year. Too subtle
for his critics). If you mean the agreement is an _objective_ fact, then I
would have to disagree. But if you mean the parties to the agreement each
_believes_ that an agreement has been reached, whether they mean the same
thing by it or not, then I can agree. Part of the problem is that any
agreement is really a _multiple_ agreement, so I may be agreeing to one set
of conditions contained in the overall discussion, while you are agreeing
to another set that only partially (if at all) overlaps mine. When you say
"I agree with that," what are you indicating by "that"?
...

To do science we test our agreements against the environment. Such tests
are the cooperative activities of science. The metalanguage of a science is
about those cooperative activities, the hypotheses, tests, models, and so
forth, what constitutes good science and how to do it. Agreements on the
metascience level of the science (how to do it) are harder to change than
are agreements on the object level of the science (what those things are
that we are investigating). This is why it is so hard to communicate PCT to
someone who is already committed to another way of doing science in the
same object domain. We demand of them that they breach professional
agreements with people who are important to them. It is a big hurdle. For
people without such commitments, PCT is not that hard to grasp -- or so it
has seemed to me.

I wish I'd said that. And as the retort goes, "You will, William, you will."

But it is possible to investigate agreements as such quite apart from the
veridity of the agreements. As far as the participants know or care, they
are talking about the same thing, and that is sufficient basis for them to
carry on cooperating as they need to. Proof that they are actually talking
about the same thing is not relevant to a study of their agreements and of
their cooperative activities, and of ruptures to either.

I can't go along with that. This is the "Don't rock the boat" approach. If
the participants in an apparent agreement do not actually agree, sooner or
later they will pay the penalty. A lot of fraud entails getting people to
commit to an agreement which has implications that are deliberately
concealed -- the "fine print" effect. And when people are working under
different impressions of an agreement, they adjust their lives and makes
plans according to their own understandings, so when the inevitable clash
occurs, the adverse results can be far-reaching. Look what happened with
the apparent agreement of the IRA (or whatever group it was) to disarm. As
it turns out, they did not actually agree to that, and when the time came
to carry out the agreement, everything collapsed. There simply was not
adequate checking on what the agreement actually was, and who actually
agreed. It's still my contention that the more "scientific" approach is the
best in the long run.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Paul Stokes (2000.03.02.00.2329 GMT)]

[Bruce Nevin (2000.03.02.00.1550 EST)]

Bruce,

Thanks for the intervention.

Why, though, do I get the impression that many of the points that you,
Martin and Bill are concerned to make seem to ignore the very same point
that I was under the impression I was at pains to make? Most disconcerting!

It is immensely frustrating to read many of my points being made by these
people as though they were somehow 'new' and not part of my original
contributions. Not to mention feeling completely misunderstood.

Now I am not saying that I have nothing to learn from this exchange. On the
contrary. Dialogue can be a royal road to knowledge. Yet my experience of
this PCT-list is that true dialogue is immensely difficult if not altogether
non-existent. Major issues are neglected and points are scored by detecting
the odd loose verbal formulation. Conflict and a lot of one-upmanship not to
mention point-scoring seem to be the norm - which is very unscientific. Most
of all there is no effort whatsoever to respect or to try to understand
where the other may be coming from, given the diversity of backgrounds and
operating assumptions that exist here. Science is if anything a co-operative
enterprise. But then PCT has serious doubts about that possibility. The fact
that everybody else can do it seems to be neither here not there.

In this regard I think Bill completely exaggerates the incidence of
breakdown. What is astonishing is the overwhelming degree of consensus at
particular levels of logical typing in society. It is interesting that, and
I am speaking as a professional sociologist here, by and large there seems
to be a very high level of basic (not total) consensus at the cultural and
institutional levels in most societies, sufficient to deem it very
successful, the levels that PCT is most dubious about - whereas the levels
at which there is rampant, significant and often deadly conflict is at the
micro-level between individuals- levels at which, Bill has asserted, it is
easier for people to come to agreement for instance in relation to the
common perception of the colour green. (Have I screwed up the words again? I
bet you know what I mean anyway. Let's not be so literal. Here's a tip:
Everyone on this list should take a course in hermeneutics. A little would
help a lot.) [I am not talking about societies in which there is chronic
conflict - these require separate treatment. Even in Northern Ireland one
would be surprised at the levels of cultural and institutional consensus
that exist!]

WI Thomas really did put his finger on it: What men define as real will be
real in its consequences. PCT seems to reap its own bitter harvest in this
regard. I wouldn't try to outsmart this man if I were you - he was one of
the great men of the Chicago school of Sociology in the early years of the
20th Century. Dwell on the wisdom of his words. I have certainly not come
across any better formulation of a nascent sociological insight into what
PCT is about.

I have learnt a lot from PCT and I don't take back anything I have said in
its praise. However, life is far too short to waste time on the often
juvenile, repetitive and regressive levels the discussion on this list
descends to.

Nothing progresses, there is just the endless repetition of the mantra.

You people have a lot to learn about how real sciences make progress in the
real world. Another tip: Look up the way to go: Finalizierungstheorie.

Now I am going to try to do justice to the PCT contributions of my fellow
sociologists - Kent, Charles and Clark,and others like Peter Burke - but I
will think thrice about referring anything back here again.

Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!

Paul Stokes

PS: A Joke:

Q: Did you hear about the hot new psychological theory that proves the
impossibility of communication?

QED

···

A: Ah, It'll never catch on!

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@CISCO.COM>
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU <CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Date: 03 March 2000 15:48
Subject: Re: Collective perceptions

[From Bruce Nevin (2000.03.02.00.1550 EST)]

I'm reluctant to intrude on this valuable exchange because I will be away
3/3 through 3/10.

Bill Powers (2000.02.29.1041 MST)--
I think it is something of a miracle that we can communicate
as well as we do, or think we do.

Paul Stokes (2000.03.01.00.10)--
12:46 AM 03/01/2000

Yet in many respects we do this incredibly well. Just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) Some kinds of communication are highly
effective. How do you explain that?

Paul Stokes (2000.03.02.00.29)--

Because people intertwine and co-ordinate their behaviours with others to
accomplish socially complex tasks we can, I think, strongly and reasonably
infer that social life works on the presumption of common understandings
(definitions of the situation) or collective perceptions and because to
assume the opposite does not make sense.

Bill Powers (2000.03.02.0445 MST)--

To me, that's not sufficient reason to conclude anything about the degree
of common understanding, unless you mean only the _feeling_ of common
understanding.

You're mixing two kinds of agreement here.

One kind of agreement is having language constructs in common (words,
sentences, discourses). This is what you get when you just say "JFK" or
Watergate and everyone in the Western World over 40 will know exactly what
you mean. (Ask them, you'll see.) But when you get past a bare recital of
historical "facts" to interpretations or expressions of attitude you will
find more divergence.

This is not the same as having in common the nonverbal perceptions with
which those language constructs correspond. As Bill says, even when we
agree there is an x in our shared environment, we can't verify that my
perception of x is identical to your perception of x. Even if we could
adequately clarify what we were trying to verify.

So why demand that this be what Paul means if it is unattainable? Perhaps
because it seems like such agreements are the aim of science: finding out
about Reality, and coming to agreement about it. But that is a much deeper
process than Paul is talking about.

Verbal agreements can be sufficient for cooperation without strict
verification of their referents because, as one or both of you have said, a
breakdown of cooperation is a sufficient test, and a successful
continuation of cooperation is pragmatically sufficient verification.

Parenthetically: this is why discussions here on this list *must* be
grounded in cooperative action and not merely limited to verbal exchange if
they are to avoid the kinds of difficulties that we see repeatedly in our
email archives. If two people exercise the same demo, that is a weak form
of cooperative action. Building and testing models is a much stronger form
of cooperative action. Interpreting the meaning of demos by projecting from
them to social situations is a shaky verbal exercise.

The construction of verbal agreements is also a kind of cooperative action,
but the verification is only word-deep.

[Paul, quoting WI Thomas -- I don't know who that is]

if people define a situation as real it will be real in its consequences.

I would say that people control their perceptions, with real consequences
regardless of the veridity of those perceptions. A person barricading the
door to keep out pink elephants is undoubtedly barricading the door. (And
as the joke goes, you don't see any pink elephants, do you?)

Furthermore, even if a social agreement involves illusions or delusions,
the agreement itself is a fact. So long as the people sustaining the
agreement can adequately control perceptions that matter to them, it may
not be important to the participants to verify that they mean the same
thing by their words or even that there is any "same thing" at all; we see
cases where it is important to protect the agreement from disverification,
and there is good reason to believe that we don't see all such cases,
including some in which we participate. This last is how non-PCT
psychologists and sociologists have sometimes been described here. Tritely:
this is antithetical to doing science. And as Bill has eloquently pointed
out on other occasions, we must guard carefully against wishful thinking,
premature closure, and all such forms of delusion as we identify controlled
variables, or whatever our object of investigation is.

To do science we test our agreements against the environment. Such tests
are the cooperative activities of science. The metalanguage of a science is
about those cooperative activities, the hypotheses, tests, models, and so
forth, what constitutes good science and how to do it. Agreements on the
metascience level of the science (how to do it) are harder to change than
are agreements on the object level of the science (what those things are
that we are investigating). This is why it is so hard to communicate PCT to
someone who is already committed to another way of doing science in the
same object domain. We demand of them that they breach professional
agreements with people who are important to them. It is a big hurdle. For
people without such commitments, PCT is not that hard to grasp -- or so it
has seemed to me.

But it is possible to investigate agreements as such quite apart from the
veridity of the agreements. As far as the participants know or care, they
are talking about the same thing, and that is sufficient basis for them to
carry on cooperating as they need to. Proof that they are actually talking
about the same thing is not relevant to a study of their agreements and of
their cooperative activities, and of ruptures to either.

       Bruce Nevin

[From Bill Powers (2000.03.04.0959 MST)]

Paul Stokes (2000.03.02.00.2329 GMT)]

Why, though, do I get the impression that many of the points that you,
Martin and Bill are concerned to make seem to ignore the very same point
that I was under the impression I was at pains to make? Most disconcerting!

It is immensely frustrating to read many of my points being made by these
people as though they were somehow 'new' and not part of my original
contributions. Not to mention feeling completely misunderstood.

I don't perceive the points I was making as being the same as those you
were making -- which may show only that I have missed the points you were
making.

... life is far too short to waste time on the often
juvenile, repetitive and regressive levels the discussion on this list
descends to.

I hope you make good use of the time you save.

Best,

Bill P.

Paul Stokes (2000.03.04.00.1748 GMT)]

[From Bill Powers (2000.03.04.0959 MST)]

I hope you make good use of the time you save.

When attempts to remediate misunderstaning only lead to further
misunderstandings and so on in an upward spiral and there seems to be no way
out - that, frankly, is a waste of my time.

regards,

Paul Stokes

[Martin Taylor 2000.03.04 14:20]

After the ongoing discussion between Paul Stokes on the one hand, and
Bill and Rick on the other, I have been re-reading Paul's papers. The
following passage leaped out at me as something that is not true
(along with the various misconceptions about how control works that
Bill dealt with).

PCT operates with an impoverished view of the social context of
action. It concentrates on rather simple (though important!) models
of human task performance and interaction. This is due primarily to
its psychological provenance.

Inasmuch as this had been the whole topic of my one and only
presentation to a CSG conference, I have to object. PCT leads
_directly_ to the coherence of standards of behaviour (and of
language and idiolect) within cultural groups, and to the way those
standards and practices drift over time. (If you can get the relevant
tape of the Durango 93 meeting from Dag, you can see the whole
presentation--in it I also showed how PCT deals with the near but
incomplete success of rules in describing language behaviour, but
that's another story).

Here is what I wrote a little while ago to summarize the
acculturation of a baby. I reproduced it in the Overview section of
<http://www.mmtaylor.net/PCT/Mutuality/index.html&gt;:

"A new-born organism is born into a "society". If the baby organism
acts in certain ways, the other members of the society act in ways
that bring the baby's perceptions near their reference levels. If the
baby acts in other ways, the other members of the society act so that
at least some of the baby's perceptions move away from their
reference levels (if you want to call that "coercion" it's fine by
me; it's just what always happens in any
environment, whether that environment consist of other control
systems or of inanimate objects). The baby tends to reorganize so as
to avoid the actions that spoil its ability to control. Or to put it
another way, it learns to be a "responsible" member of the society.
It has no "intrinsic variable" need for socialization, but if it does
socialize properly as expected for its age, it gets its perceptions
better under control than if it doesn't. It helps others, and they
help it. It learns the language and the culture into which it is
born, as if there were some innate drive for it to do so, though
there need be none."

There is no statement here about emotional perceptions such as
"shame," but it should be clear that people who do not learn to be
perceived by others as behaving according to the cultural norms will
find that those others don't help them control their perceptions,
whereas people who are perceived as "nice" will usually find others
behaving "nicely" toward them. "Shame" may perhaps be associated with
a perception of what others perceive about oneself at variance with a
reference value for them to perceive one as behaving according to
cultural norms. If one does not have that reference value, whether
because one is an iconoclast or because one is a sociopath, one is
unlikely to feel "shame."

The perception of how others perceive oneself is critical to
communication, as I have emphasized in all my Layered Protocol
papers. But it may not be critical to socialization, which requires
only reorganization such that one's perceptions are well controlled
in the social environment. Properly socialized dogs in a pack may
well not be contemplating whether the other dogs are perceiving them
to be well-behaved.

Martin

Martin,

I think your work is VERY interesting!

However, you wrote:

PCT operates with an impoverished view of the social context of
action. It concentrates on rather simple (though important!) models
of human task performance and interaction. This is due primarily to
its psychological provenance.

Inasmuch as this had been the whole topic of my one and only
presentation to a CSG conference, I have to object.

What's the expression: a single swallow does not a summer make?

Best wishes,

Paul