[Mary Powers 940607]
Martin 940602
You undoubtedly have a far greater technical grasp of PCT than I
do, and more opportunities for and more success at spreading it
around. But...
...I try to apply to PCT mathematical and physical principles
that apply to everything else in the world (living or
otherwise). The objective...is not to change PCT except to
provide other ways of looking at it, and thereby to show up
features that might be overlooked when we are restricted to a
single viewpoint.
But it seems to me that you insist on applying principles that
were developed to apply to living systems under another
viewpoint. If you were operating from a PCT viewpoint, you might
question those principles more than you do. They seem to be
sophisticated tools designed to be used with refractory data
under a bad model. In a lot of cases it seems that the PCT model
makes the data a lot simpler to understand, and the elaborate
analyses simply cease to be necessary. This is what Bill means
when he says control systems are simple. Not simple-minded,
elegantly simple. And it seems sometimes that you insist that
your pre-PCT principles and methods MUST be important because
before PCT they WERE important.
"Restricted to a single viewpoint" is an interesting point of
view. It implies that we are cramming everything into a narrow
framework. I think the people really involved in PCT are in awe
of the huge scope and potential opening up before them - if PCT
ever gets off the ground and taken seriously in all the areas
where it applies.
I definitely disagree with your statement that "control systems
at higher levels work more slowly than those at lower levels" is
a) merely "conventional" and b) unsupported unless derived from
information theory. I think control theory explains perfectly
adequately why higher levels must be slower, and that it's really
a pretty fundamental principle of a hierarchical design. Why on
earth is derivation from IT a necessary requirement for it to be
promoted to the classical level, or whatever?
I have an alert out on the alerting system (but since I began to
write this, Bill covered that territory).
I agree that PCT should be useful as well as interesting. But
not put to use to prop up concepts from other models. Alerting
and uncertainty may be two of those. More egregious examples
include Carver & Scheier, using control theory as an add-on to a
computed-output model.
Jeff Vancouver:
The reason I used the phlogiston/oxygen example was because the
flip-flop from something emitted by a burning substance to
something being added to it resembled to me the flip-flop from
behavior being an outcome or consequence of external or internal
forces to behavior simply being a means by which something else
entirely is accomplished - the control of perception. "Rejection
of other psychologies out-of-hand is dangerous" perhaps (in fact
carries a considerable risk of career-blight), but it was not
entered into lightly. I'd say that of the 40 or so years PCT has
been in existence it took 15 or 20 to come, reluctantly, to the
conclusion that PCT was revolutionary and would continue to meet
for many years to come the kind of resistance and rejection that
Thomas Kuhn described.
Some people scold us because they think we are knocking other
psychologies unecessarily and making life more difficult for
ourselves than we have to. I agree that "those who are closest
in beliefs are often at greatest odds". However, many of the
people you cite (Carver, Lord) are further away from PCT than
they (or you?) think. Truly, they are talking about phlogiston
and we're talking about oxygen.
But Bill has answered your point about purpose, pointing out that
admitting or asserting that it exists is not the same as having
an explanation of how it works.
To add to Bill's litany of active lack of interest in control
theory, I wrote to Lord and Hanges years ago, and received no
reply. Some time later, Lord called Bill (about something to do
with the Volitional Action book). While he was on the phone, I
asked Bill to ask him why he never replied to me. The answer: "
didn't know what to make of it". The scientific mind at work
[added later]
Before this is sent, I saw the posts from Bill, Rick, Tom and
Bill L.
Do you feel like a quarterback sacked by the entire defensive
line? That is certainly not the intention. The criticisms you
made were very important to everybody who answered you - more
hostile versions are very familiar (Tom Bourbon's famous
rejection file, etc.)
I just want to clarify one point - theory versus practical
applications. I'm wondering if you have gone beyond reading about
PCT to getting the computer demos and simulations. I think they
bring home the point about PCT being an explanatory theory, as
opposed to descriptive or statistical. Going back to Kuhn, this
suggests that pre-PCT psychology is pre-scientific. Lots of data,
lots of ideas about how it ties together, but no theory in the
sense that physics has theories (part of the difficulty here is
the word theory, meaning a body of principles OR a guess or
conjecture). If we criticize other psychological theories, it is
from the point of view of the first kind looking at the second
kind. Certainly as far as the basic model is concerned. We aren't
so much psychology-bashing as theory-bashing.
Lots of therapists and educators and social workers and
organizational developers do good work - no matter what theory
they believe underlies what they do. The fashions come and go in
these fields and don't make much difference. We like to think
that the good ones are intuitive control theorists who probably
don't need any help - and that the bad ones can learn to be
better by being taught what the good ones figured out for
themselves. Psychologists teach useful rules and techniques, but
these often have no connection with one another, and are
rationalized by competing and incompatible theories as to why
they work. PCT is almost in another universe, demanding of, and
at least sometimes providing, the "whys" a plausible theory of
"how".
Mary P.