[From Bill Powers (921011.1500)]
I wrote a lot of longwinded responses to various stuff and decided that it's a
waste of time. Brevity rules.
Wayne Hershberger (921010) --
I would prefer something like this: "It is that the world we
experience directly is ALREADY being shaped by the perceptual
processes even as we are experiencing it."
What are these processes and how do they do this shaping?
Thus, conceptual models of perception merely assert an equivalence
between perceptual and conceptual realizations. On this point I
trust we are all agreed.
I would agree if I knew what you meant. What do you mean by "perceptual" and
what do you mean by "conceptual?" Pretend I really don't know; you will be
right. Are concepts not perceivable?
The expression _conceiving a percept_ is an oxymoron because
a percept conceived is a concept not a percept.
Does this suggest a hierarchical relationship? That is, perceiving processes
produce percepts, from which a conceiving process can produce a concept?
ยทยทยท
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Greg Williams (921011) --
Hmmm. I know how to deal with obvious hoaxes: ignore them.
If you really received such a letter and actually believed it, would you still
say "Thank you for the information" and simply alter your behavior? Or do you
suppose there there might be a tad of affect attached to the situation?
However, Bill must have thought this important to do for SOME >reason, if only
to distract his own or others' attention away from >the main points of my post.
I was trying to show you by demonstration (which you foiled by dismissing the
letter as a hoax instead of asking what would happen if you believed it) that
your example was too intellectualized to be realistic. If you make up examples
that have no relationship to real behavior I am going to call you on them.
Your proposals require a model entirely different from mine. How
about spelling it out?
I'm not so sure my model is entirely different -- maybe not even
different at all, though at least how I interpret the ideological
upshot does appear to be different.
What starts and stops reorganization if critical error doesn't drive it? Why
would reorganization take place in response to "Fire" if the person already had
the goal of exiting upon hearing "Fire" and immediately did so? How can you be
upset (experiencing critical error) without reorganizing? How can you control
differently without acquiring a new control system or modifying an old one? How
can new information lead to controlling something new without reorganization?
How can a person use the fact that another person is reorganizing to control
for a particular behavior by the other person? How can a person want another
person to control his actions and at the same time want the consequence that
those actions are already controlling? Or are you saying that there are actions
which are not aimed at controlling anything?
If A is partly determined by B, then to predict A from knowing B you must also
know the state of C and all other influences on A, known and unknown, present
and future. How is your concept of "ceteris paribus" any different from the
failed methods of behavioral science?
To say that A depends "in part" on B is also to make a clear
statement: given B, one can predict nothing about A.
I don't think so (should we put it to a vote, or just ask a >professional
philosopher?).
How about reasoning it out? If A depends not only on B but on other variables as
well, and you do not know the states of all the other variables on which A
depends and cannot predict future states of all those other variables, how can
you predict anything about A? How can you determine that an apparent
relationship is real? Assuming that you can get data anyway, and make
predictions anyway, is the rock on which the ship of psychology has foundered.
Why should this method work any better for us?
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Martin Taylor (921010.1540) --
Well, I want to know how people work, even if you don't. It isn't >enough for
me to accept that behaviour is controlled perception. I >want to know where
the signals go (functionally), and what happens >if you block this of that
path, how to deal with people suffering >from stroke, why we have focussed
attention and what its >limitations are, whether we use internal feedback for
short-term >memory, and all sorts of questions like that.
Wanting this isn't sufficient to make it possible. We have 50 years of
groundwork to lay before any believable answers to such questions can be found.
Before you can ask where signals go and what happens if you block this or that
path, you have to have a model that is correct. Not just plausible, correct.
Throwing together a bunch of suppositions and then using them to make
deductions is a total waste of time. Do you want to know how people work, or do
you just want to SEEM to know how people work?
Of your statements, Greg said
Well said and worth repeating. Sadly, I predict no reorganization >resulting
from these comments. I hope my prediction is wrong.
If you get sad ENOUGH, Greg, reorganization will result.
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Best to all,
Bill P.