[From Bill Powers (960520.0630 MDT)]
Bruce Abbott (950519.1920 EST) --
An anthology edited by Toates and Halliday (1980), which was based
on papers delivered at a conference entitled "Analysis of
Motivational Processes" held in September 1979 at The Open
University, is remarkable for the concensus it reveals had emerged
by that time as to the failings of control theory in its
application to physiological and behavioral systems. Nearly every
author offered some argument against it.
B:CP was published in England, too (Lakewood Press), and must have been
known to at least some of these people when the symposium you mention
took place. I have had the eerie paranoid feeling a number of times that
people writing against control theory were actually responding to my
book, but without mentioning it. Of course they could have missed it,
and might have been thinking of other published works. What sorts of
citations does D. A. Booth give for the "erroneous" ideas he is
attacking? Did any of the authors in this symposium make any reference
to B:CP? It might be appropriate for you to ask Fred Toates about this.
Of course my paranoia is only partial, because I know I never proposed a
difference between control and regulation, and still don't.
Booth is under a false impression concerning physiological control
systems. The best antidote I know of is in Myrsovsky's book
"Homeorhesis." The impression may people seem to have is that
"homeostatic" systems operate with respect to fixed set-points.
Myrsovsky (hope I'm spelling that right) goes systematically through a
large number of such physiological control systems and shows that they
all have variable set-points. Most usefully, he demonstrates that it is
the set-point that changes rather than there being a simple loss of
control, by showing evidence that the changed set-point is defended
against disturbances. Body temperature, for example, is tightly
regulated at a specific temperature, whether the temperature is normal,
elevated as in a fever, or depressed as in hibernation.
At least Booth makes his own misinformation crystal clear:
The genes, with or without environmental aid, would have to specify
a cellular arrangement to produce an extremely precise and
unvarying signal of a particular strength throughout the animal's
life: this would be the set-point.
I looked this up in my indexed email archives, and find that the very
same discussion occurred in September 1995. My post was dated 950915.
Reading it over, that seems like a very long time ago in our mutual
history! Some other quotations from Booth are in that interchange. If
Rick Marken were here, he could fill in the blank for "pompous a....e".
Booth uses lack of supporting evidence for control-system components as
proof that they don't exist. Actually, I wonder what he means when he
says there is no evidence. I thought there was quite a bit of evidence,
for example in the literature on reflexes and specifically control-
system analyses of reflexes, with at least some preliminary circuit-
tracing.
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Chris Kitzke (960520) --
I guess what I was trying to suggest was that without a theory,
there is no knowledge. So if knowlegde is what I want, then I put
the theory first.
But if you can just make up knowledge out of nothing, what good is it?
I think that _phenomena_ come first -- that is, something happening that
you need to explain. That's what I mean by data -- observation. Of
course observation always involves some kind of assumptions or theories,
particularly when it involves scientific instruments. But given the
observations, a theory is supposed to explain why they are related as
they are. At least that's my understanding.
Maybe you should give an example.
PCT seems to me to be the only theory of behavior that cannot be
disproved.
If it _can't_ be disproved, it can't be proven either. I hope what you
mean is that so far it _hasn't_ been disproved.
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Best to all,
Bill P.