[From Rick Marken (930616.1500)]
Bill Powers (930616.1230 MDT) to Oded --
I didn't say that every social-historical phenomenon can be
explained in terms of individual humans. I said that every
social-historical phenomenon of CONTROL is so explained.
What I think is being missed by the "social control" advocates
is the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled results
of collective action. This is precisely analogous to the difference
between controlled and uncontrolled results of individual action
(which I'm sure everyone who has been reading CSG-L for more
than a year now understands perfectly -- right?). In the discussion
of social control I think the word "emergent" has been used somewhat
ambiguously to refer to both controlled and uncontrolled results of
collective action; I would prefer to use "emergent" to refer only
to uncontrolled results of social actions; the controlled results
already have a name -- "controlled variables". In individual
behavior, we call emergent results "irrelevant side effects".
I think the difference between controlled and emergent (my meaning)
results of collective action is best illustrated by Tom Bourbon's
cooperation experiment. The configuration of the three lines on the
screen is unquestionably a controlled result of the collective
action of two people; indeed, if these people did not control cooperatively,
the three line configuration would not have occurred. There are many
different emergent results of Tom's experiment. One is the angular
position of the two subjects relative to each other; because the subjects
were looking at the same screen (and because of the location of the
chairs) lines through the center of each person converge at the screen.
Add a line connecting the two subjects and you have a triangle pattern;
this triangle is an emergent result of the collective actions of the two
subjects -- but it is not controlled, a fact that can be tested by disturbing
the triangle (by changing the orientation of the chairs, for example); there
is no resistence to disturbances of the triangle. There are many other
possible emergent results of Tom's experiment; some could be made
quite eye-catching (like when you make a single subject write his or
her name unknowingly as s/he pulls on the rubber band to compensate
for your disturbances to the knot in the rubber band demo).
The "ring" formed in the CROWD demo is an emergent (uncontrolled)
result of collective action; the distance between control systems
can be considered a controlled result of collective action in CROWD
because the resulting distances depend on the controlling done by at
least two control systems -- ie. a collective.
If this helps clear things up at all, then the "social control" issue seems
to me to boil down to this; are the emergent (uncontrolled) results of
collective action actually under control by a social control system that
is outside of the collective? If a result is a controlled result of
collective
action then we already understand how it occurs without the necessity of
invoking "social control systems". We don't need to add a social control
system to CROWD to make the rings appear; we don't need to add a social
control system to Tom's coorperation models to control the
configuration of lines. But if we found that the emergent (uncontrolled)
results of collective action were actually controlled -- and we could NOT
attribute this control to the individuals in the collective -- THEN we
would have evidence of a result of collective behavior that is controlled
by something OUTSIDE of the collective. If, for example, the triangular
orientation of the subject's in Tom's experiment WERE controlled --
and there was no evidence of this control being exerted by the subject's
(for example, it was controlled even though the subject's were unable to
perceive the result (triangle) and were deprived of the ability to have
any effect on the result (by being curarized, perhaps) ) -- then we would
have evidence that another control system was controlling the triangle.
If I discovered such a controlled emergent variable, by the way, the first
thing I would do is head down to my local house of god and apologize
profusely.
Best
Rick