[From Bruce Nevin (20190830.16:30 ET)]
Rick Marken 2019-08-30_10:55:01Â –
Yes, I understood your question, and I was being responsive. Your question had two parts. You first asked for an example of a ‘social variable’, and then you aid you’d like to hear how investigations of collective control give such variables a strong theoretical basis in PCT. I replied to the first part of your question with an example. After you recognize that, we can continue with the second part of your question.
You did not respond to the word “Huh?” as an example of a collectively controlled (‘social’) variable. If you had, you might have commented that the word “Huh?” and its intonation (indicated by the question mark) conventionally indicates not understanding what was just said, or alternatively consternation that such a thing might be said, and you might have acknowledged that “conventionally indicating” something is a function of collective control. We’ve discussed the nature of social conventions a fair amount.
Instead, your response participates in that collective control. But that response suffices just as well to move discussion of the “Huh?” example forward. Your response has three parts. You quote the context that you were replying to, you rephrase your question, and you explicitly ask if doing this overcomes my failure to understand, very nicely demonstrating your personal participation in collective control of perceptions associated with the word “Huh?”. Not a surprise, since you fluently participate in collective control of our shared English language of which it is part.
I confess that the ‘consternation’ meaning is also relevant. You seriously do not remember any of our discussions of language and culture in terms of collective control?
The context, as you generously reminded us, was “The dispute … over Bill’s resistance, perhaps around 1992, to notions like social variables or shared perceptions.” In the early 1990s notions of ‘social variables’ got caught up in Bill’s rejection of any notion of a ‘superorganic’ (Kroeber’s term) or of a collective consciousness or social mind, control systems superordinate to the individual human beings who are its members. Confirmed to materialist science as he was, he said he would want to see the input and output functions, etc. It looked like this resistance was going to make it difficult to talk about language and culture within PCT. Investigations of collective control showed how humans in social groups create and maintain such ‘social variables’, and they do so without having to posit collective control systems (but note their reincarnation as “giant virtual controllers” etc.). Some of us are interested in developing these lines of research further. Others have different interests.
I did argue, a few years later, that if there were such multi-human or ‘superorganic’ control systems we individual humans would necessarily be unaware of its perceptual input signals etc. as such, just as a neuron necessarily is oblivious to its firing rate as such, because if the firing rate were among the variables that neurons sense as cells then sooner or later they would come to control that variable in their own interest and come in conflict with the organism of which they are part. This is more a caution against being too dogmatic, rather than providing any insight of use to theory or experiment. In reply, Bill said he felt like the floor and the ceiling had both been removed, but after that brief and inconsequential disorientation we returned to our regular themes of discussion.
···
/Bruce
On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 1:56 PM Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[Rick Marken 2019-08-30_10:55:01]
[From Bruce Nevin (20190830.10:15 ET)]
RM: I’d be interested in hearing what you think is an example of a social variable and how work in “collective control” shows that it can have a strong theoretical basis in PCT.
BN: Huh?
RM: Huh huh? Actually, I was replying to this:
BN: That is not the ghost of which I wrote. The dispute was over Bill’s resistance, perhaps around 1992, to notions like social variables or shared perceptions, I’m sure I don’t remember the precise words that were in play. Work on collective control showed how something like those notions can have a sound theoretical basis in PCT.
RM: So is it any clearer if I ask to see an example of how work on collective control gave notions like social variables or shared perceptions a strong theoretical basis in PCT?
Best
Rick
–
Richard S. MarkenÂ
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery