[From Rick Marken (970307.1140 PST)]
There is an awful lot of behavioral research that is being done and has
been done -- and virtually none of it is informed by an understanding of
the nature of control. There seem to be two schools of thought in PCT
circles about how to deal with this research.
One school says that we have much to learn from this reseach. This line
of thought is reflected in several recent posts [eg. Martin Taylor
(970305 13:40), Martin Taylor (970306 15:05), Bruce Abbott (970306.1125
EST), Gary Cziko (970308.2011 GMT)]. The other school (perhaps
represented only by me) thinks that we have nothing to
learn from this research, though it may provide hints about what to look
for using PCT-aware methodology.
I think I've made my position as clear as I can make it; and if
_Psychological Methods_ publishes my paper on PCT methodology I
will have had my public say on the matter.
Of course, people aren't going to start doing the kind of research that
I think is needed to help us understand purposeful behavior until they
understand the nature of the controlling done by living system. Since
this is probably not going happen before the year 2050 or so I suppose
that I will keep on hearing about all we have learned (and will learn)
about behavior from the results of behavioral research that has been
done without any idea that behavior is the control of perception. I
suppose there is nothing I can do about this other than do my own PCT
reseach (even if it seems irrelevant to everyone intereted in
conventional research) and constantly try to explain why I think we have
learned (and will continue to learn) nothing from conventional
research.
Today's lesson on why we have learned nothing from conventional
behavioral research comes from Bill Powers (970307.0858 MST) who notes:
suppose that the line-length were converted to a sense of length
according to the 1.9 power of the actual line length, and a spoken
number were converted to a sense of length according to the 1.4
power of the number. Then we would observe that the spoken word
corresponds to the actual line length according to the 0.5 power
of the line length. If we concluded that the perception of line
length went as the 0.5 power of actual length, we would be wrong.
That would be the _apparent_ law, but it would not be the
actual law for either perception. That would be the law relating
the _report_ to the line length, but not the law relating the
_perception_ to the line length.
This is the behaviorall illusion for psycholphysics, of course. As Bill
gently notes:
This, by the way, is what's wrong with Stevens' Power Law of
perception.
So what do we learn from all this careful, conventional research on the
relationship between physics and perception? Maybe how to keep our
job at Harvard. Maybe how to get tenure. Maybe how to become well-
known in an otherwise arcane field of endeavor. But _nothing_ about what
we thought we were learning about -- the relationship between physics
and perception;-)
Best
Rick