[From Rick Marken (920105.0800)]
Gary Cziko, Mary Powers --
Who doesn't know Arlo (and Woody) Guthrie?
Gary -- it looks like I'll have to bring my guitar
along to the next CSG meeting (I actually will
because I'm driving). Then you can pluck out
Alice's Restaurant for Dag (and me -- I love it);
and I can do my "Bob Dylan for CSG" repetoire,
which includes the song "Too much a' nothin'"
with the immortal line:
" when there's too much a nothin'
no one's in control"
Avery Andrews (930105.10.00)--
Switching topics, another problem with Gary's demo is that it doesn't
defuse the `standard brushoff' of PCT -- `we've known about this
feedback stuff for more than thirty years, and that it doesn't really
do very much for you'. I don't believe that any collection of `mere' demos
of the phenomenon of control can overcome this objection, & I'm not too
optimistic about the prospects for heaps of quantitative data either,
no matter how precise.
I completely agree. Greg's "devil's advocacy" shows that if people don't
want to believe in control, they don't have to. I think people throughout
the behavioral sciences have a serious committment to the input-output
view of behavior (and it is a "view" -- just as much as feedback control is
a view). No amount of evidence can "demolish" someone's world view;
people who wanted to view the earth as a fixed sphere at the center of the
universe had no trouble dealing with evidence suggesting that it was not;
moreover, some of the most compelling evidence was in favor of the stationary
earth view -- just as some of the most compelling evidence is in favor of the
input-output view. If the world is moving, why aren't the tree always
bent back by the wind created by this spin? On a nice calm day it's
really ridiculous to imagine that you are standing on a hugh globe that
is spining at high speed; yeah, sure it is. But most of us now accept this
(because of all the other evidence). In a tracking task the subject MUST be
responding to movements of the cursor -- how else would s/he know what
to do. But PCT says that the cursor is NOT the cause of responses; the
cursor is a controlled variable that is both a cause and result of responses;
yeah, sure. But people will eventually accept this too -- though, as Avery
says, not on the basis of any particular demonstration of the problems of
believing otherwise.
Best regards
Rick