[From Bill Powers (961001.0600 MDT)]
One fact seems to be overlooked in this discussion of who understood
principles of control among the greats of the past. James, Dewey, Wundt, and
whichever other scientists you want to include had no _formal reason_ to
propose that behavior is purposeful. They were simply echoing laymens'
beliefs, which they absorbed as children on the playground ("Johnny, I'm
going to tell on you, you broke that ON PURPOSE!"). William James was
perhaps the most acute observer of all his contemporaries, but he did not
say anything that most people of his time didn't already believe. By that I
don't mean most _scientists_ -- most scientists were well into their own
fantasies by then. When James used the image of Romeo and Juliet, where do
you suppose that image came from? In Romeo's persistent attempts to reach
Juliet, most readers of Shakespeare since the play was written would have
recognized a familiar aspect of human behavior, the ability to adopt an
intention and act as necessary to carry it out. That is why James used that
image; he knew that most readers would understand it. The only people who
would take issue with it were his fellow scientists who had decided to get
away from all that metaphysical nonsense about intentions, purposes,
goal-direction, consciousness, thinking, and so forth.
All you have to do is pick up a novel by any competent author in history to
see that people have always understood behavior to be purposive. There is no
distinction in that -- except in the world of behavioral or cognitive
science. Beginning not too long after Wundt, people who wanted to be known
as scientists began, for reasons I may never understand, denying the
simplest and most obvious facts of human experience, in favor of a stilted,
formal, and extremely unpleasant interpretation that simply ignored what was
most obvious about human nature. A scientist, after careful thought, could
report that thinking is an illusion. A scientist could pick a behavior in
advance, and vary his manipulations of an animal until it produced just the
behavior that the scientist intended it to produce, and then declare he had
proven that intentions and goals do not exist. It's all reflexes, he would
say, or stimuli causing responses, or conditioning, or genes, or social
influence. But of course he would still take the credit for doing the
experiment and writing the paper, and defend his position as an expert.
This extreme inconsistency between what one does and what one says is, when
encountered under other conditions, looked on as a mental illness. I can
easily interpret the early history of psychology, over the last hundred
years, as an episode of collective psychosis or systematic delusion. Of
course I don't really think that all those scientists were insane, whatever
that means; I just think that they got caught up in a gigantic fad and
indulged in the common human vice of trying to seem wise by denying common
sense. Who gets the most publicity: people who claim the earth is round, or
people who claim it is flat?
What's different about PCT is not that it says behavior is purposive. It's
that it explains how purposive behavior can exist in a physical organism.
Everybody -- bar a paltry few thousands of scientists -- knows that
behavior is purposive. What nobody knew before the engineers developed the
theory of control systems was how purposive systems worked. Until that great
development, all the phenomena of purpose had to remain mysterious, giving
rise to all sorts of fanciful concepts about it ranging from animism to
mysticism. The "mental" and the "physical" had to remain in separate
universes, with "mental" phenomena having no effect on "physical" phenomena.
About the only thing you can say about scientists who bravely stand up for
the notion of purposive behavior is that they have come to their senses
instead of bowing to the pressure of scientific opinion. That does not make
them pioneers; it just says that they finally have a chance to get back to
the real work, which is to understand how purposive behavior works.
Best,
Bill P.