Instead of focusing on instances of how things can go off the rails (and risking a self-fulfilling prophesy, or the skiier colliding with that tree between the open paths), or trailing off on who’s to blame, I think it’s best to focus on what keeps a conversation in balance.
Conflicts are inevitable, but contention is elective. Bill suggested not sending a potentially contentious response until after reviewing it the next day.
Bill proposed that the issues on CSGnet were about pathological social relationships. OK, so a PCT perspective on relationships is in order.
I quoted Bill Leach (no slouch) about Bill’s ‘expedient teaching’:
… one needs to think about the purpose of one of Bill’s writings before drawing too many conclusions. Especially when answering questions, Bill’s discussion could be using a very narrow (or very broad) meaning for a term depending upon which is more useful for the listener/reader to understand what he was trying to convey. By that I mean that when taken out of context it is also easy to misunderstand what he meant.
Take this as context for contentions around purity of PCT-talk. This amounts to taking observed behavior (the precise words used) to represent intentions (grasp of the concepts behind the words). With equal justification, or lack thereof, the language purist could be accused of not properly understanding PCT. They failed to test to find out what the person is controlling. Is the deficit on the input side (does she not grasp the concepts and recognize instances) or is it in verbal/memory output functions? Does he have the right CVs and reference values but poorly organized output functions for controlling them? Bill often turned attention to nonverbal control of PCT concepts and led from there back into various verbalizations.
In my experience, there was a noxious ‘gotcha!’ flavor to too many CSGnet exchanges. I think that we should avoid adversarial relationships like “obviously you don’t understand PCT because you said that wrong” and instead cultivate collaborative relationships like “I think maybe you’re trying to say this, is this what you want to say?” and expressing it in a way that we perceive as more correct. Not long ago I saw a recollection or a quoted observation that Bill had a way of guiding the conversation even more gently than that (even as disturbances in the Test ought to be gentle nudges), so that his interlocutors eventually arrived at an apt conclusion and then perceived (correctly) that they had arrived at their own conclusion themselves. Very Socratic (without hemlock). There are many examples in his long dialog with Phil Runkel.