Thanks for the clarification Bruce.
But isnât the context of a personâs words just more of the personâs words whose intended meaning canât be properly understood without context? Indeed, how can you tell the intended meaning of the context words if you need context to determine their intended meaning?
For example, you say that leaving out this context:
Would have helped me understand Warrenâs statement:
But the context is even more mysterious to me than Warrenâs statement. âFace valueâ actually makes more sense to me than âobserved behaviorâ because it implies that there is some unspecified but observable aspect of behavior other than its face value that should be used to infer intended meaning. Saying that we shouldnât use observed behavior to infer intentions leaves me wondering what else there is that can be used to infer intentions.
I still donât really know what Warrenâs or your intended meanings were. So where does that leave us? Can I not comment on what I take to be the meaning of these statements if I cannot be sure what meaning was really intended?
I donât think leaving out context is really a source of the dysfunction on Discourse. Quite the opposite. I think the best way to handle situations where a reply seems to misconstrue the intended meaning of a personâs words is for the person to keep trying to get their intended meaning across, and doing so with as little rancor and as much civility as possible.
This seems like a rather cumbersome way to have a conversation. What if the person you are addressing doesnât think your restatement sounds like what they mean? And they donât restate what they mean? Is the conversation over? Or what if your restatement of their restatement still isnât what they mean? I think this kind of miscommunication is naturally hashed out by the back and forth of normal conversation.
This may be good advice for a therapist doing MOL but I donât think itâs particularly good advice for conversations on Discourse. Yes, we should be curious in these discussions, but it should be curiosity about the behavior of living organisms, not about the intentions of the participants in the discussion.
And I canât imagine people coming into Discourse without the hope that the discussions will produce some desired outcome. I think itâs not having a desired outcome but, rather, the nature of the desired outcome that matters. If people come here with the desired outcome of learning or teaching PCT, thatâs great. But, if people come to win arguments and/or to show how smart they are, then thatâs probably not going to go well.
From here on you go into more detail about how I could have known Warrenâs intended meaning if I had just known the context of his statement. I think Iâve explained why I think context does not necessarily improve oneâs ability to infer meaning or to make something someone said easier to understand. So Iâll stop here.
Best, Rick
It seems interesting to compare understanding of other personâs (spoken or written) text with the Test of Controlled Variable. In both you need context to create feasible hypotheses. Parts of this context is what the person is perceiving:â in her environment or in the previous discussion. Another part is what (else) that person is doing and/or saying at the (relatively) same time. Both are naturally something which you can perceive, but this can be a deceptive starting point because the person can be also doing or meaning something you cannot at the moment perceive. (She does not produce the needed textual context.) I a way the final arbiter is the systematic Testing by using disturbances. In the text case these disturbances should rather be like questions as soliciting the person to tell more or in different ways. The straight critics or objections easily can easily cause that the controlled variable of the speaker/author transits from the original CV to defense of her credibility and integrity. So at least in the text case TCV could be understood as trial to create more context which could help our understanding. Anyway, after all, we may understand her wrong â and never find it out â but the more we can gain useful context the more probable it hopefully is that we understand right.
Usually, when I say or write something at least one CV is that the receiver understands my message in the same way as I understand it. (Of course there can be also other CVs.) If the receiver understands it differently, it is a side effect of my control.
Does that make sense?
I wonder if anyone has read any of my writings over the last 20+ years about communication between humans, between a human and a machine, or about communication between machines. It was actually this that led me to PCT, and that allowed Bill P to say in 1993 that I was the only person he knew who came to PCT by way of seeing that it was, after all, the foundation of my âLayered Protocol Theoryâ.
Anyway, I think a lot of what has been said in this thread would have been unnecessary if the writers had a clear concept of the Protocol, even without considering it as an element in a hierarchy of protocols. PPC Chapter II.14 is about Protocols, though they are casually introduced earlier.
Absolutely. Martin also has a chapter in the Handbook:
What I am picking up from this discussion of âDiscourse dysfunctionâ is that dysfunction on Discourse is thought to result from a failure of discussants to properly determine each others intended meaning rather than their use of ad hominum insults? Is that right?
Best, Rick
This part of this topic began with post #20 when I proposed that rather than focus on what goes wrong in our discussions, which can easily descend into whoâs to blame, it is better to focus on what makes communication work well. I agree that Martinâs âlayered protocolâ analytical tools (post #45 and #46) are essential for doing this well in a formal way. I have been less formally identifying aspects of the present instance of communication lapses.
Probably without intending to, you touch on some important aspects of language and its limitations, so Iâll also talk about those in this post. Somewhat of a digression, but not too much I hope.
You have expanded a fairly constrained statement about omission of relevant context into an unconstrained generalization.
I wrote about the unconstrained generalization in my chapter of the Handbook, a PCT formulation of something that has been recognized about language for a long time. Our understanding of the meanings of words is a function of our memory of contexts in which they have been used. Thatâs why statistics-based ânatural languageâ computer systems are so good at responding appropriately, translating, etc. (They are limited because they lack the correlated nonverbal experiences. This point will become less tangential and more relevant in a moment.)
So in answer to your question (was it intended to be querulously incredulous, as in âhow can this possibly be?â) is yes. In general, to understand an utterance you rely on a context of associations of language perceptions to one another and to non-language perceptions. That context canât be omitted (barring aphasia or gaps of experience with specific vocabulary or sublanguage usages). It is inherent in competence in use of a language.
But what was intended here was specifically relevant context in the current discussion. Such context can be omitted, and was in fact omitted. It sometimes can be controlled in imagination on the basis of life experience of language usage (the general context can be made relevant), but not so reliably.
Expanding the subject from a constrained statement about omission of relevant context into an unconstrained generalization shifts the focus to the nature of words and meanings and away from the point that punctilious control of orthodox phraseology is not the same as a good grasp of what control is, and that high gain on the former has sometimes conflicted with students gaining the latter, and has too many times been an identified factor in some people leaving.
You still havenât included the referent of the word âthisâ, despite the repeated invitation to include it. Itâs relevant.
I proposed this quotation as context for reconsidering the âcontentions around purity of PCT-talkâ on CSGnet. I know from a number of people that I am not the only participant who perceived a ânoxious âgotcha!â flavor to too many CSGnet exchangesâ as in e.g. âobviously you donât understand PCT because you said that wrongâ.
The PCT âlanguage puristâ in such a case âŚ
Because of failing to test assumptions about what the student was intending âŚ
The person who is having her use of language corrected is trying to gain an understanding of control. Oneâs grasp of what control is nonverbal. For each of us, I do believe, and certainly for me, it is not easy to convey that in language. Simultaneity of cause and effect in circular causation such that for practical purposes (i.e. for living things doing their living) delays are inconsequentialâblah blah blahâwhat? And it doesnât matter if you wouldnât say such a thing in such a way, take any characterization of control that you have written (and you write admirably). We understand you perfectly well because we have the nonverbal context as well as the ways of talking about it.
For Bill, observing the continuous change of the values of variables around a control loop, in respect to variable disturbances and variable reference values, was an especially important nonverbal experience for the novice to âgetâ. For Dag, memorably, he reached from the passenger seat and gradually but with increasing firmness pulled on the steering wheel, so that Dag witnessed his resistance to that disturbance even as all he was âreallyâ controlling was keeping the car on the road and in its lane.
Without this non-language perceptual grasp of what control is, even the greatest care in defining terms and using them precisely can be unclear and confusing to the novice, and often has been; and conversely a facile talent for bandying phrases in the dialect of the field can conceal fundamental lapses in a personâs grasp of what control is. Battling about orthodox language only adds to the concealment. Only when the recipient is joining in the struggle to encapsulate with linearized words what is inherently not linear and not tidily encapsulable is even the clearest and most expert exposition comprehensible.
Itâs the same problem for any fieldâIâve quoted Borel about mathematiciansâ use of languageâbut it seems to be more challenging for control theory, because the whole inherited and experience-derived memory of contexts in which words and phrases have been used (the great generalized context of any utterance) has got established, collectively among users of a language, apart from any understanding of controlâŚ
Itâs not an either/or. Failing to Test for intended meaning can lead (and has led) conversations into ad hominem insults. There are many examples in the record. LPT provides conceptual tools for understanding this within the broader framework of PCT, and for analyzing particular scenarios if that is felt to be needful. I have little interest in dwelling on the past and much more interest in our cultivating curiosity as to what the other person might be trying to say.
I really donât see how itâs possible to reduce the purported dysfunction of discussions on Discourse without seeing specific examples of what people said and how people reacted to what was said that created this dysfunction. If itâs because you want to avoid blame then I think we are unlikely to get anywhere with repairing things. After all, itâs individual humans who create the dysfunction so why shouldnât they (we) be called on it when they do it? How else can they (we) learn?
I think Dag might have initiated this discussion of Discourse dysfunction in response to the rather intense Power Law discussion. My guess is that he (and others) considered that discussion dysfunctional and, given the pdf of old CSGNet and private emails that he posted, that he was implying that I was the main cause of that dysfunction. So I think it would help me as well as everyone else interested in having civil discussions on Discourse if you (or Dag or anyone else who is willing to do it) would go though the recent Power Law relevant discussions on Discourse and let me know what I did to cause the dysfunction. No one else involved in those discussions need be mentioned. I would especially like to see examples of how a lack of curiosity on my part about what a person intended to say created dysfunction.
Best, Rick
Thatâs actually what I have been endeavoring to do in our present conversation, Rick. Maybe itâs difficult for you to perceive because of the absence of blame, and because of our success, so far, in avoiding disputatious argument.
As I said before, conflict is inevitable, contention is elective. When higher-level systems control to resolve conflict with minimal disturbance to control of other CVs, contention is not a necessary consequence of conflict.
You have previously advanced this guess about Dagâs intentions, and I still believe as I said then that you are mistaken. I alluded to the context of his work as archivist at the time that he came across this collection of email as sufficient explanation without any need for adducing additional motivation. An appeal to Ockhamâs razor may not be very convincing, however, and unless we find and carry out some way of Testing what Dag was controlling at that time your allegation is unproven.
Please note the rhetorical effect of the shift I made from âguessâ to âallegationâ. The first word has associations specifically within the methodology of Testing for controlled variables; the second has associations with adversarial legal disputes. I do not intend those allusions seriously (though it is possible that they ring true for you, and that would be for you to say). Iâm pointing out this example of my equivocal language use as context for a discussion of rhetoric later in this post. For our present PCT discussion I should have stuck with more disciplined PCT terminology.
An LPT analysis of those exchanges might be useful, but not with the presupposition that one participant was The Cause of âdysfunctionâ. As Bill said in the PDF archive from a decade or two ago, âit takes two to tangoâ (two or more).
As I recall the power law exchange over the past five or more years, several people said there is a mathematical blunder in the paper that you co-authored, referring to principles of mathematics, and you maintained that there was no mathematical error because the formulation was essentially the same as that in a prior publication that you cited, Maoz et al (2005).
Concurrently, you maintained that the quasi-regularity known as the âpower lawâ is an incidental side effect of control and therefore not worthy of PCT investigation in its own right. Their reply (as I recall understanding) was that this must be demonstrated by (a) correct mathematics accounting for (b) data understood by researchers as representing the âpower lawâ, the latter point being the reason that those data are worthy of PCT investigation, the former being requisite to such investigation.
Impatience escalated from that impasse.
In my wifeâs family there was a maxim that one should never argue about matters of fact. Find out what the facts are, then argue about their interpretation and application if you must. The matters of fact can only be addressed when all parties put them in commensurate terms. The appeal to authority (Maoz et al 2005) did not address the mathematical critique in commensurate terms
There are other matters of fact that remain unremarked, so far as I recall. Maoz et al summarize that by prior researchers the power law is âgenerally attributed either to smoothness in hand- or joint-space or to the result of mechanisms that damp noise inherent in the motor system to produce the smooth trajectories evident in healthy human motion.â However, their concern is âthat white Gaussian noise also obeys this power-lawâ and that researchers should exercise due âcaution when running experiments aimed at verifying the power-law or assuming its underlying existence without proper analysis of the noiseâ and they propose âthat the power-law might be derived [âŚ] from the correlated noise which is inherent in this motor system.â That this is the central thrust of their paper may be relevant to any appeal to the authority of their mathematical treatment.
(I question their assumption of ânoise inherent in the motor systemâ and the presupposition which I take to be behind it, that smoothing this is the prime function of the cerebellum, but this concern isnât specifically germane to the point here.)
More than that I think I canât say about the Power Law dispute, and if Iâve mischaracterized it then those who know better than I can fix these descriptions if they are useful enough to be worth fixing.
Aside from ad verecundiam there are many other examples of questionable rhetoric in the CSGnet record, where the aim may be to achieve debating points or âzingersâ, or even just to display a flashy turn of phrase. These can be entertaining if no one takes them seriously, but instead they too often distract from serious working-out of substantive differences in commensurate terms. Itâs easy to find examples, Erling touched on a few instances in August of 2018. However innocently you may intend such flourishes, perhaps as verbal fun, they often are perceived by others as snide, supercilious, demeaning, dismissive, snarky, sarcastic ⌠but most importantly as failing to address whatever substantive issue is at hand. They are not effective expressions of curiosity seeking to determine what the other person is trying to say, perhaps not in just the way that you or I might prefer to say it. It is my glad observation that in recent years you have been getting much better at reining in this kind of display.
As I said at the top, Iâve identified and tried to sidestep a number of instances of this sort, or what I have perceived as such, in the course of this current conversation.
I may be hypervigilant about this because of how the âmain streamâ of my field, beginning in the 1960s, was led off into a swamp of quasi-religious polemic by facile debaters who apparently believe that scientists arrive at truth by winning arguments.
Itâs difficult for me to perceive âspecific examples of what people said and how people reacted to what was said that created this dysfunctionâ because none have been posted. And we may have avoided disputatious arguments but we are certainly engaged in an argument. I am arguing that an argument becomes âdisputatiousâ (heated) when it is peppered with ad hominem comments. By that definition this has not been a disputatious argument because I have resisted replying in a heated manner to your ad hominem comments. I didnât because I knew that you probably donât even perceive them as ad hominem and therefore didnât intend them as such.
An example of an ad hominem comment is your answer to my comment above. I said that âI donât see how itâs possible to reduce the purported dysfunction of discussions on Discourse without seeing specific examples of dysfunction-causing dialogâ. Instead of answering this comment directly â by giving some examples of dysfunction-causing dialog or explaining why such examples are not necessary â you said âMaybe itâs difficult for you to perceive because of the absence of blame, and because of our success, so far, in avoiding disputatious argumentâ.
Do you not see that this is an ad hominem reply? Perhaps the ad hominem (and hurtful) nature of the comment would be more obvious to you if you were on the receiving end of it. You are saying that I might not be able to see the obviously correct answer to my comment because of a personal failing in me â my desire to see blame and disputatious argument.
Indeed, this whole thread started with an ad hominem comment from you. I had said:
And you replied:
This is ad hominem because, again, rather than answering a straightforward question you are commenting on something about me. The implication is that Iâm just a mischievous guy who knows the answer to my question and was asking it just to be a provocateur. In fact, I didnât know the answer (and still donât) and was only trying to âprovokeâ an answer.
At this point you do exactly what I ask! Thank you! Here are the two things that you say I did to cause the dysfunction in the Power Law discussion:
âappeal to authority (Maoz et al 2005) that did not address the mathematical critique in commensurate termsâ
" other matters of fact that remain unremarked"
In other words, I caused dysfunction by not making my case about the power law to your satisfaction.
Yes, you have mischaracterized it but thatâs beside the point. The point is that the âdysfunctionalâ things you say I did are the kind of things that happen all the time in scientific discussions. In the discussions here on Discourse Bill Powers is regularly appealed to as an authority on PCT and the factual basis of many of the authoritative claims that are made here are often left unremarked,
As I said, people, including you Bruce, are always appealing to the authority of Powers here on PCT, which is fine since Bill is certainly the authority. But my reference to Maoz et al (2005) was not an appeal to authority. I had already shown many times that there was no mistake in my derivation of the mathematical relationship between velocity and curvature. I referred to Maoz et al to show that some of the leading figures in power law research had discovered the same thing we did, well before we did. By saying that my reference to Maoz et al was ad verecundiam (an appeal to authority) you are violating your own caveat about jumping to conclusions about what a person intends based on their overt behavior.
I donât see what the problem was in the interchange with Erling. I wasnât trying to be flashy or score points. I said only that the power law is, in fact, an irrelevant side effect of control. I demonstrated that in my publications on the power law with modeling, just as Erling suggested. I donât see how my side of the interaction could be considered dysfunctional. Nor was Erlingâs, though I think he could have done without implying that my analysis of the power law was âhubrisâ, unless he meant that it is hubris from the point of view of power law researchers.
Based on the interaction with Erling it seems to me that what is perceived by others as my being snide, supercilious, demeaning, dismissive, snarky, and sarcastic is just me disagreeing with them in as polite a way as possible.
Thanks, but I canât see that any of the specific examples of my contributing dysfunction to discussion on Discourse are anything other than me disagreeing strongly with what you and others say relevant to PCT. To the extent that I have made comments that could be construed as ad hominem, I will try to stop that. But as long as people keep saying things that I see as being wrong about PCT I will continue to argue against them, as substantively and as politely as possible.
I dislike the idea that the goal of science is to arrive at truth and I certainly dislike the idea that that can be done by winning arguments though âfacile debateâ. I think science is an approach to the best understanding of how the world works and that the best way to do that is by testing models against data. That doesnât necessarily win arguments but itâs the best way to try.
I believe that the best way to reduce the perceived dysfunction of discussions on Discourse is to hold people accountable when they post comments that appear to be ad hominem. You donât have to blame anyone. Just politely say (in public) something like âWhat you just posted [quoted here] could be taken as being ad hominem. Did you intend it that way? If so, it would be nice if you could apologize and try not to do it again. Thank you.â.
Best, Rick
I think I see another difference of perception that is clouding our communication here. It may be that you think of âdysfunctionâ as a state or condition involving personal attack, name-calling, etc.
I arrive at this because you are using the Latin label ad hominem only in the sense of âad hominem attackâ, meaning name-calling, etc. Vituperative personal attacks result from a process of deterioration in communication. In my view, the âdysfunctionâ is in that process, of which the extreme manifestations are a symptom.
Personal attacks are ad hominem, but not all ad hominem arguments involve personal attack. The familiar phrase âconsider the sourceâ encapsulates the meaning. When our local representatives to the Massachusetts legislature supported a bill affecting the salaries of state senators and representatives, some people responded âof course theyâd support an increase to their own salariesâ. Thatâs an ad hominem argument. It distracts from the substance of the debate. It has some validity, but only to the extent that the implied presupposition (âtheyâre doing this to enrich themselvesâ) becomes part of the substantive content of discussion.
An ad hominem argument is an objectionable fallacy because it does not respond to the substance of the issue. It may allude to relevant matters of substance, but if it does then those matters need to be substantively stated. The ad hominem argument doesnât do that. In the example, Dylan Fernandez and Julian Cyr patiently explained that it was an adjustment for travel expenses, it affected only the relative minority outside Boston and its exurbs, and had been proposed by legislators out in Western MA, but yes they did indeed support it, donât you?
Paul Grahame put this in a âhierarchy of disagreementâ (resembling Maslowâs hierarchy of needs).
Iâm concerned that you felt hurt by some things I wrote, and youâre right, it was not my intent that you should feel hurt. But if I am correct about a difference in perception of âdysfunctionâ (the topic under discussion), I invite you to reconsider what I wrote in the context of my perception of âdysfunctionâ. To recap, it seems to me that for you the dysfunction is the occurrence of personal attacks, whereas for me the dysfunction is in the communication processes that can lead (and have led) to the bottom five layers of Grahameâs pyramid, with personal attacks at the bottom extreme.
I have said that there are many obvious examples in Dagâs PDF and in the course of this conversation. You have said no, there are no examples. I said âMaybe itâs difficult for you to perceive because of the absence of blame, and because of our success, so far, in avoiding disputatious argument.â Can you see that here I was beginning to suspect a difference in perception, and that you couldnât perceive these as examples of dysfunction because they didnât involve personal attacks and insults? Can you see that this was intended as a gentle inquiry about how you were perceiving things? I didnât express it very well, because my perception of the difference was in process of development.
If the ad hominem argument is made impolitely or as a personal attack, or anything in between, thatâs an expression of the fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops that generate somatic arousal and emotions. These surely contribute to the process of communicative dysfunction that can lead to personal attacks and other symptoms of that process at its extremes.
Naming these somatic and emotional concomitants of the discussion and talking about them results in their having less influence upon what we say and how we say it. âWow, I felt hurt and angry when you said ____.â (I have several times posted a reference to fMRI research supporting this description of a communicative act that is available to us.) It also gives the other person the opportunity to state their intention behind what was perceived as hurtful. For example, I did not intend to say or imply that you are cognitively defective, but I was genuinely flummoxed to understand why you were not perceiving what to me seem to be obvious examples of communicative dysfunction, identified and discussed as such. It would have been really helpful to me if you had talked about the disturbance at the time, and asked me if that was my intention.
I am glad to see your agreement with this principle:
Sterling! With the proviso that to keep our scientific discussions âfunctionalâ and avoid communicative âdysfunctionâ we need to have in mind the entire gamut of Grahameâs hierarchy and not just the bottom two levels, ad hominem argument and its extreme form, personal attack (âname-callingâ). I couldnât agree more with the template (if you will) of identifying an annoyance and asking about intention at the time that we feel annoyed.
In fact, I propose that the annoyed person should identify not only the disturbance but also what CVs of theirs are being disturbed. When this obligation is neglected we go down a level (in MoL terms), and that contributes to the discussion going downhill from there. Undeclared and unrecognized CVs may otherwise be known as ulterior motives and unconscious motives, respectively. Their inaccessibility can make resolution of a conflict inaccessible (just as in MoL). To identify the CVs that are being disturbed we have to experience those CVs from a level above them. We can even consider whether CVs at that higher level are also being disturbed. Imagine that!
Yes, I think we are talking about somewhat different things in this discussion of âDiscourse dysfunctionâ.
I think personal attacks are actions aimed at protecting a controlled variable from disturbance. They are inappropriate actions from the point of view of people like me who are controlling for avoiding that kind of action but, inappropriate or not, they are actions that will be used when the controller knows no other way to counter the disturbance or is not controlling for avoiding that kind of action.
I think that is only true when the âsourceâ of what is perceived as an ad hominem argument is intentionally trying to make such an argument. I think the best approach is to assume that what appear to be ad hominem comments were not done intentionally.
Yes, and probably intentionally so.
Actually, in this case I would say that it does respond to the substance of the issue, which was the appropriateness of a self-given pay raise, so I think it was reasonable to consider the possibility that the pay raise might have been due to personal greed.
Good on them. Seems like a nice, decent way to deal with it. Itâs good that they didnât get all insulted and angry but, instead, explained the actual reason for the pay raise â or what they said was the actual reason, anyway.
As I said, I knew it was not intended and the hurt was very mild. I let those things slid off me, even if I think they were intended (like when Adam said that only s**t comes out of my mouth).
Yes, it seems that way to me too.
Sure. But itâs really hard not to see it as also ad hominem in the personal attack sense. Why not just deal with your question straight up? Show me one of the obvious (to you) examples from Dagâs PDF of one off my ad hominem communications that didnât involve personal attacks and see if I consider it dysfunctional.
There is no such thing as âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ in PCT. There are just control loops. And when two loops are controlling the same or a similar variable relative to different references you get accelerating conflict that is limited only by the output capabilities of the two systems or by the intervention of another control system that dismantles one or both of the control systems involved in the conflict.
It sounds to me like what youâre saying is that a person making ad hominem arguments without personal attacks will disturb a variable that another person is controlling, causing them to counter the disturbance with a stronger, personal attack argument which will disturb the variable being controlled by the person who made the non-personal attack ad hominem arguments resulting in their coming back with an even stronger personal attack, and so on. And you want to nip this vicious cycle in the bud by eliminating the original, non-personal attack ad hominem arguments. Is that it?
And I was genuinely flummoxed to understand why virtually everyone in the power law discussion was not perceiving what to me seemed to be an obvious example of a behavioral illusion. I think the parties to an argument are always genuinely flummoxed to understand why their opponent(s) are not perceiving what is obvious to them. I think the best way to deal with this is to not worry about why they are flummoxed and just try to address their flummox itself. I think telling people why you think they are flummoxed is just a way to exacerbate the conflict.
Only the bottom 3 levels of the Graham hierarchy describe what I would call dysfunctional ways of doing scientific arguments. I would include the 4th level from the bottom (âStates opposing case with little or no evidenceâ) as well, but it seems to me that there could be a lot of disagreement about what constitutes âevidenceâ so Iâd just let it slide.
I think those things are pretty obvious in any substantive scientific discussion. The only time someone doesnât identify what disturbed a CV is when they blame the disturbance on the source (the person who said something that was a disturbance). What makes an argument a disturbance is when it âpushesâ a controlled variable from itâs reference. I am blaming the disturbance on the source (rather than on the fact that I am controlling a particular variable) if I say something like âYou are purposefully misinterpreting meâ rather than "What you say misses my point (my CV which is the meaning I am controlling for) and it does so in this way (it is a disturbance becauseâŚ).
While I think it would be nice to have everyone state their ulterior motives, I think itâs highly unlikely that most people really know what they are or, if they do, that they would be willing to reveal them.
Discourse is a forum for scientific discussion, not therapy sessions. And scientific discussions involve conflict, which are debates about which of several conflicting explanations of observed phenomena is the best. These debates should ideally be resolved by tests of models against data. But thatâs the ideal. Scientists are people and people have ulterior motives â Bill Powers called them agendas â and these motives will affect a scientistâs willingness to accept the results of tests.
So scientific debates can get pretty heated even if they are very substantive and there are no personal attacks. I think this was true of the power law debate; except for a few slips into personal attacks, I think it was a very substantive and useful debate. It certainly was for me; I learned a lot, had fun developing the spreadsheets to collect the data and test the models and got three publications out of it! But I can see how onlookers who are not familiar with the topic or are new to PCT might have been turned off by it. I hope they donât go away because of it.
Best, Rick
Would you be interested in inquiring what I meant by that? Or is it enough to dismiss it as having no place in a PCT discussion? With the possible inference that Iâm a pretty stupid guy to use such language here.
Of course I would. Please do. And would you be interested in knowing what I meant (actually, what I intended to mean) by my comment on âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ? If inquiring about what people meant by each post is the way to avoid dysfunction in a discussion then it must apply to everyone involved in the discussion, right?
I certainly didnât intend it to mean that I dismiss your âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ comment as having no place in PCT discussion. And Iâm sorry that you took it be a suggestion that you were stupid to use such language. In fact, I think that you are very smart. Indeed, like everyone else in this discussion group, much smarter than I am.
But Iâll be happy to explain why I replied to your comment about âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ the way I did either before or after you explain what you meant by it, whatever you think is appropriate.
Best, Rick
Did I say something that suggests that Iâm exempting myself? Iâm not.
But there is an overgeneralization in your presupposition. I do not propose that we must inquire what each post means. The opportunity to inquire comes up when we disagree with something specific within a post.
When I disagree with something you say, the disagreement is usually with what I think you mean. The inquiry is to verify whether what I think you mean is in fact what you mean. Substantive disagreement is about the perceptions that the sender wants the recipient to control. We could elaborate that in technical terms, but that would be a tedious recitation of recursive control loops which has been done by others much better than I could do here. I think you know what I mean by substantive disagreement.
There is another kind of disagreement, about the form of a communication rather than about the intended substance. Itâs important to have agreed-upon ways of talking about the objects and relations of our subject-matter. Every technical field, and especially every field and subfield of science, imposes constraints on word-combinings in addition to the constraints that constitute common usage of the given language. Technically, this is called a sublanguage. The sublanguage phenomenon has a formal definition. I see three classes of people who may lapse from the technical sublanguage of PCT into common usage (or may appear to do so). Some people may do this because they donât yet understand control or PCT as an explanation of control; some because they havenât yet mastered the technical sublanguage. Thirdly, experts may do so (Bill often did) when communicating with people in those two classes.
Confusion of these two kinds of disagreement, as well as efforts to clarify what is and is not in the sublanguage of PCT, contributed to what I called verbal sclerosis.
As above, disagreement about the form of communication (the correctness of the language) is much less disruptive if the first step upon disagreeing is to inquire curiously into what the sender intended us to perceive, however unskillfully they expressed it. Instruction about the specialized sublanguage of PCT can then be effective, but without that first inquiry into the substance the challenge to the form becomes its own distracting subject matter, and often is resisted as disturbances to the personâs mastery of our common language.
So we have two questions about intended meaning before us. You have said that I got your intended meaning wrong, so letâs start there.
Really? You said thereâs no such thing, there are only control loops.
How is that anything other than a dismissal? What did you intend me to understand when you said this? Iâm obviously missing something important.
You then went on to talk about conflict between control loops. You said that conflict is limited only in two ways, by the output capacities of the conflicting loops, or if a higher-level loop dismantles one or both of the conflicting loops. Does âdismantlingâ refer to reorganization? If so, I think âdismantlingâ is just one way a higher system can intervene. That should lead into a good on-topic discussion, but please letâs defer that discussion for a bit (best in a different topic) and clear up these two questions. Iâll answer your question next.
No, and I didnât ask because I thought you were. Rather, I asked because I wanted to make it clear to anyone who might be listening in on this conversation that this is what you are proposing: that all parties to conversations on Discourse should always be inquiring about what each other means.
It seems to me that even limiting inquiries about what a person means to when there is disagreement with something specific in a post would make discussions tedious and ungainly. Wouldnât it just be easier to reduce the (purported) dysfunction on Discourse by making it a rule that ad hominem comments are not allowed and enforcing that rule?
But I seem to disagree with you here so maybe I should just ask what you mean.
I disagree with this too. What do you mean by substantive disagreement? How do you know when you are having one? That is, how do you know when itâs time to stop asking âwhat do you meanâ?
As I said, itâs not a dismissal of your âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ comment as having no place in PCT discussion. My comment is a correction, not a dismissal. Your comment certainly has a place in PCT discussion because it is something that is often said about the behaviors you name. Fight, flight, fawn and flee are descriptions of behaviors. PCT explains these behaviors as the observed side effects of controlling perceptions: perceptions of things like defending against and producing hits, increasing distance from an opponent, getting a kindly demeanor from the opponent and, again, swiftly increasing distance from an opponent, respectively.
Yes, because I wanted to briefly note that those observed behaviors â fight, flight, fawn and flee â are observed side effects of conflict between control loops.
OK, over to you.
Best, Rick
Yes, the proposal that we should verify what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree applies to everyone, and in particular anything I propose I should apply to myself.
However, âalwaysâ is an overgeneralization. Next step is trivialization. Iâm not saying that you intend to trivialize this principle. Itâs an effect of the overgeneralizing.
âInquiring about what people meant by each postâ is recursive with no limit. Inquiring what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree is not recursive and ends when the other person agrees that we have understood. Thatâs the answer to your question
A number of your other questions can be paraphrased, I think, as What is an agreement? How do we perceive agreement? Iâm setting aside the paragraphs that I drafted while thinking about those questions because in this context we can rely upon a lifetime of experience reaching agreements with others (or not) and abiding by them (or not). Itâs a worthy topic for the Collective Phenomena category, and for research into collective control. Here, itâs a distraction.
Our topic is discourse dysfunction, including
I posit that disagreement, conflict, and contention always precede the discourse dysfunction that is our topic here. Controlling to correct things we disagree with establishes and strengthens conflict and is by definition disagreeable. Controlling to establish agreements is inherently more agreeable than controlling to correct things we disagree with.
When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to conflict is to tell them theyâre wrong and correct what they said.
When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to agreement is to paraphrase what they said, clearly expressing the parts that you donât like, and ask if thatâs what they really intended to say.
You have provided an example. When I asked what you meant you explained that you were correcting me for naming the behaviors fight, flight, fawn and flee without saying that they are the observed side effects of controlling perceptions.
Suppose the dialog had instead gone like this:
rsmarken:
It sounds like youâre talking about the conventional categories describing observed behavioral actions, without referring to the control loops that produce those appearances.
If you had formulated your response that way, you might have noticed that actually I did refer to the control loops that produce those behavioral manifestations. If you had read the prior discussions of the model of emotion, you might have remembered the use of the phrase âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loopsâ and recognized this as a reference to that model. You might even have remembered where I said this a few weeks ago:
I wonder, did your control for correcting things you disagree with result in your reading only the disagreeable phrase âfight-flight-fawn-fleeâ, rather than the entire phrase âfight-flight-fawn-flee control loops that generate somatic arousal and emotionsâ? It appears that way to me.
Now let me critique a reply of my own âŚ
⌠in retrospect I think I should have stopped with just the first sentence. The second sentence depends upon an assumption as to what you meant. The third was to alert you to potential side effects of the sort that have irritated people in the past. Too much in one bundle, too distracting. Better to keep it simple and direct.
Thereâs a smidge of missing text in the emailed copy of this reply. Iâve fixed it in Discourse. This is not the first time that I accidentally had the Ctrl key down when I pressed Enter.
Cautionary note: Ctrl-Enter (or Alt-S) sends your reply.
I am always controlling to establish agreement with others in my discussions on Discourse. But those others keep disagreeing with me, sometimes rather rudely, and then, to add insult to injury, they blame me for the contention and rudeness on Discourse. Go figure?
But perhaps you know how I could have better handled my attempts to establish agreement. For example, I was unable to get anyone to agree with me that the power law is an excellent example of a behavioral illusion; that it is an irrelevant side effect of control that appears to tell us something about how curved movement is produced, but doesnât. Was there some way I could have handled it so that we could all have come to agreement about that?
Best, Rick