[From Bill Powers (950602.1505 MDT)]
Bruce Abbott (950602.1455 EST) --
Your expanded description of the series of experiments answers all the
objections I raised. Considering the thorough way in which you tested
for variables that the rat acted to control, the main question left in
my mind is "what kept you from tumbling to PCT?" Was it simply the
custom in that field of interpreting variables controlled by the rat's
actions as variables that controlled the rat's actions? If that were all
there were to it, I should think that the transition to PCT would be
relatively easy for behaviorists. As you look back on your own frame of
mind during those experiments, can you find any illumination on this
subject?
I think it would be fair to characterize the entire research
program as a search for the actual controlled variable(s) in this
rather complex situation, from the rat's point of view and not our
own.
Yes, I concede that. Not "concede" -- agree willingly.
Every manipulation introduces confounding with other variables; the
only choice one has is which variables to confound. In this case
you can manipulate signal dependability by deleting shocks or by
adding signals. The first way confounds dependability and shock
frequency; the second confounds dependability and signal frequency.
Both ways were investigated, and they yielded the same result.
This isn't really a case of confounding, because "dependability" is an
abstraction that is a direct function of shock frequency and signal
frequency. If you vary the relationship between shock frequency and
signal frequency, you necessarily vary dependability, or
pr(shock|signal). You also vary the ratio of total shocks to total
signals, the ratio of shock rate to signal rate, and the number of
unsignalled shocks.
All of these interpretations of the actual events involve perceptions of
various levels. The question is, which of them, if any, is reasonable to
attribute to a rat? The simplest interpretation, I would think, since
the rats showed a strong preference for signaled versus unsignaled
shocks, would be that the rats simply acted against the occurrance of
unsignaled shocks. Even that is probably too abstract; what they acted
to control toward zero, I would guess, was whatever it was about the
experience that was worsened when the shocks were not preceded by a
signal. If this were the controlled variable (number of shocks not
preceded by a signal, with a reference level of zero), would it not
explain all that you observed?
On a somewhat different topic, my master's thesis examined whether
rats preferred to have physical control over shock (being able to
prevent it or to terminate it once it occurred) in the same way
that preference for signaled over unsignaled shock schedules was
investigated. Yes, this is control in the PCT sense of the term
(shock is a perception). The answer was that they were not
interested in changing from a condition in which they lacked
control over shock to one in which they had such control, so long
as the shocks in the two conditions were identical (i.e., same
frequency, intensity, and duration). In fact they were indifferent
to the two conditions.
This is another (well-conceived) example of this issue of
overinterpretation. The idea of having control is just that, an idea. It
is an abstraction formed over many experiences of many kinds, a highly
cognitive sort of thing. To a human being, it is perfectly natural to
think in terms of having or not having control, regardless of what is
being controlled. What you showed is reason to doubt that a rat
perceives the situation in the same way -- that the rat says "Oops, I've
lost control," or "Goody, now I have control again." Having control was
not a goal for its own sake; only actually controlling the effects of
shocks mattered, and as you describe the experiment, that control was
minimal because the shock would already have started. It's hard to guess
what would happen to the rat's control systems in the time immediately
following the onset of a shock.
I trust you misspoke when you included "being able to prevent it" among
the conditions to which the rats were indifferent. If a rat could press
a bar before the shock occurred and thus prevent it, it would learn
quickly to do so -- my rat paper was a study of just such a situation,
an experiment done by Verhave, a "Sidman avoidance schedule." But that
would not raise the issue of a preference for an abstract capacity to
control; it merely would verify that rats will control shocks if they
can. It wouldn't tell us what they think about being able to do so, if
anything.
I seem to recall other studies in which rats given a choice between
producing food by pressing a bar or eating freely-available food will
spend a respectable amount of time pressing the bar. Now that might
suggest a preference for being in control, but of course that idea would
have to be tested as thoroughly as you tested for controlled variables
in your experiment.
The issue that I am calling overinterpretation has shown up before on
the net, in the form of using too high a level of perception to
interpret what is really a low-level process. When you take the point of
view of a high-level system, all processes seem to partake of the kind
of perception typical of that level. If you're working mainly from the
category level, you can see all lower-level processes as involving
categories. Even a sensation-signal looks like a category of
intensities. An event is a category of transitions and configurations.
But explaining the operation of lower systems in terms of categories is
simply a mistake of "overinterpretation." It is forcing a high-level
point of view onto a process that uses a simpler mode of perception.
Recognizing this problem can make a profound change in the way we see
the behavior of animals and even other people. When I commented some
months ago that behaviorists seemed to take too cognitive an approach to
animal behavior, this is what I was trying to talk about. It is all too
easy to impose one's OWN cognitions on the world of perception, to see
goals and purposes of a kind that do not actually exist except in our
own perceptions. Even when we're looking at other people, what WE see
them doing is not necessarily -- or perhaps even not often -- what THEY
see themselves doing. This is called "anthropomorphizing," which is not
necessarily a sin, but which needs to be considered carefully especially
when the entity about which we anthropomorphize is not human.
Way, way back, Korzybski admonished us that we should develop a
"consciousness of abstracting," an awareness that our generalizations
are subjective and impose structure on the world that is not necessarily
there. The map, he said, is an abstraction; it is not the territory
where things actually exist and happen. In PCT, we say this a little
differently: "It's all perception." One of the primary insights of PCT,
which Clark McPhail wrote about eloquently in a paper on Dag's PCT Text
disc in the file "Epiphany.s", is that ALL that we can experience
(including our actions) consists of our own perceptions, not of a direct
connection to the objective world. To internalize this idea is to
experience a scientific awakening, one that arouses us from the dream of
objectivity.
The Test is a direct expression of that basic realization. No longer can
we look at someone else's behavior and simply assume that what we see
going on is what matters in the ecology of the other. We must try to
guess at what the other organism is perceiving and in what states it
wants its perceptions to be. Nothing is obvious any more; every guess
must be tested. We may see that a rat prefers certainty to uncertainty
-- but those are our own perceptions, and we may find that there are far
simpler interpretations that will work just as well, or better, for the
rat.
Is this, perhaps, the key to the transition from your kind of
behaviorism to PCT? When you realize that you control only your own
perceptions, it is hardly any step at all to seeing that this must be
true of all other organisms as well. You don't need to interact with
other people or with animals very long, from this new viewpoint, before
realizing that you have no direct way to know what they are perceiving,
and thus what they are controlling, and thus what they are doing.
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Best,
Bill P.