[From Bruce Abbott (960608.1145 EST)]
PCTers will find some familiar ideas expressed in the material presented
below from William James. You can find this and many other interesting
James quotes at:
http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~mpajare/james.html
(Try rephrasing the process described below by James in terms of
disturbances, error signals, conflict, and action.)
Bruce
···
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
How an individual settles into a new opinion
William James
The process is always the same.
The individual has a stock of old opinions already.
The individual meets a new experience that puts some of these old
opinions to a strain:
Somebody contradicts them.
In a reflective moment, the individual discovers that they
contradict each other.
The individual hears of facts with which they are incompatible.
Desires arise in the individual which the old opinions fail to
satisfy.
The result is inward trouble, to which the individual's mind till then
had been a stranger.
The individual seeks to escape from this inward trouble by modifying
the old opinions.
The individual saves as many of the old opinions as is possible
(for in this matter we are all extreme conservatives).
Old opinions resist change very variously.
The individual tries to change this and then that.
Finally, some new opinion comes up which the individual can graft upon
the ancient stock of old opinions with a minimum of disturbance to
the others.
The new opinion mediates between the stock and the new experience.
The new opinion runs the stock and the new experience into one
another most felicitously and expediently.
The new opinion is then adapted as the true one.
The new opinion preserves the older stock of truths with a
minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make
them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar
as the case leaves possible.
An outre� explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never
pass for a true account of a novelty.
The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of
his old order standing.
New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions.
The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by
the older truths . . . their influence is absolutely controlling.
Loyalty to them is the first principle; for by far the most usual way
of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious
rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or
to abuse those who bear witness for them.
from Pragmatism