From Greg Williams (930505)
Bill Powers (930504.1530 MDT)
One other approach, which you might be interested in since you
are a whiz at literature searches, would be to take recent
writings about control theory and try to trace back, through the
references, where the writers got their understanding of control,
where their references got theirs, etc.. This would end up as a
stand-alone paper that could be published (i.e., offered) without
regard to other papers.
Sounds like a cleaning-the-Augean-stables kind of task. Nevertheless,
if I get done with building a house (three of four walls sided at
present), I'll be tempted to hold my nose and start shoveling.
ยทยทยท
-----
Joel Judd 930505
Also, I think a paragraph or two emphasizing the humanistic nature
of PCT would be worthwhile. I'm trying to remember what I wrote
in the margin of the draft, but it was something to the effect
of balancing what is sometimes seen to be the mechanistic model
of negative feedback with how such a model actually accounts
for goal-driven behavior, the key to being purposeful beings,
and how S-R or I-O models actually take freedom of choice away
and place it in the environment or in unexplained cognitive plans.
Joel, I'd like to hear whether you think that there is any room for
"freedom of choice" in PCT models. Maybe I'm just confused about what
you mean by f of c, but surely it can't mean what it has meant
traditionally to humanists in the Judeo-Christian tradition: "free
will." Bill Powers himself has explained that if organisms are
organized with hierarchically arranged control loops, they are "free"
to the extent that they are able to reorganize stochastically, and to
the extent that externally applied physical force allows them to
maintain control of perceptions -- which seems to me a very long way
from J-C notions of "personal freedom." Also, I note that some of the
behaviorists have taken pains to include genetic constraints and self-
initiated behaviors in their "environmental" contingencies, while I
assume that many cognitivists "explain" cognitive plans with vague
references to evolution, similar to the vague references to evolution
made by Bill Powers to "explain" an organism's control structure.
As ever,
Greg