[From Rick Marken (960206.0800)]
Shannon Williams (960206.00:30 Calgary time) to Bill Powers (960203.0500 MST)-
You assume that there is a dynamic process ("the process of learning") and a
static result ("the result of learning").
I think that we have to assume that people learn _something_. Psychologists
have assumed that that something is S-R associations (learning strengthens
and weakens them), programs (learning selects the appropriate routines) or
whatever. We suspect that people learn to _control_. We are aware that
learning is very likely continuously occuring (we think we see evidence of it
in brief bouts of "spontaneous" loss of control that sometimes occur in
tracking experiments). But the process of control can become suffiently
stable that it is possible to model it very accurately without taking this
learning process into account (for the moment).
I think you have to have a very good model of the "something" that is learned
(in our case, we're pretty sure that it's control) before you can test models
of the process by which this something is learned. But if you can describe an
experiment in which I could study learning per se -- without having to know
what the organism is learning -- then I'd sure be interested in hearning
about it.
Hans Blom (960206b) --
Me:
Hans, does the environment spontefact behavior?
Hans:
Herewith I declare that I refuse to participate in discussions that
use words that I'm not reasonably familiar with.
Me:
Now I know exactly what you know about the phenomenon that we have been
calling (temporarily, I hope) "spontefaction"
Hans:
You have a great imagination connection! Regrettably, it is not well
tuned...
No one was familiar with the word "spontefact" before Bill defined the
phenomenon to which that sequence of letters refers. If you understood this
phenomenon, you could have answered the question "does the environment
spontefact behavior?" The fact that you didn't answer the question shows that
you don't know the phenomenon to which the word "spontefact" refers. That was
my conclusion above. Am I wrong? Do you, in fact, know the phenomenon to
which the word "spontefact" refers but refuse to answer the question for
other reasons?
Best
Rick