[Martin Taylor 960827 11:55]
Bruce Gregory (960827.1135 EDT) to Marken and Abbott
Gentlemen, Gentlemen. I hate to disappoint you, but this
country has neither a right wing nor a left wing, but only a
somewhat mushy center.
To bring this back to PCT, isn't the labelling of "left-wing/right-wing"
simply a way of describing a perception of an error in a control system?
One has some kind of reference value for a (scalar-valued) perception that
is a function of perceptions such as "social responsibility" "costs
versus values" "Good Samaritanism" "Law and Order" ... In the control
system that attempts (by voting, armed revolution, discussion with friends...)
to affect this perception, there is an error. Some other perceptual function
includes this error among its inputs, and when it perceives a positive
(say) value for the error, it says that the perceived position (of someone
else, of a party, of a country...) is "right wing." When it perceives
a negative value for the error, it says that the perception is of "left
wing". ("Says" means "using whatever labelling mechanism we ordinarily use").
Whether a position is "left-wing" or "right-wing" depends on where you
prefer to sit. Until the rise of the Reform party in Canada and the elections
of provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario, I would have said that
there were no serious political parties in Canada that were nearly as
right wing as a liberal Democrat. US politics seemed to me to be an
argument between far right Democrats and extreme right Republicans, and I
was very glad I didn't live there.
But, as Bruce Gregory points out, a Spanish Fascist would see both
Democrats and Republicans as left-wing, one mushy, the other bleeding-heart.
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We are talking about personal levels for references for perceptual signals
that are unlikely to be derived from very similar perceptual functions. Is
a fiscal conservative who does _not_ want to limit personal choice "right
wing" or "left wing?" Is a strongly anti-drug, anti-prostitution politician
who thinks the way to reduce the problem is to increase the powers of the
morality police and to provide massive funding of social programs "left wing"?
It's a silly question, I think.
We tend to be influenced into perceiving "left wing" and "right wing" by
the fact that we have only a single vote, and (in the USA) only two serious
parties to select between. There is only one degree of freedom for
action, which tends to restrict the degrees of freedom for perception, as
reorganization proceeds. Canada had a little more choice at the last election,
where before the election it was thought that Parliament would have five
major parties (it turned out to have only three), each of which focussed
on different primary policy areas. That makes the right-left labelling a
little harder to apply, though it is often done. It's even harder in a
country like Israel or the Netherlands.
Arguing about labels is seldom fruitful, if it is not accompanied by some
mechanism for deriving the label from more fundamental, more readily agreed
perceptual labels--as we have recently seen in the "models" discussion. Who
cares whether a politician is "right wing" or "left wing" if the question is
what s/he would do in respect of, say, avoiding another Mississippi '93
flood disaster?
Why should anyone care whether the system of constraints that allows a
control system to function properly in a given environment is called a
"model" or a "constraint image" or a "formal analogue," provided everyone
understands that the relationships may matter among the constraints and
the behaviours of the control system under different conditions?
Martin