[From Rick Marken (950327.1430)]
CHUCK TUCKER (950327) --
The research that you suggest (on controlling for distance from
another) has already been done both in the field (McPhail and
Wohlstein, ASR, 1986) and experimentally (by Schweingruber [forth-
coming]).
Excellent! Could you describe it for us?
You ask person to control for distance, gait, and tempo of locomotion and
they do so and will make adjustments when disturbed.
Actually, I was just thinking of having the testers go into an existing
"gathering" and try to get as close as possible to one person and then
another and so on. You use this disturbance to test to determine what
variable the person is controlling: distance; minimum distance; average
distance; rate of change in distance, etc. There are many possibilities.
The point: all translations are not equal; the translator must know PCT.
True, if the translator does not know PCT (at least the language thereof)
then he cannot translate conventional research into PCT language. What I am
arguing is that the result of this translation must be meaningless because
PCT is not about what conventional research is about; conventional research
is about behavioral patterns that the experimenter finds interesting (these
are also known as irrelevant side effects); PCT is about control.
I can't see how translating conventional research into PCT terminology can
even be done with any accuracy; since conventional researchers have no
inkling of the existance of controlled variables and don't do anything like a
test for controlled variables, the best one can do in a translation to PCT is
guess at the variables controlled in the conventional research. Such untested
guesses have the same credibility (none) as the conventional psychologists'
claims about what the subjects in their experiments are doing.
Think of it in terms of "stimulus control". The conventional psychologist
sees a person differnetially responding to stimuli; the PCTer "translates"
this phenomenon as a side - effect of controlling a logical variable. This is
just a yelling match until someone goes out and uses some version of The Test
to determine whether or not some variable IS under control. That's what I did
in the HyperCard demo (which you can have if you like; it works best on a
IIci). I use three different kinds of disturbance and monitor the state of a
logical variable while each disturbance is occuring; the logical variable is
protected against these disturbances, indicating that the logical variable
is under control. One of the disturbances results in a pattern of responding
that looks like "stimulus control" (high correlation between stimulus and
response) but now we can see that this "phenomenon" is just a side effect of
controlling.
I think it would be a good exercise to forget about the THEORY of control
(PCT) for a while and just look to see whether or not any particular
behavioral phenomenon we find interesting might actually involve control.
If we do this, I think we'll see that many of what are considered to be the
important phenomena of psychology (and sociology) are not important (in
the PCT sense) at all - they are just irrelevant side effects of controlling.
Best
Rick