[from Mary Powers 990331]
Jeff Vancouver (99330.1020)
"One of my bugaboos with some on this list is that discrete labels are put
on continuous phenomena. The discrete labels are: is or is not a
study/theory of control. I am trying to educate the psychological community
in PCT (among other goals. When I see someone close, I think like a teacher
instructing a pupil "That was very good, you are almost there, now if you
just...you will have accurately applied the concept of control. This is
what happened to me (although I did not have the encouragement).
"It is true that the study has vestiges of S-R psychology. But it is also
true that it has vestiges of cybernetics (not just the words, but the
concepts). I think these people should be taken under our wing, not
denigrated...."
This post sees a continuum with S-R at one end and PCT at the other. I do
not see the two theories as blending into one another along a continuum.
There are various degrees of "S-Rness" in psychological theories, and then a
jump, a flip-flop, an "aha", from "the control of behavior" to "the control
of perception". A jump from conceiving of a world where where event follows
event, from S to R, from input to output, without a gut-level appreciation
of the simultaneity of it: that the output is affecting the input as the
input affects the output, that every part of the loop is active at once and
affecting the rest. People can be extremely well acquainted with
engineering control theory and not make this jump. They can be
cyberneticists of great reputation and not make this jump. They can talk
goals and feedback and error signals and reference levels and not make this
jump. You may indeed lead them up to that point, but getting to PCT
ultimately is not a matter of one more tiny increment, it's a sea-change.
If you have not experienced that yet yourself, you have a surprise coming
some day.
You are right that you have not been much encouraged in your efforts to
integrate PCT into mainstream psychology, or integrate mainstream psychology
into PCT, or whatever it is. Maybe you're doing a good thing and everyone
here should be cheering you on. But I know I feel that mainstream
psychology and PCT are incompatible, and PCT, once integrated, is no longer PCT.
* * *
I was thinking this morning about the non-acceptance of PCT by
psychologists, and how disappointing it is that PCT has made so little
headway, considering the number of times one or another person has said that
what the field needs is a new, general theory. (My personal collection of
such statements include Heinz Pagels, Antonio Damasio, and William Bevan,
and if anyone has any more I'd like to see them). Jeff seems to feel that
it's because we insist on the either/or-ness of PCT and other theories.
Other folks have gone away mad or disappointed because of this insistence.
And that leads to the first principle of non-acceptance:
1. Any new theory has to connect seamlessly with everything that has gone
before, invalidating none of it.
A corollary of this is that any paper on PCT must cite every mention in the
literature of control, feedback, etc., whether or not they are a)
irrelevant, or b) wrong.
The second principle is:
2. A new science must appear in full bloom, explaining all about everything
in detail with complete experimental verification.
Another principle is:
3. The above do not apply if you are already famous.
With the inevitable corollary: if you are not famous, you can't possibly
have anything interesting or useful to say.
Or such is the conclusion one reaches on reading reviews of rejected PCT papers.
Mary P.