[Martin Taylor 2010.02.23.10.11]
Some time in the late afternoon Feb 5, my e-mail client got thoroughly
screwed up, and I lost all e-mail contact with the world. I managed to
get some connection through a horrible web-based interface with my main
account a few days later, but without connection to ongoing threads. I
have spent many days trying to restore my connection with mail from Feb
5 and before, and I did not want to try reconnecting to CSGnet until I
was successful. However, after nearly three weeks of frustration in
trying to make the reconnection, I decided to give up on that effort,
and make a new start with whatever has been happening since Feb 5. It
took a little while to get the reconfiguration of the server-client
relationship set up properly, but a few minutes ago I was able to get
the 247 messages that were waiting. This message of mine is in part a
test message to see whether I can send to CSGnet, and in part a comment
on the true topic of the subject line.
[From Rick Marken (2010.02.20.1130)]
Bill
Powers (2010.02.20.1112 MST)–
Fred Nickols (2010.02.20.1050 MST)
I
think Bill Powers might consider endorsing certain people and certain
expositions of PCT.
I am not and don’t want to be Saint Bill. It’s good to know that people
appreciate my work, but all that will matter in the long run is what
others do with my ideas, what others set straight where I have made
mistakes, what others build on the foundations. I don’t think that
having the hand of a dead man on the helm will help in that process.
I am so on board with Bill on this (though I do have a statue of him
that I pray to every morning;-) I’m not a fan of having anyone
“certify” expositions (or knowledge) of PCT because that makes it seem
like PCT is some kind of religion.
I would like to add my voice to those opinions, based on a little
background experience.
When I was developing the Layered Protocol Theory of dialogue in the
1980s, I had fairly strong opinions on its structure. I was working in
a small group dealing with multimodal interfaces (which was the reason
for developing the theory in the first place). One of the group
persistently tried to convince me that one of my central constructs was
wrong and should be reconsidered. I resisted for several weeks or
months, but eventually he was able to show me how his version actually
fitted the situations we were dealing with better than my version did.
So although I was the founder and guru of LPT, I was wrong about the
scientific validity of my version. With LPT as a “certified religion”,
a “certified LPT practitioner” certified by me would have had to accept
my scientifically (but not religiously) wrong version.
As a side note, if I had not accepted the revised version, I would not
later have been able to see that LPT was actually a special case of PCT
applied to the particular application area of dialogue, in which the
controlled perceptions are those that the dialogue partners have of
each other.
So I am with Bill and Rick on this. Bill is quite capable of telling
people that this or that is or is not consistent with his view of PCT,
but no person is capable of telling anyone that this or that is
consistent with PCT itself, if “PCT” is taken as the consequences of
the assertion that all behaviour is the control of perception, or even
of HPCT, if “HPCT” is taken as the consequences of PCT with a
particular model of the relationships among perceptions.
Martin
···
On 2010/02/20 2:33 PM, Richard Marken wrote: