[From Brian D'Agostino (950920)]
Bill, this responds to your 950918 message "PCT, CSG, and
heresies." Rather than reproduce your long message here, let me
summarize what I understand to be your main points and respond to
them.
You said that the problem of heresy is not with my work, but with
PCT, which is heretical vis a vis the academic mainstream, of which
my article is a product. This seems to be a complicated way of
denying my observation that there is intolerance and groupthink in
the CSG (not limited to the CSG, of course). Well, I guess I was
naive to think that the CSG could learn from experience regarding
this particular problem. My original complaint was that the CSG
stereotyped my work without even reading it. Now, here you are
doing exactly the same thing again, as if I had said nothing
whatsoever. (It is clear that you didn't read it, because
otherwise you would not attribute to me the foolish proposition
that self image should explain all or even most of policy
preference variance and then proceed to criticize my statistical
model because it does not have an R-square larger than .9). When
you critique something you have read, like certain behaviorist
literature, you are on solid ground and you usually make a
contribution to science. When you critique something you _haven't_
read, like my research or the literature I reviewed in my article,
you usually blow hot air and make a contribution to intolerance and
the cult of William T. Powers. (Who else but an omniscient guru
can know the errors in something he hasn't even read?)
In your posted message, your stereotype of my research was linked
with the patronizing belief that I am a passive product of my
professional training and that in order to succeed in that training
and be awarded a Ph.D. I had to produce work that was incompatible
with control theory. This really hurts, Bill, because I have paid
more of a price than you can possibly know for thinking my own
thoughts and refusing to play the academic game. Belatedly getting
my Ph.D. and getting my research published in a leading academic
journal is a personal triumph for me precisely because I did not
sell my soul in order to achieve these results. I did my research
in spite of my degree program, not in conjunction with it,
struggling against all the misleading and incomplete material I was
being taught, using control theory to rethink everything and
reorganize it all into a new and coherent psychology of militarism.
I have to laugh when you say I will get little thanks from my
mainstream colleagues for applying control theory in my field. I
have already gotten more thanks from the mainstream than I have
from the CSG!
Of course, you are free to conclude that my admittedly exploratory
and preliminary application of control theory to the psychology of
militarism is really an unacceptable bastardization of control
theory. But you can only legitimately conclude this after you have
read my work. This raises a far more serious problem, however. If
you are willing to reject something even before you have read it,
which you have now amply demonstrated, what good will it do for you
to read it? You have already made up your mind. So don't
patronize me by reading my article in order to put me on the right
track. If you don't feel you have anything to learn from the
mainstream or from me, let's just leave it at that, and I'll learn
what I can from you, which is apparently how you like it.
I will probably rest my case here, because I know a heresy trial
when I see one, and I know that nothing I can say in this context
can make a difference.