[Bruce Abbott 941010.1600 EST]
Oded Maler (940929) said:
What I mean to say is that what thousands of people are doing in, what
I can roughly term as "cognitive neurosciences" which includes motor
control, vision, speech recognition (including the more theoretical
foundational aspects such as dynamical systems, organizational
principles, information) is not non-sense and useless just because it
is not based on PCT terminology and principles. A neuron is a neuron,
a muscle is a muscle and a phoneme "is" a phoneme, and anybody who
studies some of their properties is advancing our state of knowledge.
This view was echoed by Martin Taylor (941004 18:30):
If what happens is done by living control systems, it is a fit subject for
consideration using PCT. If it happens consistently, then PCT had better be
able to provide at least a plausible explanation.
Rick Marken (941005.2200) disagreed. With reference to psychophysics, he
wrote:
In fact, psychophysical experiments were not designed with any
understanding of control in mind at all and, thus, no more can be learned
from them about the nature of purposeful behavior than can be learned
from any other pre-PCT research -- nothing.
Later in the same posting Rick speculated on the reasons why so few
researchers have gotten on the PCT bandwagon in the 21 years since the
publication of B:CP:
I submit that there is only one reason why there has been so little PCT
research and publication: it is because there is a reluctance to turn away
from pre-PCT research. This reluctance is based on the belief that there
must be something of value in the work of those "thousands" of pre-
PCT researchers. And there is, I suppose; by following their gaze, you
can see that they were all looking in precisely the wrong direction.
My own recent posting (941007.1240 EST) argued for a different set of reasons.
First (echoing Oded and Martin), much of the research being conducted in the
behavioral sciences retains its validity whether or not viewed from a PCT
perspective. Thus there may be little incentive to switch research programs,
especially if one has already invested considerable efforts in the current
one. Second, asserting that everyone else's program of research is misguided
and trivial is almost guaranteed to generate resistance to PCT. It's not just
that people don't take kindly to being told that their work is worthless. The
claim is so obviously absurd that it undermines the credibility of those who
make it.
As I see it, the dispute between Rick on the one side and Oded, Martin, and me
on the other arises because Rick has misunderstood what we are trying to
assert. He seems to think that we are saying that all non-PCT research can be
recast into a PCT framework and then be made to yield relevant data on
organism-as-control-system. But this is not what we are asserting. What we
ARE asserting is that past (and some present) research on the behaving
organism has disclosed important facts which (a) may supply important pieces
of the puzzle and (b) may reveal important phenomena of behavior that must be
explained by ANY adequate model of the behaving organism. The history of
science demonstrates the truth of this proposition:
Tycho Brahe collected some of the most exacting astronomical data on the
motions of the planets available in his time. The fact that he was a staunch
believer in the Ptolemaic model did not prevent those data from being used by
Kepler to discover the elliptical nature of planetary orbits as summarized in
Kepler's laws (a fruitful exercise in curve-fitting if ever there was one).
Newton's more fundamental insights invalidated neither Kepler's laws nor
Brahe's observations; instead they EXPLAINED them (and showed why Kepler's
model was only an approximation). Nor did Einstein's radically different
conception of the universe lead to a wholesale burning of all the research
based on Newton's view.
The fact that most current behavioral science researchers still hold to the
Ptolemaic view does not automatically invalidate their findings or render them
trivial, although it will almost certainly lead them to interpret those
findings incorrectly and MAY show them to be trivial. Newton did not convince
the scientific community to adopt his model by arguing that all previous
research on astronomy was misguided and should be discarded in order to pave
the way for a fresh start. Rather, he did it by showing how, with elegant
simplicity, his model could account precisely for those previous observations
and by demonstrating that it accurately predicted new relationships that up to
that point had not yet been observed.
Bruce