[From Bill Powers (940502.1800 MDT)]
An interesting week on the net. A week or so ago, Rick Marken
announced that he was taking a two-month vacation to allow all those
who felt he had come down too hard on them to have their say without
criticism. He even promised not to make any comments on what
transpired while he was gone, when he comes back. What's interesting
is that we haven't heard a peep from anyone on this subject: no S-R
theorists venturing out into the daylight to have their say, no
social scientists or communications theorists or dynamic systems
analysts becoming emboldened, in fact nobody who felt unfairly
treated by the Thought Policeman uttering a word.
Of course Tom Bourbon and I are still lurking here, waiting for
unsuspecting prey. Would it be better if we, too, took a vacation
from CSG-L and removed even that threat? If enough people say yes,
then that could no doubt be arranged, too. But I wonder if something
else isn't the problem.
I wonder whether some of those who, pushing back against the
unremitting pressure from Rick, haven't found themselves in an
uncomfortable position now that there is nothing to push back
against. With the pressure removed, there's nothing to prevent the
pushee from proceeding in the direction that was formerly being so
energetically opposed by Rick. I wonder if some people seeing the
way clear aren't having second thoughts about whether they really
want to go in that direction.
After all, PCT is a new way of looking at behavior. Whatever is new
about it seems to have appealed to many people, especially those who
have stuck with CSG-L for a year, two years, three years. Something
that is both new and appealing must appeal because it speaks to
something that one's former ideas didn't take into account. It might
even be that what is new about PCT contradicts, in an interesting
way, things one formerly thought were true, or had accepted without
thinking much about it pro or con.
PCT and its methodology certainly conflict with what many older
theories have assumed to be true. An interesting feature of
conflicts that I have noticed is that when they are purely internal
-- when one is weighing opposing interpretations and goals without
external interference -- they can cause a great deal of inner
confusion and turmoil. But when a external agency comes along and
start pushing you toward one of the conflicted goals, all doubt
seems to disappear: you take the side of the other goal and
wholeheartedly push back. So with Rick pushing for total adherence
to the basic principles of PCT, those who are in conflict between
some other scheme and PCT found themselves freed of the internal
struggle and were able to defend their old beliefs in a refreshingly
single-minded way.
I would like to think that most people who have been around the net
for a while have a pretty clear picture of what PCT is about -- how
we assume behavior works. If that picture had been totally
unbelievable to someone, why would that person stick around to hear
more about it? But I'm also pretty confident that for a great many
participants and listeners, the concepts of PCT are hard to
assimilate into whatever previous understanding of human nature they
had already accepted. We've seen plenty of evidence of that.
Essentially everyone who has come onto the net with some well-
developed conception of how to approach understanding or modeling
human behavior has put up arguments. All those arguments have
amounted to saying the same thing: "Please tell me I haven't been
wasting my time!" Now the interesting thing to me is that these
arguments have had no common theme; that is, they haven't revealed
any consensus to the effect that there is some particular basic flaw
in PCT. Instead, whether the argument has come from the direction of
social science, control-system theory, behaviorism, religion,
neuroscience, systems science, linguistics, cybernetics, or any
other field, the brunt of the argument has been that perhaps PCT has
something fundamentally new to say about those _other_ fields, but
in _my_ field there are viable alternatives to it.
Maybe there are. Maybe in some fundamental way PCT fails to come to
grips with problems that are already handled by other fields -- in a
different way for each field. But if PCT failed in so many different
ways, it would be hard to understand what it is about PCT that has
attracted people from all these different fields. I think it is more
reasonable to assume that PCT has provided a single framework in
which many different facets of human nature fall into place and make
sense. But this way of cutting the diamond or the pie reveals
different things that are inconsistent with each other approach. It
just seems likely to me that the fault lies in these various fields,
each of which takes a narrow view of behavior to the exclusion of
other views. The sociologist and the psychotherapist, the linguist
and the behaviorist, the engineer and the personality theorist,
simply see behavior differently, and largely incompatibly. PCT is
set down in an arena among multitudes of competing and conflicting
ways of explaining behavior. And while eliciting no specific
criticisms from any quarter, it nevertheless is resisted from every
quarter, because in some way it implies that there is something
wrong with each other approach. Nobody has to say what the conflicts
are: just by being what it is, PCT makes the conflicts obvious to
anyone who looks for them.
I've complained about this before, and made resolutions I promptly
forgot, but I will bring it up again: you people out there on the
net have heard enough about PCT to try to offer your own
explanations. If you come up with some example of behavior that you
think challenges PCT, don't just throw it out on the table and wait
for some expert to provide a plausible answer. Try thinking like a
PCT theorist. If you don't get your feet wet you will never take the
plunge. And if you don't practice thinking in PCT terms, you will
remain stuck in whatever point of view you brought to this
discussion. Beyond a certain point, PCT is self-teaching: you can
work out the answers to your own questions, and in doing so will
resolve many of your conflicts about it. But you have to TRY. I've
probably made more wrong guesses and thought up more incomplete
explanations than anyone else, because I've been at it so long.
There's no shame in coming up with a wrong guess or an incomplete
explanation. That's how every "expert" on this net started,
including me. The only shame is in just sitting back and sniping,
letting someone else have the trouble of actually trying to find an
answer.
So what about it: should I disappear for a while, and Tom Bourbon
too, and whoever else has been defending the purity of PCT, to leave
the field free for dissenters? I'm willing, and I'll bet that the
others are, too. Will avoiding conflict between PCT and other
"suppressed" approaches further our understanding of human nature?
If so, then by all means let's try it. Any comments?
Best,
Bill P.