[Martin Taylor 2016.07.15.00.30]
Kent McClelland has given permission to post the entire message from
which I posted fragments earlier today. I sent this message to him
15 December 2014, when we were discussing what to call the concept
we currently call an “atenex”. It is the first message in the thread
that introduced that word, and the different levels of quoting
suggest some of the reasons why we eventually settled on it.
------start 15 Dec 2014 message -------
Maybe this 19-month old discussion will prime someone to come up
with a word or neologism that sound better than “atenfel”, can be
easily varied to be used as a label for what we now call a
“molenfel” (a portion of a feedback path in which two atenfels must
be used in parallel because neither is useful without the other) and
“atenex” (a hub where potential feedback paths for control of
different perceptions come together, possibly because a physical
object such as a hammer or an abstract perception such as money can
be used in control of many different kinds of perception).
If not, I hope this little bit of now rather ancient history might
help clarify the problem of finding a suitable label for a concept
that has no relevance when considering a single control loop, but
that is important when dealing with whole societies of control
systems. The careful reader of the foregoing and of the earlier
postings explaining the atenfel concept will have noticed that the
detail of the concept has evolved a little in the last year and a
half, but the core of the concept has not changed.
Martin
···
Kent,
OK. It makessense to me that we need a new word for an “atomic
environmental feedback link” (I like that description),
something that no one has tried to discuss before in quite
those terms.
OK, how about "atenfel" and atenfels for a bunch, "atenfelex" or
“atenfex” for the hub, “molenfel” for a complex that functions
as a unit, including a complete environmental feedback path,
molenfels for a bunch of them, and if they converge at a hub,
molenfelex or molenfex.
As I'm going through my chapter and trying to think how thisnew term would work, I find myself reaching a term for a whole
complex of maghernexes (maghnexi?) that are the components of
a built environment designed to facilitate the work of a
particular social structure—a fully equipped office, for
example, with all the furniture and office machines necessary
for doing the work people usually do there, or the distributed
computer network that an company uses, or a movie studio with
all the equipment necessary for making and editing films.All these assemblages of physical artifacts implycorresponding sets of behavioral and cultural artifacts (in
the sense you’re using the term artifact in your chapter),
such as special languages or techniques for doing things
(protocols, possibly), that represent the way these physical
artifacts are characteristically used by members of this
social structure. These behavioral and cultural artifacts, as
I see it, can also be considered maghernexes, that is, links
in feedback paths for controlling the kinds of perceptions
that people control when doing the work of the social
structure.I'm afraid that the jargon may be multiplying here, but thisstuff hasn’t been all that easy to talk about. . .
No, it isn't, when you are trying to get across the
ramifications of a concept that your readers have probably never
considered. Maybe the suite of new words, whatever we choose,
might make it easier both the conveive and to explain.
Martin
Kent On Dec 15, 2014, at 1:14 PM, Martin Taylor wrote:Kent, On 2014/12/15 1:10 PM, McClelland, Kent wrote:Hi Martin, Before moving further down this road, I'd like to reviewhow we got to this point, just to get a better idea of the
value that might be added by coining another piece of
jargon.As I understand it, the problem we've been trying to solvehad its roots in my mistaken way of using the idea of
degrees of freedom in my chapter draft. Degrees of
freedom, as you rightly pointed out, has a clearly defined
physical meaning in any given environment, but I was using
it to describe a psychological phenomenon: the
facilitation or constraint that an actor experiences when
attempting to control a particular perception or range of
perceptions, given the physical (and social) configuration
of the environment in which the actor is operating. (Just
as an aside, it seems to me that Bill was using the
degrees of freedom idea in this same imprecise way in his
piece in LCS I on degrees of freedom.)Using the term effordance appears to be one way to solvethis problem, but when I objected to the term (since for
me it seems easily confused with Gibson’s affordances), we
got launched on this quest for a new term to express the
idea.If I recall correctly, I got myself into a similar kind ofdifficulty some years back when I tried to use the concept
of bandwidth, which has a clearly delimited technical
definition, to apply to the same sort of psychological
phenomenon, the actor’s ability to use a given object in
the environment as a feedback path for controlling a wide
range of perceptions. In both of these cases I was trying
to express an idea that has to do with the relationship
between a actor, with a given repertoire of elementary
control units within a perceptual hierarchy, and an
environment that offers a particular set of stabilized
phenomena as potential feedback paths.I've been going through the revision of the second part ofmy chapter and inserting first “pernex” and then “maghnex”
in the appropriate places just to see how they sound, but
I wasn’t sure when I looked at the results that the
tradeoff introduced by the unfamiliarity of this new piece
of jargon wasn’t greater than the value added by the using
the term (instead of just talking about feedback paths)
for expressing more concisely the ideas that I want to get
across.Have I analyzed the problem correctly? Do you havethoughts on the value that’s added by creating a specific
term to describe these kinds of relationships between
actor and environment?Best, KentI agree with your analysis. For me, the issue is bound up in the fact that Bill and Ricknever worried about the complexity of the environment in
their simulations or analyses, so there has been essentially
no discussion about the links in the environmental feedback
chain, and hence no awareness that there are concepts that
have no real parallel in the S-R world but that are
important for PCT. They talk about “the behavioural
illusion”, which is that the relationship between “stimulus”
and “response” depends on the complexity inside the
organism, whereas if control is good, the relation depends
almost entirely on the complexity of the environmental
feedback path, but they don’t go any further.Your work -- and necessarily any work that aims to explainsocial phenomena – forces one to think of the complexity of
the environmental feedback path. Not only must one think of
feedback path, as is
usually the case in what Rick does, but one must imagine
your “gossamer web”, which I more mundanely call a network,
of crossing and merging path segments, real and potential.
Physical objects in the environment are nodal points in this
web, but they are not the links, and it is the links for
which I do think we need words.
We need a word for a link that provides a means whereby a
particular perception might be influenced. My latest effort
at that was “magher” from old Indo-European “magh-” “to be
able, to have power”. A magher is one who makes able, or
gives power. In modern English, a “maker”. The motto “many
means to the same end” can be transcribed as “Any perception
may have several maghers”. But also, an entire environmental
pathway may consist of a many maghers in series and/or in
parallel. An object, however, enables many different
perceptual controls, and is a hub, nexus, or confluence of
many maghers for different perceptions. I don’t think simply
using the plural works here. You could call an object a
magher nexus or a magher hub, but I think the concept is
solid enough to expect that if “magher” came into general
use, either form would be elided
“magher-nexus”->“maghernex”->“maghnex” or “magher-hub”
→ “maghub”.
One of the issues in communication is the conflict between
getting across a general idea, and being precise in a way
that allows for a correct extension of the thoughts. We see
this right now with even Warren supporting a loose
definition of “control”, a loose definition that causes no
end of confusion when one tries to use it to analyze
situations more complex than the simple control of a single
scalar value. Since the very concept of a particular link on
a complex environmental feedback pathway is probably novel
to most readers, I think we need to have precisely defined
words that can be used to develop the social analysis in
effective ways.
The base word doesn’t have to be “magher” or “pernex” but
there should be a base word for the atomic environmental
feedback link. I was quite happy with “effordance” until you
said you didn’t like it, but since this discussion, I see it
as difficult to use fluently in the discussion of a hub or
nexus. A “magher” or whatever you call it has mathematical
and possibly physical properties that can be combined with
those of other maghers in the path when you trace a full
environmental feedback path through the web. For example,
since the output of muscles is a force, does the magher
transmit, augment, or integrate the force? Whatever it does,
the result of that operation is available to the next magher
in the path.
Anyway, the short answer after a long rigmarole is that I do
think the value added by having a precise word outweighs the
problems of adding to the specialized vocabulary of PCT. I
don’t much care what the word is, provided it is easy to
say, has the right kind of connotations, and can be worked
into circuit discussions. I tried to think of one based on
“link”. Even “link” itself might work, despite having a
real-world meaning that is different. A “magher” is a
potential, whereas a “link” is actually used, and I’m not
sure whether the “gossamer web” can carry the weight of real
links in a chain.
Martin
a__