Origin of the coinage "Perceptual Control Theory"

[rsmarken]

Continuing the discussion from PCT is where it's AT:

@bnhpct

For the 35 or so years that I have been involved with PCT objections to the word “control” have recurred. Emotional discomfort with controlling others and being controlled is a bump in the road for many people.

The Control Systems Group started as a group within the cybernetics world, and in the first years the term of art was simply control theory, CT. Kent introduced the more explicit phrase perceptual control theory, PCT.

I thought Kent came up with it as well. But I was talking to Gary Cziko a while ago and he thought that he was the first to use it on CSGNet and that Kent was the first to use it in a publication. But I recently contacted Gary and he did a little digging in Google Scholar and Chat GPT and found that neither he nor Kent was the first use of the term “perceptual control theory” in a publication. It was apparently first used in a paper by Sheldon Stryker entitled “The Vitalization of Symbolic Interactionism” published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 50 in 1987! Here’s the quote where it appears:

It’s interesting that Stryker refers to Powers’ theory as “perceptual control theory” as though this was already accepted as the way to distinguish Powers’ from other applications of control theory in the social sciences. Since Stryker is a sociologist, perhaps he got this coinage from Kent?

My memory is that Kent came up with the PCT coinage for Powers’ theory at a CSG Meeting. I think formal CSG meetings began in 1986 so perhaps Stryker got the coinage from Kent after that meeting. Perhaps Kent and/or Dag, the CSG archivist, can help out on this: When was “perceptual control theory” first used to describe Powers’ theory of behavior and who came up with it?