Rick Marken [My last on politics -- maybe] writes - :
if the electorate cannot discriminate their
own interests from mindless propoganda . . . then that's
the fault of the electorate, not the interest groups. I think we have a
serious education problem in this country. . . .So what you see is what people have voted for. The politicos are there to
give the people what they want. This is what they want. . . .I think there is an analogy here to what is happening in the life sciences.
. . . . I think PCT has had a hard time because the life scientists
themselves don't want it. The life science "electorate" WANTS S-R theories
(or some trendy variant thereof) -- not PCT (regardless of its merits).
Again, I think we have a serious educational problem in the life sciences.
Yes, we do have serious educational problems! And to be precise, the
really serious questions to be answered concern _what_ is to be taught,
and _how_.
And in this regard it may be that PCT at this stage can say more useful
things about methods and processes of inquiry than about high levels of
generalization, which have been used to baffle brains throughout the ages.
In a previous post - Re: Depolarization - I wrote (8/26/94) (inter alia):
... biological, psychological, sociological and political realities at all
levels [have] their own kinds of regulation and control for predictable
governance. [Problems} at each of these levels require very different kinds
of attention.What is the answer? There is no single answer, but prerequisites include
awareness of multiple levels, and factors of unpredictable kinds ... it is inthis regard that PCT may have insights to contribute.
Bill Powers , in Misc comments (8/30/94) wrote:
"Going up a level" in PCT means not finding
more general terms in which to speak but examining the perceptions of
any level as if from the viewpoint of a higher level: seeing programs of
actions from the standpoint of the principle level, or seeing principles
from the standpoint of the system concept level, or seeing system
concepts from .... wherever you can see them from.
Rick:
. . . I can see that my political beliefs could be
considered a potpouri including socialism, conservatism, liberalism, and
libertarianism.
. . . the only surprise (from an
HPCT perspective) is the existence of what seems to be a category of
principles. As I recall, the category level in HPCT currently lurks below
principles so something is weird . . .
Now for a few comments to make a more general point about the role of HPCT.
In reading some of the correspondence among Rick, Bill Leach, and Tom Bourbon
on the subjects of politics and ideology it seems to me that many of the
concepts being used are like balloons with the loosest of tethers, or at
any rate tethered to basic experiences best known to the speaker. As such,
the discussion appears (to me, at any rate) somewhat off the reservation as
far as PCT is concerned. This would not matter much except that it is
somewhat like the pot calling the kettle black when advocates of PCT stray
afield with pronouncements in areas in which they lack expertise, and
neglect the grounding within their home base which could give their
cogitations real weight.
(I also thought that Bill Powers was gently attempting to indicate this.)
This seems important, at least insofar as PCT may have a methodological
approach which does hold some promise. In the early days of cybernetics
people like Margaret Mead felt that the models and language of systems and
feedback might be capable of providing basic ideas for a universal system
of concepts in terms of which clearer human communications might be
possible. As I understood it, the hope was that there might be ways to
ascertain what it is that guiding abstractions are being used to refer to.
Those hopes are of course largely unrealized. But the ideas of PCT may
provide the basis for a more exact and useful strategy.
To do this, however, Bill Powers suggestions for studies which would relate
general terms to specific perceptions seem to me to be extremely important.
This cannot be done if people imagine that concepts like liberalism,
conservatism and libertarianism are anything more than allusions to
problematic areas of thought and feeling. As such they too often tend to
muddy the waters to the lowest common denominators, although we now have
almost no alternatives.
In my view, operational meanings, useful for the understanding of likely
actual behaviors, can only be known for specific individuals, in the
relation of the terms and symbols used for primary level perceptions and
experiences to the needs/intrinsic variables of that organism. I believe
that there is a whole literature (e.g. for management) about this kind of
thing, under different names (cf. Stephen Covey: strategies for
effectiveness, etc.) with interests aligned to those of PCT.
Comment re Statistical Models:
Tom Bourbon says:
. . . Discussions of statistical
computations by small parts of human beings are metaphorical, in much the
same way that discussions in which nervous systems are said to transmit,
receive, or process information are metaphorical.
In the interest of clear communication I would like to suggest that science
as such attempts to formulate Models. While metaphors are indeed basic to
abstract thought, they also loom large in myth, religion and literature in
general, without much aspiring to exact correspondences with predictable
observation.
And, while I am not a statistician or mathematician, I have had the notion
for many years (my source for this was a volume _Anthropology Today_,
edited by Kroeber) that a principle role of statistics is to make possible
the modelling of phenomena on very small and very large scales, i.e.
outside the normal human scale of observation. A statistical study can
bring data into the range of models on the human scale of perception - one
which we term mechanical rather than statistical, where we can
conceptualize the entities and relationships more concretely. Comments
anyone?
Cheers!
Bruce B.