[Mary Powers 9304.14]
Ken Hacker 9304.12
Thanks for your answer giving 7 basic reasons why social
interaction is important.
I agree that social interaction is important. The problem is,
this was not the question I asked.
While you seem to accept the idea that PCT explains how
individuals are organized, you asserted that interaction is
qualitatively different, so I asked what is beyond PCT - what is
the qualitative difference.
You have offered a list of the main things you consider social
interaction to be important for. What I see in this list is a
summary of a lot of careful observation of what people do,
abstracted into generalizations: people learn to adapt to their
surroundings through interaction; they symbolize, label, and
converse; they are socialized, they have collectively defined
values and practices; they interpret events and experiences; they
have rules, they categorize, they achieve consensual validation;
through interaction they clarify thoughts and feelings.
PCT asks, and attempts to answer, the same question about social
interaction that it asks, and answers, about the "simple"
question about how a person is able to stand up on what amounts
to precariously stacked sticks held together by rubber bands. It
proposes a model of organization to apply throughout the world of
living systems, from the simplest to the most complex. It takes
the same observations that are used in the social, behavioral and
life sciences (which leads to the frequently heard remark that
PCT is nothing but...) but it interprets them in a new way, as
manifestations of the operation of control systems; as the
control of perception.
I get the impression that the study of social interaction is
focussed on WHAT is going on between people, and explaining it by
making generalizations. I don't think it has addressed the
question of how or why these phenomena are produced, which I
believe are much deeper questions, and ones I believe that PCT
does address.
So I'll ask my question again. What is it about social
interaction that is so qualitatively special that a model of how
individuals are organized does not apply?
Mary P.