[From Rick Marken (951124.1330)]
Well, my last little post got through to the listserver so it
seems that I am reconnected. Here's the post I've been trying to
post -- hope it gets through and all the previous tries don't.
Best
Rick
···
------
[From Rick Marken (951122.1750)]
Chris Cherpas (951122.1357 PT)--
it would be helpful to learn more about the details of how
you arrived at your formulation.
I agree. I think such a history could be very useful, if only because
it would show the remarkable irrelevance of conventional psychological
science to the development of PCT. Indeed, I think that Powers'
discovered PCT (while others, who could have, didn't) BECAUSE he ignored
existing psychological science(while the others didn't).
I think, for example, that the failure to ignore existing psychological science
is what kept cybernecticists from discovering PCT. Norbert Weiner seemed to
have a reasonable grasp of control theory; he didn't discover PCT (I think)
because he made the mistake of believing psychologists who told him
that cybernetics had to explain how the senses communicate with the
muscles and, thus, "control" responding (hence, the subtitle of Weiner's
book on Cybernetics, "Control and communication in man and machine").
I think what led Bill to PCT was the realization that behaving organisms
do what control systems do -- they control. Bill saw that organisms (like
control systems) are varying their effects on certain consequences of
their actons, as necessary, in order to protect those consequences from
disturbance; those consequences are perceptual variables that are kept
under control; controlled variables. The actions that keep these variables
under control are merely attention getting side effects of the process of
control-- and they are what got the attention of the "real" psychologists.
When Bill learned what the "real" psychologists were up to, he realized
that they had missed (or dismissed) the fact that organisms control; he
realized that psychology had focussed mainly on the side effects of
control -- on the relationship between environmental events (potential
disturbances to controlled variables) and the actions that must be
involved in protecting controlled variables from disturbance (though
not necessarily from the "disturbance" manipulated in an experiment--
hence the typically weak relationship between IV (disturbance) and
DV (action) in psychological experiments).
Because they ignored control, psychologists were fooled into thinking that
behavior is highly variable and "complex"; in fact, behavior can be seen to
be extremely precise and simple once one discovers the variables an organism
(or control system) is controlling.
PCT was discovered BECAUSE the "facts" of psychology were ignored. It
was discovered by a person who was able to look at real, everyday
behavior with a physicists' eye and see what is actually going on all
the time. PCT was discovered when Bill Powers discovered that
_behavior is control_.
Best
Rick