# PCT: What's important

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-whats-important/8580>\
**Category:** CSG1992\
**Created:** [December 4, 1992, 5:03pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-whats-important/8580 "1992-12-04T17:03:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/c67d28/32.png) [@William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/William_T_Powers2)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 1992, 5:03pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-whats-important/8580/1 "1992-12-04T17:03:40Z")

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[From Bill Powers (921204.0830)]

The most important concept of PCT is not control of perception or error,  
but purposive behavior.

One of the main things that PCT does for us is to get intention and  
purpose back into theories of life in a simple form. People like  
Brentano and Searle and many others have tried to deal with  
intentionality under the assumption that the folk meaning has been  
disposed of. So they have come up with vague ideas like "aboutness" and  
"directedness" to explain this sense of doing something on purpose,  
intentionally. They have purpose (an active process) mixed up with  
attention (a form of selective but passive observation). I've read a bit  
of the philosophy of intentionality -- it keeps cropping up -- and my  
impression is that these people are groping in the dark. Another case of  
tossing aside the nuggets on the surface and looking at the ground where  
they were for the obscure answer.

The original meaning of purposive or intentional behavior, the one that  
conventional science eventually threw out, was that organisms can select  
a future state of the world and act to bring it into being. We drive  
cars to work in order to arrive at a parking place and get to work on  
time. We mix ingredients together with the intention of baking a cake.  
We write papers for the purpose of publishing them.

All examples of purposive behavior like these have been argued away by  
scientists who didn't know how to explain them. Part of their difficulty  
in accepting phenomena of purpose came from flaws in the folk concepts  
of purpose and intention. People have the idea that if you have a firm  
and forceful intention, it will be more likely to succeed than if you  
hold the intention "weakly." I had a dog who had the same idea. When she  
wanted to go outside, she would stare fiercely at the back door, and  
later at the doorknob, obviously willing the door to be open as hard as  
she could. And of course it always worked, eventually, because the  
humans in the house liked the effort of getting up and opening the door  
better than the alternative. But the dog evidently never connected what  
the humans did with what the door finally did. Other dogs would bark or  
run to find a human being. This one had a different theory of purpose.

> From similar sorts of experience, people have got the idea that purposes

and intentions have some sort of supernatural effect on the world, even  
on events that they can't affect by their actions. So this leads to  
belief in magic of various kinds -- no wonder science was put off by the  
commonsense concept of purpose.

One of the arguments often brought up against the idea of doing things  
intentionally (when the debate was still going on) was that intentions  
don't always work out. Between the "intentional action" and the outcome  
it was supposed to produce, all sorts of accidents can occur to prevent  
that outcome. The position against which this argument was presented was  
assumed to be that purposes and intentions, by their nature, had some  
magical assurance of succeeding, as per the folk and canine  
misunderstanding.

Another argument was that the future effects of purposive behavior would  
have to act backward through time to cause the behaviors that led tothem. Behind  
this argument was the assumption that all behaviors are  
caused by external effects on the organism. Purposes were thought of as  
future events stimulating the organism in the present in a particular  
way, so as to create the future event. This, too, was assumed to be the  
folk concept of purpose, and perhaps it was. People are not generally  
very clear about what they mean by "the future."

The idea of intentional actions carried the implication that there was  
something different between an intentional action and some other kind of  
"ordinary" action. In either case, both science and common sense  
considered behavior in terms of action-events that had future  
consequences. Do something now; later on something else happens as a  
result. The implicit concept was that once you're performed a causal  
act, natural processes are set in motion that can no longer be altered.  
This concept was behind many objections to purpose, especially  
objections that raised the issue of unsuccessful purposive acts.

Control theory would suggest that there is no peculiar quality that  
makes one act purposive and another not purpose. It is not the action,  
but perception of the outcome that is purposive. Control theory also  
shows that if some outcome is to be produced on purpose, it is necessary  
to form an inner perception of that outcome, a reference signal, and act  
continuously until the perceived outcome matches the reference signal.

Purposes or intentions, as explained by PCT, have no effect on the  
external world. Only actions affect the external world. A purpose, even  
though it feels directed outward, is really a specification for input.  
Only action can alter the perceived world to bring it nearer to the  
specification (if th4e world doesn't spontaneously cooperate, by luck).

There is no effect of the future on the present; the reference signal is  
a present-time phenomenon that is carried through time in the actor.  
Behavior is not a series of events, but a continuous process that is  
updated as often as necessary to assure progress toward the intended  
state. The actions performed on the way to achieving a purpose will  
change with every disturbance that tends to interfere with progress in  
the right direction. The only way for an intention to fail to be  
achieved would be for external events too powerful to resist to overcome  
the organism's maximum opposing effort.

So PCT offers a clear explanation of purpose and intention, one to which  
the old arguments simply don't apply. Yet PCT also explains how the folk  
concepts of purpose might have appeared to be true under pardonable  
misapprehensions about the way the world worked. The mistake made by  
science was to argue against bad theories of intention and then assume  
that these arguments got rid of the phenomenon of intention, too. The  
tacit assumption, also, was that if science in the early part of the  
20th Century couldn't explain the phenomena of purpose, they must not  
exist. The hubris of our forebears was limitless.

I suggest, therefore, that arguing about whether error signals or  
perceptual signals or reference signals are the essence of behavioral  
organization is a side-issue of little importance in comparison with  
what is really important about PCT. In effect, PCT goes back about 80  
years and settles an argument that everyone involved in it at the timesettled  
incorrectly. All the philosophical thinking about purpose that  
has taken place since then, if it did not include the phenomenon of  
control, has been vacuous and amounts to nothing. Vast volumes of words  
on this subject can now be consigned to the wastebasket or the delete  
key. If we study such words at all in the future, it will only be to  
learn how people of good intent can use words to fool themselves into  
thinking they understand something.

> **···**
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------  
> Best,
> 
> Bill P.