[from Mary Powers 970122]
Caroline (970120)
No apologies! I think you missed noticing Rick's winking smiley
face.
Scott Sterling (970121)
Before you get too wrapped up with Bill's remarks on the soul,
etc. on p. x of BCP, consider this. When the editor at Aldine
got the manuscript in his hands, he found he had very little to
do, Bill being pretty literate and all. So to justify his
paycheck he spent some time moving bits and pieces around, and
that passage, I believe, was one of them. So it came to occupy a
more prominent position, and appears to be of more importance to
Bill, than when it was in the back of the book somewhere as it
was originally.
Philosophy is not what PCT is about, although anyone is free to
examine its implications for various philosophical stances and
vv. What PCT is about, for Bill anyway, is well-represented, I
think, in this quote:
...Behind [the control system model] there is something called
control theory. Control theory does not consist of the statement
that organisms are control systems - that statement proposes only
that certain relationships will be seen in behavior; if they are
seen, the behavior is indisputably that of a control system.
Control theory is the method of analysis that lets us understand
and predict the behavior of any system in this kind of closed-
loop relationship with an environment: basically, it's a body of
mathematical analysis. The difference between [two cybernetic
approaches] and the approach taken by control theory is that
control theory actually makes quantitative predictions of real
experimental data - very accurate predictions. The other two
approaches have yet to predict any specific observable measure of
behavior, accurately or otherwise...(Living Control Systems, p.
247-8)
And the same goes for a good deal of experimental psychology as
well as cybernetics. Cybernetics, and the various fields of
psychology, and sociology, a lot of the life sciences like
neuroscience, and a good deal of the subject matter of
philosophy, apparently, constitute what Thomas Kuhn called pre-
paradigmatic schools. PCT is a paradigm proposed to encompass
them all and bring them together as a single science of living
systems. It may very well fall short of answering the great
philosophical questions, but it may answer some, show that some
others aren't so great after all, and pose some new ones that can
be more productively pursued.
Mary P.