from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.
As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses -- this is
what I wrote about in "Casting Nets." For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot -- my tangle of methodological embarrassments --
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.
The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation --
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don't say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about "feedback." But the manner in which living organisms make
use of the feedback loop -- or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being --
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor
Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.
But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure -- the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels -- the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.
The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.
For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the _Psychological Review_, volume 85, number
5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.
To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two -- or sometimes just a reference to a
publication -- without any personal words at all. I don't mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.
You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world -- our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.
In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.
I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.
Thanks, brother.