[From Bruce Abbott (960610.1745 EST)]
Jeff Vancouver 960603.1430 EST --
If this response seems late, it's because it is. (I've been away this past
week on a vacation trip.) However, I didn't want to pass up the opportunity
to congratulate Jeff for this:
The most significant thing is that I have a paper accepted at
_Psychological Bulletin_, with Jim Austin as the first author, on the goal
construct in psychology. It will be coming out in November. In that
article we review the current state of psychological theorizing on goals
in cognitive, motivational, and personality psychology. We define goals
as internally represented desired states - i.e., reference signals. The
paper is heavily peppered with PCT-incites and cites as we used it
extensively to organize the material. I have been working on this paper
for six years, and Jim for even longer. It was all the stuff that he had
uncovered that prompted me to argue for psychology's redemption in earlier
posts. Anyway, we were both surprised by the reception that the paper got
from the reviewers. I cannot help but think we got lucky with our
reviewers. We did try to down-play much of the jargon and the keywords
that tend to be red flags in our colleagues' eyes. Nonetheless, I hope it
will substantially reinvigorate the PCT model within psychology.
Psychological Bulletin is widely regarded as the number 2 journal in the
discipline (Psych Review is 1, maybe next time).
Getting a paper accepted in Psych Bulletin can be likened to winning the 10
million dollar state lottery -- twice. The last I checked the rejection
rate was something on the order of 92%, so getting this one accepted is
quite an accomplishment.
I should note for our non-psych friends that Psych Bulletin and Psych Review
have somewhat different "missions." Psych Bulletin focuses on integrative
reviews of the literature, whereas Psych Review publishes theoretical
articles. (Confusing, isn't it?) The fact that Jeff's paper will appear in
the "number 2" rather than the "number 1" journal reflects the paper's
content should not be used to infer that the paper lacked sufficient merit
to appear in "number 1," or anything to that effect. Congratulations, Jeff!
In addition, my paper that I sent to many of you a couple of years ago
was trimmed down and has now been accepted at _Behavioral Science_. What
I trimmed out was the middle section on misunderstandings. I have
expanded that into a piece I plan to submit to _American Psychologist_.
It deals with misunderstandings and belief systems of psychologists which
have slowed the acceptance of cybernetic systems perspectives as a
paradigm for psychology. It is because of that article that I am very
interested in the posts of Bruce Abbott about the death of CT in
psychology in the 70s. I am trying to make sure I hit the main issues
that have derailed CT.
. . .
So, either, 1) these articles that Bruce is finding reflect a small,
never taken seriously, group of researchers, 2) a trend that was latter
and effectively countered, which Bruce has not turned up, 3) control
theory is dead, but the text book writers don't know that, or 4) we are
labeling something (control theory) that is too complex to be considered
a single entity.
My impression is that "everybody" accepts a basic model in which negative
feedback stabilizes certain physiological variables, that is, in which
deviations from some value produce "motivational" effects which result in
behaviors that tend to reduce those deviations. When you get down to
specifics, however, you find various objections being raised against the
specific kind of mechanism specified by perceptual control theory, and a
variety of alternatives being suggested in its place ranging from simple
equilibrium systems to complex feedforward systems to open-loop ballistic
central-planning mechanisms. Most of the objections raised against the
control system model seem to arise from a mistaken idea of how such systems
may or may not be realized in living systems, from a failure to appreciate
the crucial difference between control and equilibrium systems, or from
attempts to reason verbally around the closed loop when attempting to
understand how such a mechanism will behave under various circumstances. So
I would like to propose a fourth option: (4) control systems are "accepted"
but assumed to play a rather limited role; behavior is mostly driven by
something else (pick your theory).
Regards,
Bruce
!