[from Mary Powers 9512.11]
Bruce Abbott (951210.1715 EST)
A couple of things concern me about your defense of reinforcement
theory, which you describe as
not a finished theory ready to be applied to specific cases;
it is a theory-in-development. Processes have been
inferred from empirical evidence; these basic processes are
assumed to underly any observed behavior (and these
processes include more than reinforcement). However, the
quantitative rules through which those processes act to
influence observed behavior remain to be worked out.
Because you then go on to say that it's applied all the time,
worked out or not:
very little research in EAB is designed to investigate the
reinforcement process per se; reinforcement is used in most
procedures only to provide the motivation for responding, so
that other questions can be investigated.
I'm wondering if there's very little research because
psychologists are satisfied with what they have assumed, and
believe that quantitative rules are just icing on the cake. Who
besides you looks at reinforcement theory as unfinished and under
development? How many years of being under development do you
think it will take to realize that the "established basic
processes" _can't_ be quantified - that the math purporting to do
so is fatally flawed? Reinforcement theory has been around a lot
longer than PCT, with a great many more researchers involved, and
yet PCT is far more solid and quantitative.
As for physicists thrashing around trying to reconcile relativity
and quantum theory - yes, they are as confused as reinforcement
theorists, but so what? Both physicists and psychologists are up
blind alleys and "just as prone to invent novel principles to
explain the discrepancies in their data". The question is,
presented with some real novel principles that work, would
physicists reject them as casually and for as trivial reasons as
psychologists reject PCT?
BTW, I would classify psychology as largely pre-paradigmatic.
Not yet ready for prime time as a science, except for PCT. Which
is one reason why psychologists have trouble with PCT - it's not
that it's a different paradigm, it's that it's a real one.
* * *
It occurred to me today that PCT has now languished in (relative)
obscurity for a year longer than Gregor Mendel's paper on
genetics. How time does fly!
* * *
Greg Wierzbicki (951210)
Welcome. Glad you find csg-l interesting. Your questions seem
to relate to counseling concerns - shared by a number of people
on and off the net who are also hoping to find some answers.
There are really no ready answers for you. The first impulse
when confronted with some questions is to try answering them, as
Bill Leach did. But this never proves adequate. We don't know
why you asked, for one thing. We don't know where you are at
with PCT - what you've read so far - or what your background is.
We don't know how you define habits, compulsions, addictions and
abuses, except by implication as all bad, all similar, and all
needing getting rid of. Do you have any, even tentative, way of
relating them to PCT? How, in a multiple level control system,
these things may be serving, or in the past have served, to
maintain a desired or necessary level of some variable? Have you
read about conflict and about resolving conflict by going up
levels (numerous net posts and maybe on the www)? Given the
interest and the need, you may find more and better answers than
anyone can give you. We'll be glad to help, but so far most
thinking along these lines is anecdotal and informal. We'd love
to have more interested people learning and testing and trying
out PCT on these real world problems.
Mary P.