[From Bruce Gregory (991121.0831 EST)]
When Rick, and I believe when Bill, use the word "responsibility" they are
talking about what I will call I-responsibility. I-responsibility applies
only to the consequence of intentions. If X was not intending A, then X is
not I-responsible for A.
In a typical classroom, I suspect that a student is not I-responsible for
disrupting -- the student is not intending to disrupt. Rather the student is
disrupting as an unintended side-effect of realizing some other intention.
Further, a student is not I-responsible for going to the RTC -- that was not
the intended outcome of constatly talking to the student sitting next to
him. The Russian government is not I-responsible for the death of civilians
in Chechnya. NATO is not I-responsible for the death of civilians in
Yugoslavia, for the bombing of the Chinese embassy, or for the ethnic
cleansing of Serbs that followed the NATO intervention in Kosovo.
For some people this restricted notion of responsibility fails to capture
what we mean outside of PCT by the term responsibility. I think a step
toward remedying this might be to introduce an expanded notion of
responsibility, U-responsible. X is U-responsible for A if A occurred as a
result of an action of X, _whether or not_ X intended for A to
occur--whether or not X was controlling a perception with a reference value
of A. X is U-responsible for hitting the car in front of hereven if that was
not X's intended outcome. The disruptive student is U-responsible for going
to the RTC, even if that was not her intention. When I, and perhaps others,
use the term responsible, I am talking about U-responsible. If will
endeavor to make that explicit whenever it is germane.
I hope it is obvious, but in case it is not, the distinction between
I-resonsibility and U-responsibility is made within the context of PCT, not
as any kind of alternative or variant version of PCT.
Bruce Gregory