Even simpler for me is if you enter that text yourself. There’s nothing stopping you from editing that post. Click the three dots below it to open the menu and click the ‘pencil’ widget. (Remove the spaces before commas and periods in your text.) After you have done that, I will add the following.
In proposing CVs and discussing their precise nature, refer to the phenomena which must be observed in order to perform the Test for the Controlled Variable. They are:
- An environmental variable that appears to be a controlled variable (CV).
- The condition in which it is maintained despite disturbances (reference value).
- A representative selection of environmental influences that do or could affect it (disturbances).
- Among these, the subject’s effects on it and the subject’s means of causing those effects.
- The subject’s means of perceiving it.
Reflecting your comments, I have reorganized this list (see post 6 of this topic).
I understand “is not the case” means “is not an observable phenomenon of behavior” (as PCT defines behavior). I haven’t found a concise way to refer to the phenomena that must be observed to verify that the subject can perceive (and is perceiving) what the investigator is perceiving as the CV. That step in the Test involves disturbing what we think is the environmental feedback path through which the subject perceives the putative CV. Maybe you can suggest a better way of describing this concisely in #5.
(In #2, I use the word ‘condition’ so as not to exclude higher levels of the perceptual hierarchy, where it is increasingly difficult to measure perceptual variables quantitatively. Quantification is necessary for making a computer model or simulation, but discussion in this category is not about models and simulations. ‘Condition’ also avoids the pitfall of ‘state’ implying static.)
During the Test, the subject and the investigator are concurrently controlling the CV. Whenever the investigator’s actions disturb it the CV is collectively controlled, whether or not the investigator has yet identified what she eventually will report as the CV.
Verifying control system inputs and outputs is more complicated in collective control writ large, that is, in the laboratory of actual social conditions when plural subjects affect a publicly accessible variable. One reason is that in such cases it is typical for any given individual in the relevant public to be only sporadically perceiving and actively controlling the variable. Active control by any one participant is not constant. Another reason is that the perceptions that constitute material culture and mores are complex, with perceivable aspects that are interrelated so that changes in one affect the conditions of others, and the participants in collective control typically are concerned to control only those aspects that directly affect their ability to control their more private perceptions. But though more complicated, (4) and (5) are still essential for precisely identifying collectively controlled CVs.
This is a verbal distinction without a difference. It is an indirect assertion of your claim that control is a directly perceived phenomenon (see below). It is not possible to perceive control without perceiving a control loop, and that engages theory (and imagination) as well as observable phenomena. This is precisely the point of your excellent metaphor, “control-theory glasses”. Don’t abandon that insight now.
Yes, the axioms of a theory are ‘theoretical’. Control of input is taken as axiomatic in PCT. It is also axiomatic that for living organisms the relevant inputs are what we call perceptions. We may extend the term ‘perception’ to nonliving control mechanisms like thermostats metaphorically, and we may take that metaphor increasingly literally as robots become increasingly sophisticated. The more neutral term is control of input. To say that control is distinct from control of input is patently vacuous.
Control cannot be perceived without performing the Test. The Test requires observation of phenomena of behavior (behavior defined as control of input). Those phenomena are referenced in items 1-5 above. A perception of control is inferred from results of the test. Control is a perception in the same way that the rotation of the earth is a perception. The only way to perceive it is as a combination of phenomena, theory, and imagination. Evolution is a fact of this kind. (I allude here to your excellent article “The nature of behavior: Control as fact and theory” [Behavioral Science 33, 1988], which you linked.) Evolution, planetary dynamics, and control are system concepts in Bill’s conjectured hierarchy. People holding signs on the sidewalk chant “This is what Democracy looks like”, and they’re making a good point, but system concepts are not directly perceivable phenomena.