[From Bill Powers (2000.03.02.0445 MST)]
Paul Stokes (2000.03.02.00.29)--
Perhaps my use of the term 'shared perception' to describe common sense
views of collective perceptions was not well chosen. I can understand that
in PCT terms it is a possibly a dubious formulation. I certainly was not
asserting that people actually do share perceptions (after all, how can we
really know?) or that there is only one perception shared out among many
people (this latter is frankly a ridiculous idea and I was shocked and not a
little outraged to find it attributed to me!).
Well, one has to discover _somehow_ what other people actually mean.
Outrage is wasted on people as dense as I am.
Because people intertwine and co-ordinate their behaviours with others to
accomplish socially complex tasks we can, I think, strongly and reasonably
infer that social life works on the presumption of common understandings
(definitions of the situation) or collective perceptions and because to
assume the opposite does not make sense.
To me, that's not sufficient reason to conclude anything about the degree
of common understanding, unless you mean only the _feeling_ of common
understanding. Of course I have the same feeling you do, that there is some
degree of common understanding, but to know how close that understanding is
to the nature of the real world (including us), we would have to have some
way of knowing about the real world that doesn't depend on human senses and
human brains. I would love to know just how close the correspondence of my
understanding to reality is, but I have tried for 50 years to figure out a
way to determine that, without success. If you have a way, by all means
reveal it to me!
We can legitimately infer, I think,
that stabilising the perception 'university' is a common project (even if
they don't intended to do so in precisely these terms) of a great many of
the people who turn up there everyday to do their business.
Interaction with others leads to an understanding that is _not
inconsistent_ with what we understand others to mean by their words and
deeds. We eliminate all the inconsistencies that we happen to discover and
that we can understand. But even at a university, where we can assume that
the people are especially well-equipped for this task, and where they are
conscious of the problem, universal mutual understanding is far from
commonplace. If it were, would we be having this difficulty in
communicating, or even outright disagreement about the realities of social
life?
To say that an idea is _not inconsistent_ with reality is far from saying
that it is a correct description of reality.
This does not imply that all individual perceptions are perfectly congruent.
Nor do they need to be, most of the time. The 'taken for granted-ness' of
collective perceptions means that much if not most of what we perceive does
not need to be articulated. This leaves room for plenty of actual
discrepancies, which, if they are not articulated, do not get to cause
problems. It is the collective co-ordination of one another's perceptions of
people's actions that counts because that's where discrepancies get picked
up first. I thought I was making this point loud and clear. Obviously not.
The point I am making seemed (to me) equally loud and clear, and our
present difficulty illustrates it. People commonly _assume_ and _take for
granted_ the congruence of which you speak, but in my lifetime of working
with others I have witnessed this assumed blissful state but rarely.
Fortunately, as you indicate, congruence is not necessary for people to
work together and accomplish (approximately enough) what they each want out
of the social interaction. And that is what I was trying to get across.
Many theorists assume that for a social enterprise to be viable, there must
be a rather close agreement on what the common task is and what the common
goal is. But in my experience, there are few enterprises that rely on such
close agreement -- fortunately for the enterprises. The actual behaviors
involved in those that do rely on commonality tend to be exceedingly
simple, like the movements of a marching band or the exaggerated and
simplified steps of mass dancers -- and even then, it doesn't take an
abnormally sharp eye to pick out the mistakes.
The human capacity for imagining what is not actually happening is of great
help if one wants to perceive social harmony. We simply substitute what we
believe _should_ be happening for actual observations of what _is_
happening, like a fond parent watching a child's performance in a school
play. I don't mean that delusion is involved; only that we tend to perceive
most easily those components of a situation that agree with our
expectations and desires. If you test for a positive condition (say,
altruism), you will always measure some degree of it, no matter how much of
it actually exists, because any such test is set up to detect the
condition. And if you're not measuring in degrees -- if you're just trying
to detect the presence or absence of altruism -- it's pretty easy to come
to a wrong conclusion.
All in all I was merely trying to defend the phenomenon of collective
perceptions because Bill seemed to raise doubts about it, unreasonably I
thought, in his previous post. What happened subsequently was a calamity. I
share the blame.
Let's not get too upset over small disagreements. When you have been
misunderstood as often and as thoroughly as I have you learn to shrug it
off and try again. To me, the only way to make sense of the term
"collective perception" is to speak metaphorically, or in terms of a
"virtual" system, meaning a system that doesn't actually exist but which is
equivalent in its net behavior to the collection that does exist. In
principle (and given the required resources) it would be possible to
approximate the relevant controlled variables of all the individuals
involved in a collective undertaking, and derive the properties of the
virtual system from the properties of the individuals. One of these
properties would be the nature of the variable that each person thinks is
to be controlled, and another would be the reference level that each person
is actually trying to achieve. With data like those, no arguments would be
necessary.
Best,
Bill P.