[From Bill Powers (951018.1530 MDT)]
Bruce Abbott (951018.1530 EST) --
SOMEONE (certainly not me!) has
asserted what can be reduced to the following syllogism:
1. The phenomena studied by "conventional" behavioral scientists are
merely the irrelevant side-effects of control.
2. Irrelevant side-effects of control are of no interest in PCT.
3. Therefore, phenomena discovered by "conventional" psychologists
(like those labeled "reinforcement," "attachment," "modal action
pattern," etc.) are of no importance or relevance to the problem of
understanding the complex biological control systems of animals and
people.
But we've just seen that much observable behavior cannot be construed as
"irrelevant side-effects of control," as now defined. Therefore, not all
behavioral phenomena studied by "conventional" science take the form of
"irrelevant side-effects," and the above syllogism is proven false. My
thanks to Rick for providing that excellent insight.
Yer honor, the defense rests.
There's only one problem for the defense. How are you going to decide whether
a given action is relevant to the behaving organism until you have determined
what that organism is controlling? The syllogism doesn't work backward. You
can't say
1. Psycholologists have studied behavior pattern x.
2. Some observed behavior patterns are relevant because they affect
variables under control by the behaving organism.
3. Therefore behavior pattern x is relevant to a variable that the
observed organism is controlling.
Our new commentator, Shannon Williams, has just made this point in 1/10 of
the words we have been using (Welcome, Shannon!).
Returning to a previous paragraph; you say:
Rick must have read my previous couple of posts, wherein I argued this
point (that much observable behavior is not a side-effect of control, as
here defined). I can only say I'm delighted to see that he--and you--
agree with me on this.
Don't leap to conclusions. My thesis is still that all behavior, all of it
with no exceptions, is produced for the purpose of controlling some
perception of the behaving organism. If this is true, then it follows that if
you think you see a behavior that does not have this purpose, you are
misconstruing your observations and describing them in terms of irrelevant
effects of the organism's actions. Every action can be seen as having many
different effects; in this case, you have simply picked the wrong effect as
being significant. The way to prove this is to find a controlled variable and
show that some other effect of the same actions is actually controlling that
variable.
For example, the apparent fact that baby chicks behave in such a way as to
move in parallel with the mother hen is a misinterpretation, from the PCT
point of view, of what the baby chicks are actually doing. While it would be
necessary to carry out formal tests of this hypothesis, one description a
PCTer might want to try out is that the chicks are maintaining the mother hen
at a certain distance and direction relative to themselves. In other words,
the _relevant_ dimensions of the chick's actions are the changes in position
and walking direction that continually correct errors between the mother's
perceived direction and position and some reference direction and position,
both measured from the chick's point of view. The parallelism of the chick's
movement path and the mother's, while it can certainly be observed, is a real
but irrelevant side-effect of the chick's actions, because the chick is not
in a position to perceive that parallelism; the parallelism appears only in
the observer's perceptions. What the observer perceives is irrelevant to the
chick's behavior.
Once a verifiable way of describing the relevant aspects of the chick's
behavior at this level of organization has been found, one can then treat
this whole control system as the output function of a higher level of
control. What effects of controlling relative direction and distance of the
mother, among all those we can see, are the ones that the chick is concerned
with maintaining at reference levels? Again, many possibilities may come to
mind, and each one has to be tested to see if the assumed variable is
actually under control by the chick. In the course of this investigation, you
might find other lower-level control systems that are also used to control
the same higher-level variable.
At some point in this process, you might want to try out a controlled
variable defined in terms of the chick's inner emotional state. This purely
hypothetical variable, you might assume, is affected by certain behaviors
that oppose disturbances leading to an undesirable inner state or away from a
desirable one. So by seeing what observable conditions are restored by the
chick's behavior to their original state under different conditions, you
might be able to find a variety of original states in which can be seen a
constant pattern, and this pattern might tell you something about what is
being disturbed in the chick's perceptions of its own state.
To do experiments like this you have to be sure that the chick's behavior
succeeds in controlling the variable; the state of the environment that is
restored by the chick's behavior is a clue to the nature of the controlled
variable. Merely observing the chick's actions when there is a presumed error
tells us nothing about the controlled variable; only when the error is
removed by the behavior do we see the reference state. If we have defined the
controlled variable incorrectly, we will see that the final state is
different each time the error is removed. But when we have the right
definition, the differences between final states will become much smaller.
In all of this there is never any need to look for analogies between the
chick's behavior and experience and a human being's. Even doing this with a
human being does not rely on analogies with the way other human beings behave
(except as one source of hypotheses to test). If there are parallels and
valid analogies, they can be pointed out later, and will be all the more
significant for not having been assumed at the start.
···
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Best,
Bill P.