[From Fred Nickols (960907.1030 EST)]
Replying to [Bill Powers (960906.1500 MDT)]
<< Interesting discussion of Herbert Simon. If you read his description, he's
talking about feedback control, but if you read his explanation, it's
stimulus-response. The critical part comes when he says that this is a
goal-directed process -- and then explains the goal as being a motor program
produced out of perceptions of the environment.
What is the intellectual barrier that prevents so many scientists from
taking that last step? >>
I'll take a shot at answering that . . . but I'll probably come at it in
a roundabout way . . .
As a fire control technician in the Navy (gunfire, missiles, etc.), I
learned a lot about servomechanisms, amplifiers, positive and
negative feedback, and related concepts early on. Those were
"hard" systems. (And that was a long, long time ago.)
Later on in my Navy career, I was trained as a trainer and then
as an organization development (OD) specialist. Again, similar
concepts showed up, this time in the context of open or "soft"
systems. (Frankly, the first thing I noticed about "soft" systems
was the lack of good schematics).
The big difference, for my money, isn't between "hard" or "soft"
systems, but is instead a distinction between "natural" and "
contrived" systems. A human being (or Simon's ant) is a natural
system. An organization, a gunfire control system (including all
its amplifiers and servomechanisms), or a modern data processing
system are all examples of contrived systems. Their reference
conditions have been placed or programmed into them. In slightly
different terms, these are not systems that establish their own
reference conditions.
Herbert Simon is a computer whiz. He is probably a genius, too.
He has certainly provided me with a lot of good reading over the
years. I recently learned that his father was a servomechanisms
engineer. I haven't read all of Simon's work, but I've read a lot of it,
and I don't think Herbert Simon's inability to take that last step, as
Bill put it, is intellectual -- I think it's philosophical -- and political.
To take that last step is to recognize that human beings are
autonomous entities, that their reference conditions are self-
generated, not imposed from without. This, in turn, means that,
in the last analysis, the concept of social control reduces to what
it has always rested on: force, coercion, manipulation, misinformation,
propaganda, and the like. For the scientific world to adopt, en masse,
an autonomous, self-governing view of human beings and their behavior
would put them at odds with the politicians and the generals. I don't
think scientists in general are ready to pick that fight.
Herbert Simon has spent a good portion of his lifetime wrestling
with the problem of control in organizations and they, of course,
are an interesting, dynamic mix of natural and contrived systems
(e.g., people, and processes). However, for the most part, people
have always been components in this framework, not actors. If
Herbert Simon were to adopt the PCT view, he'd have to say to his
organizational and governmental clientele, "Well, you can control this,
and that, but you can't control the people." That would put him right
in sync with Peter Drucker who has been saying for the last 25 years
that we have to focus on controlling the work, not the worker.
Aw, the heck with it. This is getting way too long . . . I don't
think they're going to take it on their own; they'll have to be
nudged.
Regards,
Fred Nickols
nickols@aol.com