[Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28.1156 EDT)]
Rick Marken (2003.09.26.1010)–
The
test is necessary for an observer to know what perceptions another agent
is actually controlling. You certainly don’t need to test to
determine what you yourself are controlling. You’re just controlling
it!You don’t need the Test to determine that you’re controlling. But
you do need it to verify what you’re controlling.
Why?
When I’m catching a fly ball I am completely unaware of what I am
controlling. If I thought about it (before I did the research on fly ball
catching) I would have thought I was controlling my location relative to
the predicted landing site of the ball. This, of course, is not what I
am actually controlling. But even when I thought that that was what
I was controlling I was still pretty good at catching balls (so I could
certainly control without knowing what I was controlling).
That’s right. You don’t need to know what you are controlling in order to
control, and what you ‘know’ about what you are controlling can easily
have little or nothing to do with what you are controlling. The story you
told yourself about how you catch fly balls was wrong, but fortunately it
was irrelevant. The story you tell yourself about fairness is equally a
fabrication.
As anywhere in
science, it’s just too easy to fool yourself. And in fact people fool
themselves about their CVs all the time. The most common word for it is
probably rationalization.
Rationalization is another kind of
controlling.
I agree. But it is irrelevant to the control actions that you are
rationalizing. The smoker tells a little story about being able to quit
any time he really wants to, cold turkey. Or a story about enjoying the
taste. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. These stories are irrelevant to what
the smoker is controlling by smoking. (Such stories can be the source of
some reference settings, but not the references that the smoker is
controlling by smoking. More on this under the heading “Stories,
explanations, concepts”.)
You control for perceiving yourself as acting
in terms of principles of rationality. I suppose it is a way of
“fooling oneself”. But it seems to me that this comes up only
in a special situation; when one is in conflict. That is a
situation where it may help to know what (at a higher level) are one’s
goals (the ones creating the conflict). In most everyday behavior it
doesn’t seem to me that one has to know what one is actually controlling.
It doesn’t help to know, anyway. As in the baseball catching example,
whether I know I’m controlling vertical optical velocity or not doesn’t
seem to matter as long as I can catch the ball.
You keep beating on this Pferd. I did not say that you have to perform
the Test and identify your CV before you can control it. I must have said
something very carelessly for you to make that interpretation of it.
The point I am making is quite different. It is that what you think you
are controlling, and what you say you are controlling, very possibly is
not at all what you are controlling, and the only way to find out what
you are controlling is the same as when you want to find out what someone
else is controlling. You have to Test for the controlled variable. The
investigator is not exempt, though generations of psychologists appear to
have thought so. Your example of baseball catching illustrates this
perfectly.
/Bruce
Nevin