Hi, Mara.
You can ask your questions of any of us.
Bill criticized ‘mainstream’ psychologies, behaviorism and cognitive psychology alike, because of their assumption that stimuli cause behaviors.
Could you spell out a little more clearly what you see as circular?
None of the established psychological theories in which stimuli cause behavior are based on PCT.
PCT includes psychology, but denies that stimuli cause behavior. So there is a psychological theory that is based on PCT.
If we can’t talk about things that haven’t been scientifically demonstrated yet, then we’re not doing science. The point of hypotheses, experiments, and models is to come up with new ideas and test them.
We can talk about anything that concerns the control-system structure and function of living things. What we propose must be consistent with epistemically prior sciences–neuroscience, neurophysiology, endocrinology, physiology, biochemistry, physics.
If not, are we unscientific? Well, first these sciences grow and change by scientists making hypotheses, testing them experimentally, refining theoretical models, submitting all this to peer review, and maybe influencing the ‘current consensus’ of their field. So we may be consistent with ideas that are not fully accepted, and evidence from PCT may be relevant to that discussion. Secondly, PCT may suggest new hypotheses that can only be tested in one of the more specific fields. Henry Yin, a neuroscientist among us, has shown how his fellow neuroscientists are still thinking in linear input-output terms and how they narrowly focus on small neural systems in isolation–that’s in his chapter in the Interdisciplinary Handbook of PCT.
We can talk about any aspect of our subjective and social experience, seeking to explain perceptions-as-experience in terms of perceptual signals in the PCT model. Subjective experience has a bad reputation in scientific circles. PCT offers ways to talk about subjective experience and explain it scientifically. This kind of topic is inherently more interesting to all of us because subjective experience is where we live, it’s our reality, but it’s also liable to criticism as being ‘unscientific’.
The crucial distinction to anchor to is control: living things do whatever works to make their perceptions be the way they want them to be. The observable ‘doing whatever works’ is the behavior or ‘behaviors’ that other theories are concerned with. PCT has demonstrated that there is no way to make sense of behavior until you identify the perceptions that the organism is controlling thereby.
Stay anchored to that fundamental fact of our science, and there is not so much appearance of overlap and resemblance to the mechanisms proposed by other theories.
That said, I have been proposing that there are phenomena that PCT researchers have not investigated. Other schools of psychology have their stories about these phenomena. Their stories are ignorant of controlled variables, but we can still look at the phenomena. I mentioned hypnotism, for example.
I believe it is important to understand the functioning of the limbic system, the brainstem, and what Bill called the somatic branch of the control hierarchy in relation to the more familiar behavioral branch. I believe this opens the way to a PCT explanation of how environmental ‘stimuli’ can influence how an organism adjusts reference values and gain for controlling its perceptions. By this ‘back door’ rewards and punishments influence us, even though stimuli do not cause behavior. This is somewhat controversial within PCT because of a familiar argument that all the old work in psychology needs to be thrown away as worthless, and psychology needs to begin all over on a new PCT foundation. I think my proposal may make it easier for people to understand and accept PCT even if they are trained in the old S-R framework.