[From Bill Powers (940606.1820 MDT)]
Jeff Vancouver (940606, I presume) --
Welcome to the land of the speaking, Jeff. I'm glad you have decided
to speak up, because you have some important observations to make.
I'll let Dag Forssell speak for himself. I can tell you, however,
that there are often things going on behind the scenes that you
wouldn't hear about. For example:
But contemporary psychology is embracing purposeful behavior in
a big way. For instance, the most popular motivational theory
in organizational psychology currently is Locke's goal-setting
theory. That theory is based on many of the same self-
regulatory ideas as PCT. There is no question that Locke and
his school (along with Bandura) has not appreciated PCT, but
they have ended up specifying models that are purposeful.
What they have done is to admit that behavior is purposeful, which
people have been claiming at least since McDougall in the 1920s, and
they may even conclude that behavior is caused by the difference
between the a goal and reality, but they (Locke and Bandura, for
example) explicitly reject control theory as an explanation of these
well-known phenomena. This is extremely puzzling, so puzzling that
both Mary and I have written to Locke in an attempt to clear up some
of his misconceptions about control theory (in response to an
article by him violently attacking control theory). The problem is
that Locke rejects control theory precisely because of hjis mistaken
idea of what it is, and he refuses to change his understanding of
it. Our correspondence with him has netted exactly zero by way of
any improved understanding. He has picked a position and is not
going to change it.
The appearance of George Richardson's book on our reading list is
not so strange. If you read the book carefully, you will see that he
puts PCT on a thread of its own, which is neither the cybernetics
thread nor the systems thread. I was one of the prepublication
reviewers of his book, and I gave it a thumbs up because he had a
deep enough understanding of PCT to see that it differed in
essential ways from the two mainstream ideas.
You have to have some experience with individuals from other
disciplines to grasp just how ridiculous the rejection of PCT ideas
can get. There is fierce academic competition going on out there,
and the tactics used for trying to keep opposing ideas in abeyance
are sometimes every bit as self-serving and underhanded as one might
expect in the sleazier parts of the business world. You and I think
of the ideal scientist as a person who might be dismayed at
discovering that his ideas are refuted by some new approach, but
never as a person who would deliberately try to suppress such ideas
simply to maintain his reputation of rightness. Ideal scientists,
alas, are few and far between, and they do not rise to positions of
power and influence. Those who are at the top are, like any person
endowed suspiciously well with the rewards of life, at the top
because that is where they want to be and intend to stay.
You say
In fact, I see many contemporary theories and applications
based on the same underlying principles of PCT.
This I seriously doubt. You may find a lot of people talking about
purposes and goals, but that is not theory; it is simply
observation. I doubt very much that you will find _any_ other theory
that contains an explanation of purposive and goal-directed behavior
like that of PCT -- unless the explanation is in fact PCT,
acknowledged or not. For example, Robin Vallacher writes a lot about
very PCT-ish ideas, but that is not surprising. In about 1974 or 75,
he read my book and invited me to give a seminar at ITT, where he
was at the time. He got a thorough personal introduction to my brand
of control theory, but you will have a hard time finding any
acknowledgement of that in his writings. Even then, incidentally, I
was saying that the focus of attention goes to where the largest
error signals are, the only way I could think of to confine
reorganization to the areas of the brain that actually needed
reorganization.
Carver and Schier, who are a little better at acknowledgements,
asked for my criticisms of their first book while it was being
written, and I gave considerable time and effort to them, including
a critique of one of the main points in their book about self-
awareness -- which they ignored, although the last time I spoke to
Carver (to invite him to a CSG meeting, which he begged off from),
he mentioned that they gave up on that approach.
I have corresponded with literally hundreds of people about PCT, and
have shared my ideas and explanations without stint when asked for
them, holding nothing back. Whenever I have seen some piece of work
that looked as if it were on the same track or close to it, I have
written to the authors inviting their attention to PCT, explaining
how it might be useful to them or apply in their work. The return on
this effort has been miserable, although I have seen an increase in
allusions to PCT-like ideas in the literature as the years have gone
by, and have wondered just how much of that reflected my efforts.
The least satisfactory responses have uniformly come from the most
famous and admired people. Gerald Edelman, for example, was
condescending and insulting in his reply. Roger Penrose ignored my
letter completely. Jeremy Campbell never replied. Joseph Engleberger
concluded that there was nothing in Perceptual Control Theory that
was of any interest in his work with robotics. The list is long.
The biggest problem I see is that people simply don't realize the
difference between observing that behavior is purposive and
explaining how it can possibly be that. The conclusions of PCT get
across, but rarely does anything of the theory come through. Even
your student obviously doesn't realize that there is a theory
beneath the trappings of PCT:
P.S. I just had a student ask if PCT deals with non-optimizing
reference signals.
The words "non-optimizing reference signal" don't strike me as
meaning anything. A reference signal is simply a specification for
the state of a perception: it is a signal that has a particular
value, against which a perceptual signal is compared. There is
nothing to optimize about it, as far as I can see, and a reference
signal can certain DO no optimizing of anything.
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I don't go in much for bashing the opposition, except when
particularly frustrated and needing to blow off some steam among
friends. I would not dream of using most of the tactics that have
been used on me. I think that the face of PCT that you see on CSG-L
is quite different from its public face. I do agree with you
wholeheartedly about promising what we have never in fact delivered;
I am as reluctant to emit junk mail as I am to receive it. But I
have learned long ago that people do the best they can, and if my
standards differ from theirs so be it. I just want to make sure that
if a person uses the term PCT, it is in fact PCT that is being
talked about. Even that isn't always easy to do.
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Best
Bill P.