[From Erling Jorgensen (2018.03.21 1425 EDT)]
Alex Gomez-Marin agomezmarin@gmail.com 3/20/2018 8:35 PM
agreed — may I add one more: its *non-falsifiability *
EJ: I would express this differently. Included in Phil Runkel’s letter about what he admired in PCT, that Bruce N. quoted from, was, “(1) its precision… (3) its ability to be modeled…” These are qualities that to my mind lead to enough scientific rigor that the models of PCT can be falsified. That’s part of what I love about PCT. And with a PhD in Psychology, the lack of falsifiability is what I don’t love about much of the rest of my discipline.
EJ: When a model is written with every constituent part specified, and without a lot of extra hand-waving, it either works or it doesn’t. It either produces high correlations with the subset of phenomena that it is simulating, or it is still an incomplete model. And indeed, it should be possible to find the limits of any given instantiation of PCT. For instance, cover the screen of a PCT tracking task and that model won’t work, (because the model is predicated on controlling perception, not memory.) Or, don’t follow the experimenter’s instructions and the model may not work, (unless additional parameters can be inserted in the computer version to change the references in that particular way.)
EJ: I see these as local falsifications of individual PCT models, by specifying their limits, and for good science we want that. However, it does not serve as evidence to falsify the whole enterprise of PCT, unless there are no local adjustments to a given model to make it match the (falsifying) data.
EJ: For me, it makes for a stronger presentation of evidence to show an incomplete model and what it does not (yet) do, and then show the model’s additions that lead to those remarkably high correlations. I like the scientific dialectic where a model is indeed “falsifiable,” but with the proper adjustments “not yet falsified.”
EJ: I will leave the rest of the Runkel quotation in place below, because it is so cogently written.
All the best,
Erling
Bruce Nevin 2018-03-20_17:50:14 ET
From a letter written by Phil Runkel to Bill Powers on 17 June 1989:
What I admire most about control theory (as of 8:17 p.m. on 17 June 1989) is (1) its precision: correlations within a few points of 1.0 and 0.0, as appropriate (in the method of relative frequencies, that’s called validity. I never did understand the concept of validity–though I pretended to myself and others that I did–and now I know why), (2) its generality: it works with that precision with every living creature properly tested–so far, anyway, (3) its ability to be modeled, (4) its underlying simplicity, nicely expressed by your statement in the documentation to ARMDEMO that the modeling required only 40 lines of the program, (5) the way it clears up previously fuzzy concepts such as learning, action, perception, memory, “relevant” variables, etc., (6) its fit with common-sense observation: no action when things are the way we want them, higher standards overriding lower ones, the reorganization attending insight and revaluing, the ease and smoothness of most action, etc., (7) its implication to give up, in general, trying to predict particular acts–another thing observable by common sense–as well as its specification of the stringent conditions under which particular acts can be predicted, and (8) the way it clears up–for me, anyway–the anomalies and undesirable assumptions in traditional research method.
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