It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Very sad news! Bill showed me great kindness as a postgraduate student, after email communications about PCT, offering me somewhere to stay should I visit the US from the UK, without ever knowing who I was. True to his word I stayed with him and Mary when I visited for the Fort Lewis convention in 1997.
I hope that someday soon his outstanding contribution to science and the understanding of living systems will get the recognition it deserves. A contribution, in my opinion, as significant to the behavioural sciences as that of Charles Darwin's has been to biology!
Regards,
Rupert Young
On 24/05/2013 18:49, Richard Marken wrote:
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
--
Richard S. Marken PhD
<mailto:rsmarken@gmail.com>> rsmarken@gmail.com
<http://www.mindreadings.com>> www.mindreadings.com
Rick, thanks for sharing. I think we all knew this day would come to pass.
Friends and relatives often ask me if I miss those who once had a significant impact on my life. My typical response is: "No, because they are a part of me now." Bill Powers is no exception.
Chad
Chad Green, PMP
Program Analyst
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1633
"If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself." - Norton Juster
Richard Marken <rsmarken@GMAIL.COM> 5/24/2013 1:49 PM >>>
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of
you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice
and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Dear Allie et al.,
I have nothing to add to all these tributes beyond my own condolences. Bill was a great thinker, a great human being, and someone whom it has been a privilege to know. His ideas will live on!
Kent
On May 24, 2013, at 2:18 PM, Chad Green wrote:
Rick, thanks for sharing. I think we all knew this day would come to pass.
Friends and relatives often ask me if I miss those who once had a significant impact on my life. My typical response is: "No, because they are a part of me now." Bill Powers is no exception.
Chad
Chad Green, PMP
Program Analyst
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1633"If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself." - Norton Juster
Richard Marken <rsmarken@GMAIL.COM> 5/24/2013 1:49 PM >>>
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of
you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice
and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.Allie
--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
For Allie and all PCT’ers:
I am so sorry to hear this. May this great man rest in peace. May you Allie and all his family and friends all rejoice in his life for it will survive his death.
Few men have affected my life as much as Bill Powers. I have the fondest memories of acting as CSG President during our visit to China and seeing him respected there by the brightest of the bright Chinese scholars.
Perhaps more touching and unforgettable was a private meeting with Bill we shared in Colorado Springs. I too am facing death without a liver transplant. These are tough perceptions but I sense that PCT helped Bill get through them as it is also doing for me.
I think that if everyone thought about behavior like Bill did and applied it to our daily actions, we would have a much safer and more sane world where getting along means as much as getting the upper hand.
Kenny Kitzke
In a message dated 5/24/2013 1:50:05 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, rsmarken@GMAIL.COM writes:
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
That’s is a very sad news.Â
A man way ahead of his time.Â
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Chad Green Chad.Green@lcps.org wrote:
Rick, thanks for sharing. I think we all knew this day would come to pass.
Friends and relatives often ask me if I miss those who once had a significant impact on my life. My typical response is: “No, because they are a part of me now.” Bill Powers is no exception.
Chad
Chad Green, PMP
Program Analyst
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1633
“If you want sense, you’ll have to make it yourself.” - Norton Juster
Richard Marken rsmarken@GMAIL.COM 5/24/2013 1:49 PM >>>
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of
you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice
and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
It is hard to believe. I will miss him greatly. I will treasure the many conversations we had together. I will continue to use PCT and MOL in my clinical work. In this way Bill continues to help me help the people I see in therapy.
David Goldstein
From: Richard Marken rsmarken@GMAIL.COM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 1:49 PM
Subject: Fwd: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
http://www.mindreadings.com/
Please accept my commiserations with regard to your Dad’s death Allie and family.
I have never met another academic with such fierce, brilliant intelligence coupled with graceful humility; it’s a rare and wonderful combination. We corresponded privately and I treasure Bill’s astute, insightful comments on my stuttering, spluttering text.
Ours now the torch; to sustain the flame and enlighten the way.
With kind regards to one and all,
JohnK
On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 9:29 AM, F Arocha frankarocha@gmail.com wrote:
That’s is a very sad news.
A man way ahead of his time.
- francisco
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Chad Green Chad.Green@lcps.org wrote:
Rick, thanks for sharing. I think we all knew this day would come to pass.
Friends and relatives often ask me if I miss those who once had a significant impact on my life. My typical response is: “No, because they are a part of me now.” Bill Powers is no exception.
Chad
Chad Green, PMP
Program Analyst
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1633
“If you want sense, you’ll have to make it yourself.” - Norton Juster
Richard Marken rsmarken@GMAIL.COM 5/24/2013 1:49 PM >>>
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of
you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice
and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
Allie,
The news of Bill’s passing, even though expected, was overwhelming.
To the many eloquent tributes I want to add that for me,
knowing Bill and learning PCT from him has been a privilege.
Working to share PCT with the world provides a powerful sense of purpose.
I look forward to our conference June 7-9.
My original travel and hotel reservations remain.
I think it appropriate to add/share the following
tribute to Bill from Brother Phil.
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU
from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.
As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.
The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor
Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.
But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.
The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.
For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.
To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.
You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.
In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.
I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.
Thanks, brother.
Allie,
The news of Bill’s passing, even though expected, was overwhelming.
To the many eloquent tributes I want to add that for me,
knowing Bill and learning PCT from him has been a privilege.
Working to share PCT with the world provides a powerful sense of
purpose.
I look forward to our conference June 7-9.
My original travel and hotel reservations remain.
I think it appropriate to add/share the following
tribute to Bill from Brother Phil.
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct
1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel
runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To:
CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU
from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before
I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.
As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove
to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont
to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword
that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect
seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.
The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn,
requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with
loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I
mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even
wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living
organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor
Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before
1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it
possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of
mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.
But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As
you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What
is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds.
Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.
The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.
For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in
1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I
am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas
are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take
an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But
I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.
To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very
first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.
You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.
In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.
I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given
me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to
make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.
Thanks, brother.
Thanks to everyone for working with Dad and supporting his cause with such energy.
You have said some very touching things about my Dad, and I appreciate it very much.
Denny Powers
Thank you, Dag. It is more than good to have Phil’s voice among us now.
On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Dag Forssell csgarchive@pctresources.com wrote:
Allie,
The news of Bill’s passing, even though expected, was overwhelming.
To the many eloquent tributes I want to add that for me,
knowing Bill and learning PCT from him has been a privilege.
Working to share PCT with the world provides a powerful sense of
purpose.I look forward to our conference June 7-9.
My original travel and hotel reservations remain.
I think it appropriate to add/share the following
tribute to Bill from Brother Phil.
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct
1999 19:49:26 -0700From: Philip Runkel
runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Powers
To:
CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDUfrom Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before
Ihave set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.
As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove
tounderstand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont
todo. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword
that cutthe Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect
seemsa simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.
The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn,
requiresabandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with
loopswhile reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I
meanit is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even
wroteabout “feedback.” But the manner in which living
organisms makeuse of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor
Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before
1960will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it
possibleat last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of
mathematicaltheorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.
But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As
yousay, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What
iscrucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds.
Previouslydisparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.
The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.
For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in
1978to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I
amwriting, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas
aremultifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take
anhour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But
Iam sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.
To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very
firstconversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.
You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.
In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.
I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given
mea way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to
makePCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.
Thanks, brother.
This is a very sad news. As I said before, I beleive that Bill was a pioneer, herald of new age. And I don’t doubt that one day his ideas will be part of life of all human kind. He’ll live for ever.
My deepest condolance to family…
Boris Hartman
----- Original Message -----
From:
Richard Marken
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 7:49 PM
Subject: Fwd: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
I am very saddened to hear about Bill’s death. He was a invaluable resource of knowledge, kindness and support in the PCT community and for me personally. I will always be proud of having known Bill.
Adam
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Boris Hartman boris.hartman@masicom.net wrote:
This is a very sad news. As I said before, I beleive that Bill was a pioneer, herald of new age. And I don’t doubt that one day his ideas will be part of life of all human kind. He’ll live for ever.
My deepest condolance to family…
Boris Hartman
----- Original Message -----
From:
Richard Marken
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 7:49 PM
Subject: Fwd: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.
Best
Rick
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct
1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel
runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To:
CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU
from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before
I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.
As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove
to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont
to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword
that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect
seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.
The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn,
requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with
loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I
mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even
wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living
organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor
Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before
1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it
possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of
mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.
But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As
you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What
is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds.
Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.
The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.
For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in
1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I
am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas
are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take
an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But
I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.
To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very
first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.
You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.
In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.
I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given
me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to
make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.
Thanks, brother.
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Dear All,
I am in northern Wisconsin and just opened my email. I am very saddened by the news of Bill’s passing. He was for me much like a second father. I will miss him and the ability to ask him even the simplest of questions and be treated with great respect. I have and will continue to view him as one of my greatest teachers I have ever had the experience to learn from. His work and ideas have brought a new perspective on life to thousands around the world. I hope to continue to pass along what he has taught me and share his message of PCT.
Shelley A.W. Roy
Be Creating!
-----Original Message-----
From: Denny Powers denny68flh@gmail.com
To: Dag Forssell csgarchive@pctresources.com
Cc: Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Tim Freeman tim@fungible.com; Fred and Perry Good nview@aol.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; <,mmt@mmtaylor.net>, mmt@mmtaylor.net; James soldani jamessoldani5@gmail.com; <,bbabbott@frontier.com>, bbabbott@frontier.com; McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com; Claire Runkel c/o Larry Dunn larrygdunn@comcast.net; Greg and Pat Williams gwill@mis.net; 328babs . bara0361@gmail.com; Bruce Nevin bruce.nevin@gmail.com; Brett Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com; Shelley Roy shelley@be-print.net; Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; Richard Pfau RichardPfau4153@aol.com; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; <,rjrobertson2@comcast.net>, rjrobertson2@comcast.net; <,Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au>, Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; Sara Tai sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Mike Mermel mmermel@mikemermel.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Frans Plooij fplooij@kiddygroup.com; Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Hugh Gibbons hgibbons@law.unh.edu; Tom Bourbon tombourbon@sbcglobal.net; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann bbollmann@bbollmann.com
Sent: Sat, May 25, 2013 4:57 pm
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13
Thanks to everyone for working with Dad and supporting his cause with such energy.
You have said some very touching things about my Dad, and I appreciate it very much.
Denny Powers
Here is a post from Bill’s daughter Barbara with information about the memorial that she was unable to send to CSGNet.
Best
Rick
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:
All,
Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.
Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).
– Gary
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:
Hi Rick,
I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.
Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.
Henry
On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:
Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.
Best
Rick
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDUfrom Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before Ihave set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove tounderstand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I hadbroadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont todo. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months ofemotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated tothe convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of itsfunctioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms makeuse of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books asthe founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the periodbefore Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, inthe behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, butsimply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – theenabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of thehierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doingresearch at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all threetogether in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they beganrowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I amwriting, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas aremultifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take anhour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But Iam sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four linesor by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internalupheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist wouldsay. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.Thanks, brother.
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.
Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page
Hi Barb
I posted it to CSGNet.
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 9:04 PM, bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone,
It’s been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I continue to be amazed at the scope of his impact, in so many ways…
We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…
For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.
Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.
On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.
We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied to some extent until Tuesday.
Thank you again, and many times over…
*barb
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:
All,
Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.
Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).
– Gary
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:
Hi Rick,
I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.
Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.
Henry
On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:
Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.
Best
Rick
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDUfrom Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before Ihave set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove tounderstand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I hadbroadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont todo. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months ofemotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated tothe convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of itsfunctioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms makeuse of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books asthe founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the periodbefore Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, inthe behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, butsimply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – theenabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of thehierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doingresearch at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all threetogether in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they beganrowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I amwriting, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas aremultifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take anhour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But Iam sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four linesor by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internalupheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist wouldsay. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.Thanks, brother.
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.
Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page
What a shock to have it made official, even though I knew this news was forthcoming at any time. With tears in my eyes I say Vale, Bill Powers - to the person who has had the most powrful and gratifying affect on my life.
I know I'm getting my thoughts in late in the stream of testimonials. I have been somewhat sick myself for a few weeks. Bill's death only punctuates alertnesss to the end, modest as it has been, of participating in what I am confident will prove to be one of the most earth-moving, and exciting, developments in western science and society. I have quietly shared a small taste of Bill's fruistration at the opposition of so many people who could only benefit, if they had taken the trouble to understand what he was telling and showing them/us.
Sharing your grief,
Dick Robertson
________________________________________
From: Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) [CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU] On Behalf Of Richard Marken [rsmarken@GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 12:49 PM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: Fwd: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13
It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.
Allie
--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com<mailto:rsmarken@gmail.com>
www.mindreadings.com<http://www.mindreadings.com>
Dear Barb and all
It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.
I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark, R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.
Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.
Best regards
Rick
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:
All,
Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.
Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).
– Gary
On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:
Hi Rick,
I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.
Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.
Henry
On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:
Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.
Best
Rick
=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDUfrom Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:
Dear Bill:
In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before Ihave set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove tounderstand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I hadbroadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont todo. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months ofemotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated tothe convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.William of Occam would not approve.
The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of itsfunctioning.
You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms makeuse of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books asthe founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the periodbefore Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.
Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, inthe behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, butsimply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – theenabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of thehierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doingresearch at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all threetogether in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number5!
I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they beganrowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I amwriting, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas aremultifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take anhour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But Iam sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four linesor by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internalupheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist wouldsay. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.Thanks, brother.
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com
Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.
Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page