[From Bill Powers (941224.2145 MST)]
Back from Boulder with some new-old perspectives. The newest one came
from mulling over a couple of terms that have arisen recently. One was
"elicit," from a definition of S-R theory that says stimuli "elicit"
behaviors. The other was "select," as in "natural selection" or
"consequences select x (whatever the latest thing x is).
If someone asks me what "a perception" means in PCT, I can answer that
it refers to a signal in the brain that is some function of
environmental variables. A request for an example might produce "One
perception in a model of a tracking experiment is a variable whose value
is proportional to the position of a cursor measured relative to the
center of the screen." Or I may simply refer the questioner to a
published article where perceptual signals are formally defined as part
of a model or a simulation program, and say that is what I mean.
There is one piece of literature to which I will NOT refer the
questioner: the dictionary. I think we have all been overlooking a
critical fact about PCT and the models through which we express it most
exactly. The whole reason for a model is to substitute exact
quantitative language for informal everyday language in which the basic
definitions always come down to an individual's private interpretations
learned in childhood. Words like "elicit" and "select" have definitions,
but the only place to find agreed-upon definitions is in the dictionary.
Even though you will find these words in scientific papers, they have no
scientific meanings.
The dictionary can't provide scientific meanings, nor can any method for
defining words in terms of other words. All verbal definitions boil
down, in the end, to a set of terms that you either understand or don't
understand. "Understand" is defined in terms of "comprehend," and
"comprehend" is defined in terms of "understand." All attempts to find
the meaning of a word in a dictionary end up in a few tight little
circles using terms that can be defined only as synonynms for each
other.
This applies, of course, to ordinary discourse as well. If you ask
someone what he means by a word, he will give you more words. You, of
course, will assume that you understand each of those new words, but
that is a false assumption: you don't even understand the words you use
yourself, if your only way to explain what they mean is by generating
more words. To prove that to yourself, ask a friend to find out what you
mean by a simple sentence: the bat flies at night, for example. What
does "The" mean? "Bat?" "Flies?" "At?" "Night?" And when you supply some
sort of meaning, let the friend write it down and ask about each of
those words. More practically, just follow one of the important words,
then one of the important words used to define it, and so on. You will
ALWAYS end up saying "Well, dammit, you KNOW what I mean!" Or you will
end up pointing to something, or demonstrating something by actions.
Try this out with the word "select" or any alternate form of it. What
does it mean? It means word1, word2, word3..... And what does word1
mean, and word2 and so on? In the end you'll find it doesn't mean
anything but other words -- when you go at it this way.
The concept of an operational definition goes one small step toward
finding a solution to this problem. The operational definition is useful
not because it defines things in terms of operations, but because it
encourages us to define them as _experiences_, as _perceptions_ that are
not words. What does "tickle" mean? An operational definition says that
if you apply certain operations to another person, that person will
laugh, yet try to stop you. But that definition is as useless as the
informal one -- unless you happen to be the one on whom the operation is
performed. If you are the one being tickled by a Ukranian, you know what
the Ukranian word for tickle means even if you don't speak Ukranian. The
real meaning has nothing to do with other Ukranian words, or with
operations performed by a Ukranian. It has to do with the experience of
being tickled. If you're not ticklish, then try this with "hurt" or
"salty." If you're Ukranian, substitute a speaker of any language you
don't know.
Or try it with a word like "understanding." Perhaps some of you, reading
the previous paragraph, came to understand something you had not
understood before. If so, I can now define understanding: it's what you
experienced at some point in the previous paragraph. All I have to do is
to say that "understanding" is that experience, and you need no further
words to know what this term is to mean when you next hear it. In fact,
any _WORDS_ you may try to use to convey to someone else what you
experienced will completely fail, because understanding can't be defined
in other words. It's a nonverbal experience: a nonverbal perception.
My point is this: no theory expressed entirely in words can mean
anything on which different people can agree. The statement "stimuli
elicit responses" means nothing, because "elicit" means nothing. The
place in experience where this word points is empty. The sole purpose of
this word is to fill the place in the sentence where a reference to an
experiencable operation is supposed to go. But there is no operation
called eliciting. We use this word when we want to sound as if we're
talking about an operation, but don't know what operation. The word is a
transitive verb, so conveys the sense that the stimulus is doing
something or other to result in a response. But "something or other" is
all that "elicit" means.
The same is true of "select" in the sentence "consequences select
behaviors". They do what to behaviors? Why, they "select" them. And how
does something or someone go about "selecting" something? A number of
images may come to mind, but none of them fits what a physical
consequence is said to do to the behavior it selects. We do not have an
array of different behaviors, all present at the same time, to which the
consequence can point, as we point to the ice-cream we want to select in
a Baskin-Robbins. We do not pass a whole mix of behaviors through some
sort of sieve to select the one we want, as we use a real sieve to
select the raisins (we hope) in the sugar bowl. The thing said to be
doing the selecting does not appoint, declare, designate, name, choose,
specify, elect, prefer, or favor the thing selected. Neither does it
adjust, align, dial, or tune it. You, too, can consult a thesaurus, and
you will not find any connotation of the verb "to select" that is within
the capabilities of a consequence such as a kibble dropping into a dish.
And don't bother with the dictionary: for "select," mine says "to choose
in preference to another or others." And "choose," of course, is "to
select from or in preference to another or other things or persons."
What "select" or "choose" or "pick" really means is what you do when you
want all the pieces of candy but are told by a grownup that you can have
only one. These are not scientific terms; we learned them as children,
and as children we continue to use them.
Psychological theories are constructed almost entirely from words we are
already supposed to know and knew before we starting thinking about
things like psychology. These words refer to nonverbal experiences if
they're not just pointers to other words. But nobody ever pauses to pick
the critical words and tie them to a specific, standard, defining
experience that everyone is to mean when they use the word. If a
theorist speaks of "level of aspiration," everyone hearing the word gets
to supply his own private experience to go with "aspiration." If the
theorist says that stimuli "elicit" responses, everybody gets to imagine
his or her own process called eliciting, whether it involves pulling on
a string, waving a wand, or pushing the plunger that sets off the
dynamite.
And when somebody says that consequences "select" behavior, you're free
to imagine any process at all that seems to you like selecting. You can
imagine any specific process, simple or complex, and arbitrarily say to
yourself that this is what selecting means. After all, when other people
talk to you about selecting, they can't see what you're imagining.
They'll just assume that you're imagining what they're imagining.
Modeling and simulation try to find a different way to express
scientific theories. There are no ambiguities or alternate meanings in a
simulation. Each variable has to depend on other variables in a
completely explicit way, or the model won't run. When we tie the
organization and behavior of a simulation to real behavior, we are
supposed to reconize in the stimulation something that we also recognize
in real behavior, without going through the intermediary of words.
This is why the rubber-band experiments, the various parts of Demo1, and
other experiments and demonstrations of PCT are so important. They
provide experiential meanings for the formal terms of PCT. In the
running simulation you can see relationships directly, without naming
them, and put them into direct correspondence with parts of the model.
The worst mistake anyone can make in attempting to understand PCT is to
take the basic experience and translate it first into the language of
ordinary psychology, which is to say into natural language, and then try
to find parallels between the model and the verbal representations. All
linguists will tell you that this is the wrong approach for learning any
new language. You must learn to go directly from the new language to the
experience, not from the new language to the old language and then to
the experience. The old language will impose its categories on what
you're observing, so you will continue to use the old way of thinking
even while using terms from the new language.
I make the same mistake that many other PCTers do when trying to explain
PCT to adherents of other theories. We say " the organism varies its
behavior to control the reinforcer." We should not say "reinforcer,"
because that calls to mind properties of the affected part of the
environment that do not, in PCT, exist. We can admit that there is a
relationship between rate of delivery of food pellets and rate of bar-
pressings, but we do not have to admit that anything is going on but the
processes of control. There's a certain amount of politeness in using
the other guy's terms, but doing so hides the fact that PCT can explain
the actual observed phenomena without using either those terms or their
connotations.
There's another thought in here but I'm having trouble getting it into
words. It's basically that because psychology uses natural-language
terms in its theories, its theories are really just descriptions of
experiences. They don't really explain anything. A simulation, however,
does explain things, because it expresses the organization of a system
in terms of simple and regular variables and relationships, publicly
defined so we can't mistake their meanings. The parts of a simulation
are not themselves the explanation, but what happens when they interact
does constitute an explanation. Once we have a simulation that fits our
experience of one simple situation, we can try it out in other
situations and see if it still seems to capture everything we find
important. In Demo1, we can ask "Does this really feel like what I do
when I say I'm controlling something?" And if it does, we can ignore all
the old words for what is going on, because now we have a more direct
link between the experienced process and the formal structure of a
model. We can say, "Whatever is going on right now is what I intend for
the word control to mean."
As usual with ideas that go through one's head before actually waking
up, there's less in these thoughts than there was when they went through
a drowsier and more accepting mind. This is what was left.
ยทยทยท
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Best to all
Bill P.