[From Rick Marken (950906.2200)]
Bill Powers (950906.1125 MDT) --
Says Verplank:
The very word "will" gives the game away. In the English language,
"will" appears as an auxiliary, referring to future events, things
that haven't happened. It relates to predictions of either or both
what we will do and what _will_ be the outcome of what we do.
The etymology here is pretty amateurish stuff: the origin of "will" is
not as an auxiliary indicating future events; the root is the same as
that of "voluntary," a term that is specifically understood to have to
do with choice, intention, and purpose and which has nothing to do
with prediction.
Well, this seems like a nice way to seque into a brief discussion of the
difference between coercion and control. Here are definitions of the
two terms that come from Webster's New Collegiate , 1980:
coerce: to restrain or dominate by nullifying individual will.
control: to exercise restraining or directing influence over.
Both coercion and control involve restraint; and, indeed, in both cases
a variable is restrained in the sense that it is kept in an intended state
despite disturbances that would tend to move it from this state. What
differentiates coercion from control is _will_.
In coercion, a variable is directed towards an intended state by
nullifying the will of another individual; an individual who is also
trying to direct the variable toward an intended state that is
different than te one intended by the individual who is doing the
coercing. With control, on the other hand, it is not necessary to
nullify the will of another individual if there is no one, other than
the person doing the controlling, who wills that the controlled variable
be in another state.
So coercion is just a kind of control -- it is an attempt to control a
variable that is also controlled by another controller. This kind of
control is called conflict; coercion is an attempt to win a conflict by
producing efforts that overwhelm the efforts produced by another
controller. Each arm wrestler tries to coerce the other into putting
his or her hand on the table, palm up.
Coercion is the kind of control that gives "control" a bad name.
Coercion is the rarest, least successful and, unfortunately, best know
form of control. PCT is aimed at getting the good kind of control -- the
kind that produced the piano concerto that I am listening to at this
moment (Ludwig's 4th)-- to be the kind of control that people think of
first when they think of "control".
Best
Rick