Hi John
I think the reason PCT might seem like a cult or a bubble is because it’s about a phenomenon that most behavioral scientists don’t recognize or fully understand: the phenomenon of control. Control is what is informally known as purposeful behavior. So PCT explains the purposeful behavior of living organisms. The big problem is that control looks a lot like stimulus response, output geneneration, or selection by consequences type behavior. So behavioral scientists study behavior based on the assumption that it is the result of one or another of those kinds of processes.
The research that’s been done to study behavior from those points of view tells you little or nothing about the controlling that is actually occurring. The most important feature of this controlling that is ignored by this research is the perceptual variable or variables around which any particular behavior is organized. PCT research is oriented to testing the PCT model which proposes the different types of perceptual, variables organisms control, how they control them and why.
So PCT has had a problem because it implies (as Bill Powers said in the Foreword to my book MIND READINGS) that a large segment of conventionally done behavioral science research has to be “deposited in the wastebasket”. Obviously, that doesn’t go over well with behavioral scientists of any persuasion.
A related problem is that PCT is often seen as simply another theory of behavior. The problem is that the “behavior“ they are talking about is not control. So a lot of discussions of PCT get confused because they don’t describe the phenomena they are trying to explain and they end up being what I call “theory first”. Or even “theory only”.
One of the things I liked most about PCT is that everything Powers said about it was based on clear and relevant demonstrations of behavioral phenomena and clear explanations of how PCT accounts for them. PCT is an “observation first“ theory of behavior.