Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 14:36:23 EST
From:         mmt@BEN.DCIEM.DND.CA
Subject: Re: "beliefs", standards

[Martin Taylor 921118 14:10]
(Rick Marken 921118.0900)

>So what you mean by standards is "perceptual variables that involve another
>person". Well, now we have another possible meaning for "standard". Why
>don't we just stick to the PCT model terminology (and semantics)?

I've been trying to stick very precisely to the PCT model, but I don't know
of any standard terminology to handle what we are talking about.

The problem with any definition of "standard" is that it is something (let's
not say what) that one person applies to the observable actions of another.
A person may apply standards to themself (isn't non-sexist language loverly?),
but only as an observer, possibly in imagination, of their own actions.

Standards have a funny status.  I cannot control your behaviour, because
I have no sensory information that allows me to perceive it.  But I can
control my perception of your actions, in the same way I can control my
perceptions of the inanimate world.  To control perceptions of anything,
I perform actions (not controlled; the product of all past reorganization),
and if my reorganizations have been effective, my perceptual signals come
closer to their reference levels.  If I hold reference levels for my
perceptions of your actions, the same applies.  I act, and if the error
signal does not decrease, there is a reasonable probability that I will
reorganize.  You, too.  We both reorganize if controlling (as CEV's) each
other's actions is not proceeding successfully (and if it matters--i.e if
we are working at a reasonably high gain).  Our mutual reorganization will
probably wind up eventually in a situation where our perceptual errors are
not too large.  Then, each of us is acting according to the other's standards.
This cannot happen if it causes a more than compensating increase in errors
related to control of percepts outside the interaction.  The most likely
end result is that most people in a community use much the same set of
standards.

Naturally, the end result of reorganizing through social interaction and the
control of the actions (not the behaviours) of each other will be the
existence of perceptual functions in each person that relate to patterns
of actions in other people (and perhaps in themselves).  Specific reference
levels for these perceptions will be associated with the probability of low
errors in other perceptual signals, and those reference levels may become
the kind of "standards" that you were originally talking about.

>As you can see, I don't think standards are anything that people control

People don't control reorganization.  Reorganization allows them to control
their percepts more successfully.

>Boy, you got me. In the quote above it sounded like standards were
>social perceptions. Now they are something that can't be controlled. And
>yet people reorganize when controlling them produces conflict. So it must
>not be failure to control standards that is leading to reorganization.
>But the reorganization leads to new, stable standards.

Do you follow it better now?  Think about what is happening in the interactions
of many people, all potentially reorganizing in response to sustained error,
rather than about the words used to describe the interactions.  I don't mind
changing terminology, but as you never tire of pointing out, PCT is a new
and different viewpoint.  To talk, we use old language that never was built
on PCT, and take the old words into the PCT context with new, sharper
meanings.  I've done the same in LP, where I use "syntax" "semantics"
and "pragmatics" in a precise sense that I think is included in the old
vague senses.  It can cause confusion, but short of creating a new
language, what else can one do?

If, instead of "standard" we use "social convention," does this help?

> So standards are
>a perceptible (to Martin) side effect of reorganizing to control
>perceptions that are not standards?  In other words, people control
>perceptual variables; this can appear to an observer are a process of
>converging on social standards. Is this it? If so, I completely agree.

I'm not sure this is what I said.  We haven't arrived at a Paskian third-level
agreement over an understanding, because I am not sure how to interpret
this paragraph.  Does the earlier part of this posting agree with it?

Martin
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