X-Delivery-Notice:  SMTP MAIL FROM does not correspond to sender.
Fake-Sender: sibun@parc.xerox.com
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Fri, 14 Aug 1992 18:35:03 PDT
From:         Penni Sibun <sibun@PARC.XEROX.COM>
Subject:      what is and isn't
X-To:         CSG-L%UIUCVMD.BITNET@pucc.princeton.edu
              8 Aug 1992 21:08:48 -0700
              <92Aug8.210945pdt.11855@alpha.xerox.com>

(penni sibun 920814)

   [From Rick Marken (920808)]


   penni goes on:

   >is this [S-R modeling (rm)] what the
   >alife people claim they are building?  it is emphatically not what
   >agre, chapman, brooks and co claim they are building.  for these folks
   >and others in ai, for gibsonian psychologists, for
   >ethnomethodologists, etc., agents and their worlds are *not
   >separable*.  how can you have a respond to b's stimulus when a and b
   >are the same thing?  that's actually not a terribly useful
   >simplification of the argument; try this one:  how can you individuate
   >a's-stimulus and b's-response when you can't individuate a and b?

   My comments about people building control systems and calling them
   SR devices were based on an article I read in a computer graphics
   magazine where little "bugs" moved around the 2-D surface of the

well, please.  you're talking about a different group of people here.

   Trust me. Whatever psychologists call their models, they are SR
   models pure and simple and they are treated this way.

sorry.  i was just at the cognitive science conference with several
hundred psychologists, and they didn't strike me as s-r modelers; one
of the keynote addresses was by turvey, who is a gibsonian (that is,
has an interactionist model of organism/environment), another was by
bates who talked about recent research in aphasia.  i got my undergrad
degree in psych at harvard, a bastion of behavorism in the latter's
heyday; i was taught behaviorism only as part of the history of the
field.  if anything, in my experience, psychologists are too likely to
be cognitivists and not at all likely to be behaviorists (and a lot of
them are too smart to be emphatically either, at least all of the
time).  most ai-types are raving cognitivists.

on my view, you talk like a cognitivist.  partly cause you oppose pct
to behaviorism.  more tellingly, cause you explicitly locate control
in the head, just as cognitivists do.  i think it would be a lot more
constructive for me to understand your position if, instead of
distinguishing your view from behaviorism, you distinguished it from
cognitivism.  care to give it a shot?

you ignored my radical challenges (repeated above), but they are very
much to the point.  in order to convince me, and other people
(characterized as above) who loosely consider themselves to be
interactionists, or situated activity theorists, or whatever, you need
to step back from the pro-/anti-behaviorism debate.  interactionists
*just don't find that an interesting question*.

if you think it's too weird to consider that organism and environment
are fundamentally inseparable, why not consider a slightly different
take on it:  action and perception are inseparable; there is no way
you can draw a line and say that on one side is the organism's action
and on the other is the organism's perception.  on this view, what
could it mean to locate control in the head of the organism?

on the interactionist view, control is neither in the head not in the
environment.

to conserve my hands, and because they've had years more practice
explaining this than i have, i include excerpts from two authors on
the ``interactionist'' view.  this first bit is from an unpublished
manuscript of phil agre:

   A worldview might be decades old, but its rhetoric will continue
   to encode its formative disputes.  Behaviorists, in their very
   discourse, will
   be forever locked in battle with introspectionists, and the very
   discourse of
   cognitivism is still locked in battle with behaviorism.  Cognitivism and
   behaviorism are really two sides of the same coin, sharing a system of
   metaphors and simply disagreeing on certain important propositions
   within that common horizon.
   [...]
   In my view, what actually characterizes the cognitivist worldview
   is [...] a certain system of metaphors.  These metaphors
   begin by marking out a firm distinction in kind between the mental
   Inside and the world Outside.
   [...]
   Gibson's theory of perception poses a challenge for cognitivism because it
   locates perception squarely in the evolving relationship between agent and
   world.
   [...]
   My point is that the metaphor-system of Inside and Outside finds
   itself unable
   to make any stable sense of concepts which reside neither in the
   agent nor in
   the world but precisely in the relationship and interaction between the two.
   [...]
   We wrote Pengi out of dissatisfaction with STRIPS-like planners and
   with world
   models.  (Pengi, our program, plays a video game called Pengo.)  While not
   intended as a general architecture, Pengi illustrates certain ideas.  It
   implements a version of Ullman's notion of "visual routines" (1984). [...]
   Pengi also illustrates some of the structure of an agent's
   interactions with a structured environment.
   [...]
   Like Gibson, we locate certain phenomena
   in the relationship between an agent and its world.
   [...]
   So where are we?  The critical issue is whether one's categories locate
   things in agents and worlds separately or in the relationship between them.

what follows is the abstract from beth preston's ``behaviorism and
mentalism--is there a third alternative?'', to be published in an
upcoming issue of _synthese_.

   Behaviorism and mentalism are commonly considered to be
   mutually exclusive and conjunctively exhaustive options for the
   psychological explanation of behavior.  Behaviorism and mentalism do
   differ in their characterization of inner causes of behavior.
   However, I argue that they are not mutually exclusive on the grounds
   that they share important foundational assumptions, two of which are
   the notion of an inner-outer split and the notion of control.  I go on
   to argue that mentalism and behaviorism are not conjunctively
   exhaustive either, on the grounds that dropping these common
   foundational assumptions results in a distinctively different
   framework for the explanation of behavior.  This third alternative,
   which is briefly described, is a version of non-individualism.

what i'm still trying to figure out about pct is whether the
methodology, stripped of the theory, is theory neutral enough that one
could build interactionist frobs with it.  this is exactly avery's
undertaking with trying to recast sonja in pct terms; i find this
quite interesting.

cheers.

				--penni