🚀 go-pugleaf

[From Rick Marken (950214.2115)]

Lash LaRue (1995.02.14/ 1110 EST) --

>Be careful about how you generalize about "the law."

>1) "caused the result" : not all crimes have a "causal" element ...

>2) "intended the result" : not generally a requirement...

>3) "knew that the result was wrong" : the law generally assumes
>this, and the standard maxim is: "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

I agree (what's to disagree?; you're the lawyer;-)).

I guess my main point re: Staddon's article was this: if people are
the type of system that conventional psychologists (like Staddon)
imagine them to be -- S-R devices, universal Turing machines, non-
linear dynamical systems, etc -- that is, if people are cause-effect devices,
then it makes no sense to even consider whether or not any particular
result produced by a person was intended; cause-effect systems have no
intentions (purposes).

It seems to me that the people who invented the law (as well as those who live
by it) clearly saw people as purposeful, not cause-effect, systems. The
assumption of human purposefulness seems to be at the heart of many formal
(and informal) legal decisions. For example, the notion of "first degree",
"second degree", "manslaughter", etc seesm to be all about degrees of
to which a result was intended (done on purpose).

I don't think the law would really treat a result, like spilled milk,
the same if it was produced by accident rather than on purpose,
especially if there was no reasonable way to see the accident as the
result of negligence (which imples that a the person should have had a
particular purpose -- being careful -- but didn't; considerations of
purpose are still involved)? I think most people do distinguish
accidental from intentionally produced results and judge them
differently; most people believe in purpose. PCT confirms this belief
and, more importantly, shows how purposes can be carried out. PCT
shows how purposeful behavior actually works. Lawyers, who already
believe in purposeful behavior, can learn a lot from PCT.
Conventional psychologists, who see purpose as an illusion, have
nothing much to learn from PCT.

Conventional psychologists have been trained to believe that purpose
is an illusion because behavior (like everything else) must follow the
laws of cause and effect. In purposive behavior it looks like a future
effect "causes" present behavior --  a clear violation of the law of cause
and effect; future results can't determine the present means used to
produce then, ergo, purposeful behavior must be an illusion. So conventional
psychologists have been trained to imagine that the _appearance_ of
purposive behavior emerges from the operation of cause-effect laws;
Skinner was trying to do this all the time, claiming that a purposeful
result (a reinforcer) was actually the current cause (selector) of the
future means (responses) used to produce it.

PCT confirms a basic assumption we all have about people -- they are
purposeful. Purpose is real. PCT shows that purpose doesn't violate
the laws of cause and effect; it occurs when cause and effect exist
in a circular relationship -- a negative feedback loop. Cause and effect
behave quite differently when they are connected in a loop than when they
are laid out in a straight line. The difference is that between purpose
and non-purpose, beyween PCT and conventional psychology, between, well,
life and death.

The moral: Lawyers, who are at least familiar with the phenomenon of
purposeful behavior, should not pay attention to psychologists, who
obviously are not.

And that will probably be the last nice thing I say about lawyers;-)

Best

Rick