🚀 go-pugleaf

Help me out here, fellas...

If engineers who design control systems don't really understand control
theory (i.e., they use an S-R model and dismiss PCT), how do they manage to
design control systems that work.  Presumably, whoever designed the
thermostat mechanism that is cited so often on CSG didn't know or care
about PCT.  Yet, from my miserable layperson's perspective, the darn things
works just fine.  Ditto for the weapons systems on board ship.  The
engineers associated with those systems didn't know squat about PCT either,
yet the weapons systems they built worked.  That leads me to ask a couple
of stupid questions:

        If an understanding of PCT isn't needed to design workable control
systems, what value does PCT offer?

        If all PCT does is offer an alternative explanation for phenomena (e.g.,
the thermostat and shipboard weapons systems) that are adequately accounted
for by other explanations (namely, those in the minds of the designers and
builders of such systems), where is the "competitive edge" of PCT as the
would-be theory of choice?


>Rick Marken (990420.1810)]
>
>>Bruce Gregory (sometime 990420) --
>
>> That's certainly true. But Rick is not talking about student
>> misconceptions. He is saying that engineers who design control
>> systems don't really understand control theory and that only
>> "we" truly understand control theory.
>
>Real engineers who design real control systems have used control
>theory to study humans as S-R devices; these same engineers have
>dismissed PCT because they know that control systems control
>objective variables in the environment, not their own perceptions.
>These engineers are not students. Do they understand control
>theory?
Regards,

Fred Nickols
Distance Consulting "Assistance at A Distance"
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
nickols@worldnet.att.net
(609) 490-0095