ИСТИНА

Pask has written several lengthy papers on social systems and social cybernetics. He has taken the paradigms and findings of his laboratory work and, following the general spirit of cybernetic thought, seen to what extent their range of convenience can be extended to shed light on the larger concerns of mankind. An early paper still reads as a remarkable attempt to bring a unitary cybernetic view to bear on problems usually distinguished as sociological, psychological, political and ethical. It was in the context of such discussions that Pask first articulated his concept of the Psychological Individual (P-Individual) as distinct from the Mechanical Individual (M-Individual). The concept has been elaborated extensively: in the theory of conversations proper, a conversation is a P-Individual. The main thrust of the distinction is to recognise the systemic nature of the P-Individual as a unitary organisation which may or may not be correlated with the unitary organisation of an M-Individual. A typical M-Individual is a processor, such as a brain. Such a processor may execute one or more P-Individuals as processes – here Pask has in mind the internal conversation that is cognition, most clearly observed in the experimental free-learning situations where the student, acting as his own teacher, directs his own attention. Several such processors may execute the P-Individual, which is a conversation: the social process which, by dint of information transfer, synchronises the activities of a collection of M-Individuals. By focusing on the organisational properties of cognitive systems, Pask is unique in having developed a set of concepts which can unify the social sciences: organisationally, a social institution and an isolated psyche are both subsumed as conversational processes, as P-Individuals. That Pask has done more than make loose analogies about “group minds”, I hope to make clear in Part 2, where the logical and epistemological foundations of conversation theory are spelled out.