From: amanda@INTERCON.COM (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Date: 20 Aug 92 22:17:35 GMT

friday@netcom.com (Carol Anne Ogdin) writes:
> >         NLP's treatment of language and representational systems
> >         is liable to make any professional linguist run
> >         screaming from the room, or at the very least pound on
> >         the table :).  
> 
> I acknowledge your kinesthetic bias in the above, and absolutely
> concur.

Amusingly enough, this wasn't a metaphor, but a recounting of actual 
observations of professional linguists (a semanticist and a syntactician, 
respectively).  I will refrain from giving their names in the interests of 
maintaining their privacy, but I'm sure that there are people over on 
sci.lang who would be able to reproduce the phenonema in question :).

> Anybody who claims NLP is a unique body of science or
> knowledge is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Fair enough.

> There is no intrinsic assumption about
> linguistic models, although the NLP "meta-model" is a useful (albeit
> imperfect) tool to help understand most people's casual utterances.
> 
> >         Now, some of the claims of NLP ...
> 
> What claims, specifically, do you mean?

Picking the first one that comes to hand: John Grinder and Richard Bandler, 
"The Structure of Magic II", ISBN 08314-0049-8, p. 3:

	"The most thoroughly studied and best understood of the
	representational systems of human modeling maps is that of human
	language.  The most explicit and complete model of natural language
	is transformational grammar. [...] In adapting the concepts and
	mechanisms of the transformational model of the human representational
	system for the purposes of therapy, we developed a formal Meta-model
	for therapy.  This formal Meta-model is (a) Explicit [...] and (b)
	Independent of content -- dealing with the form of the process and,
	therefore, having universal applicability.

	The Meta-model relies only upon the intuitions which every native
	speaker has of his language. [...]"

And so on.  You are welcome, by the way, to quote the entire piece, if you 
think that my elisions for brevity change the fundamental meaning of the 
passge.

> Attributed by whom?

Me, when I attempt to be charitable towards Grinder & Bandler's treatment of 
language.  TG was certainly a remarkable advance, and still affects the study 
of syntax at all levels, despite fundamental problems that have surfaced 
since Chomsky initially devised it.

> Where, specifically, does Bandler make any claim that NLP is a
> comprehensive theory of language?  Knowing Richard personally, as
> I do, I would expect him to emit a loud hoot and guffaw at your
> assertion that he espouses ANY comprehensive THEORY of language.

I did not claim that he thought *NLP* was a comprehensive theory of
language; however, he does make overly strong claims about his source
marterial being so (see the quoted material above).

> In fact, I know of no scholarly paper or document produced by any
> of the founders of NLP for the academic community.

Indeed.  If NLP is in fact innovative, however, I would expect to have seen 
at least *some* material on it in the academic or professional press (either 
in linguistics or psychology).  This very lack is one of the things I find 
very suspicious, since it would have direct bearing on discourse modeling, 
semantics, psychoterapeutic techniques, and a number of other areas.  Given 
the observable tendency of Grinder & Bandler to cite acdemic and professional 
references themselves, I am given to wonder why they have not pursued 
publication during the past twenty or so years.  It would be wonderful 
evidence to show to critics, if nothing else...

> I reiterate:  NLP makes no claims for originality in areas you cite
> here; NLP only claims to have amalgamated the available stuff into a
> teachable (and learnable) whole, resolving some of the different terms
> used by disparate writers into common words.

This I have no problem with.  In fact, I will say that I know many people who 
have found NLP to be useful within this sort of scope.  Now, perhaps my 
initial impressions of NLP were based on faulty data (i.e., overzealous 
practitioners), compounded by my own negative reactions to the presentation 
of linguistics (in particular) in The Structure of Magic I & II, and further 
compounded by my personal tendency to prefer multiple sources to survey 
materials.

> Of course, NLP practitioners-in-training receive citations to those
> references, and they are welcome to pursue them.  However, most of
> them are practicing business people, therapists, executives and
> students who'd rather learn *how* than pursue academic references.

This is true enough, and I must admit that, as I alluded to above, I am one 
of those people that prefers the opposite: I'd rather do my own research, 
since I invariably end up with a much richer base of knowledge and techniques 
than if I am presented with the material "pre-digested."  I attribute this to 
a number of factors: prodigious reading speed and comprehension, a librarian 
and a teacher for parents, and an evidently unusual ability to find 
correspondences between apparently unrelated things (maybe that's why I find 
the Kabbalah so comfortable :) :)).

Sigh.  Perhaps I'm just the victim of overenthusiatic "NLP newbies" :), but I 
got awfully tired in college of people telling me it was the answer to all 
human communication problems--especially as a computational linguistics 
student who was deeply immersed in some of the more intractable briar patches 
of human language :).


Peace,

Amanda Walker

Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA