From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP and what the .... are we talking about???
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: NLP is not concerned with scientific truth.  
Keywords:  NLP   NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 09:34:51 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.042946.3437@ucc.su.OZ.AU> ben@archsci.arch.su.oz.au (Ben Colbron) writes:
>In article <1992Sep14.173929.14613@spectra.com>, ohumukin@spectra.com (Kawika Ohumukini) writes:
>
>|> Rule #1 in NLP is that nothing is true or real.  
>
>In saying that nothing is true you must either claim that *that*
>proposition ('nothing is true') is itself true, and if so, it 
>contradicts the original claim, or you must admit that the
>proposition 'nothing is true' is not itself true. Clearly, this
>claim is self-reflexive: i.e., it is no proposition at all because
>it raises no issue of truth or falsity.
>
>There is folk-psychology and there is science. Then there is simple
>logic. To which do you subscribe?

The presupposition here is that these are the only choices.  And there
seems to also be an presupposition that they are mutually exclusive
choices -- one cannot choose more than one.  

Unlike the language of mathematics, in ordinary language there are many
statements which are not propositions -- for which the values "true" and
"false" don't really apply.  And yet these statements are meaningful.  

Some examples are "It's not good to make wild generalizations on a
subject on which you have minimal knowledge."   "No means no."   "You
shouldn't intentionally hurt people's feelings."   "NLP doesn't belong in
SCI.psychology."   "There is no such thing as truth."   "Psychology is not
a real science."   "Anecdotal evidence is worthless."  

Statements like this are the very life-breath of usenet, because one can
argue about them forever.  It's impossible to establish their truth
or falsity in any non-subjective manner.  Some of these statements
simply express attitudes.  Some are capable of being interpreted on so
many different levels that without an agreement on what the basic
criteria and meanings of the words are, no argument about them can 
ever be resolved.


Now I'm not sure what Kawika means by saying that nothing is true or
real.  But I do think it's a statement of an attitude or point of view
rather than something that has a truth value.  

I do find it a little strange that anyone would consider the assertion
that nothing is true the #1 rule in NLP.  However I do think that it
brings up an important point that causes confusion about NLP for many
scientific psychologists.

The attitude of Bandler, Grinder, and the other developers of NLP was
that they were not trying to discover scientific truths, but instead were
simply trying to create a *model* of certain phenomena.  And that the
important thing about a model is not whether it's "true" or not, but
whether it works to give one the outcomes one is going for.  

The fact is that NLP is full of assertions based on nothing except the
personal insights of Bandler, Grinder, and others.  There is shockingly
little evidence, even informally, for many of these assertions.  But NLP
can be regarded as a massive very undisciplined and uncontrolled
experiment to test NOT whether these assertions are "true," but
whether they are useful.  

This misunderstanding is illustrated, for instance, in a series of
articles almost ten years ago in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.
(I could give the specific reference, but I don't want to destroy my
image in sci.psychology as someone who knows nothing about academic
psychology.)  The authors of the original article did a study to try and
determine whether or not people actually do have a primary
representational system, as is claimed by NLP.  

The study is interesting in some rather perverse ways.  First of all,
the authors found that the people studied did indeed exhibit
individualized patterns of eye movements and the use of sensory related
"predicates"  -- some favoring visual terms, some auditory, some
kinesthetics.  Some other patterns were also observed.  But instead of
noting these as something of real scientific interest and deserving of
further study, the authors were only interested in the fact that these
patterns were not found to be consistent with each other.  People whose
eyes often moved sidewards rather than upwards when thinking (which in
NLP would indicate paying attention to internal "auditorizations" rather
than visualizations) might use a primarily visual vocabulary for instance.  

To me, having studied and used a fair amount of NLP, this was
not surprising.  Anyway, the conclusion of the authors (challenged by a
subsequent paper in the same journal) was that there was not support for 
the claim that people have a favored representational system.

Some have cited this article as evidence showing that there is no
validity to NLP.  Well, if one looks at NLP as an attempt at finding
scientific truth, I think that the best that one can say is that it
offers the scientific psychologist some interesting phenomena to
investigate and some valuable ideas and hypotheses to explore.  

If one looks at NLP, however,  as a set of attitudes and points of view
and "useful lies" (not to mention techniques!) that can enable a
therapist to be more effective, I believe that one will find a lot of
value in it.

--
It is a poor sort of skepticism which merely delights in challenging
those claims which conflict with one's own belief system.  
                                                          --Bogus quote 
lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet
Xref: sparky sci.psychology:3983 alt.postmodern:2432