(Feb. 14, 2011)
One of the first things I sought to understand when I first studied NLP was where did the NLP presuppositions come from and who contributed which presuppositions. So early on, I began reading all of the sources that NLP began from to find who contributed which presuppositions. And most of them go back to Abraham Maslow, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bateson … and then from them, to Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson.
What are the official NLP presuppositions and how many are there? Well, if you want to start an argument, ask that question! You will have people at the extreme like John Grinder who rejects most of the NLP presuppositions and others who have tried to bring in various New Age ideas. But in most of the early NLP books—the following are recognized as the NLP Presuppositions.
1. The map is not the territory.
2. People respond and act according to their internal maps, not according to reality.
3. Meaning is context dependent. What something means depends on the context.
4. Mind-body are parts of the same system and so affect each other.
5. Individual skills result from the sequencing of representation systems.
6. Rapport is created by respecting each person’s model of the world.
7. Person and behavior are different logical levels. A person is more than his or her behavior.
8. Every behavior is useful in some context.
9. Behavior is to be evaluated in terms of its context and ecology.
10. Behind every behavior is some positive intention.
11. You cannot not communicate.
12. The way you communicate influences your perception and another’s reception.
13. The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
14. There is no failure, only feedback.
15. Check the ecology of a system; systems can be ecological or non-ecological.
16. The person with the most flexibility will have the most influence in the system.
17. Resistance indicates the lack of rapport. There is no resistance, only the lack of rapport.
18. People have all the resources they need to be able to succeed.
19. People are response-able persons.
20. Humans can sometimes learn through a one trial learning.
20. People make the best choices that are open to them.
22. We seek in increase choice, not limit choices.
23. If one person can do something, then it is a human ability which can be modeled and replicated so that most people can improve their own skills.
Now ask any informed NLP-er the question, “What NLP Presupposition did Alfred Korzybski contribute?” And they will immediately tell you. “The map is not the territory.” We all know that one. But what most NLP trained practitioners, master practitioners, and trainers do not know and cannot tell you is the full significance of that premise in General Semantics and how that statement establishes the very epistemology of NLP. And why not? Mostly because it was taken on as an assumptive understanding of human nature, human mind and consciousness, and epistemology. I guess that’s why it is called a presupposition!
This is also the case because most writers and trainers in NLP have not gone back to the source, read Science and Sanity for themselves and simply do not know the incredible importance of this profoundly simple statement.
“The map is not the territory.”
“The menu is not the meal.”
“The sex manual is not the sexual experience.”
“The photo in your wallet is not the person.”
“The brochure is not the holiday.”
These statements of negation reveal and announce a distinction, which if not understood, creates the foundations for unsanity and if left uncorrected, can set the stage for insanity. It invites the unaware to identify two things that exist on different dimensions, different logical levels, and as different phenomena. If you identify your mental maps or mapping about something as that something, you create a distortion that in some circumstances can be disastrous. It would have the kind of results if you confuse the menu for the meal and began chewing on the menu (!) or if you confused the photo for the person and tried to hug and kiss the photo. Probably not very satisfying!
Identifying and identification, in fact, in Korzybski’s work of General Semantics, is the big problem in human thinking, consciousness, speaking, and responding. To the extent that you identify (or over-identify) you are confusing map and territory. Infants and primitives confuse their maps of reality with reality and so are superstitious and engage in magical thinking. You then will suffer word-phobias and be reactive to words, descriptions, and not take the time to ask:
“What do you mean when you say those words and use those symbols? What do they stand for? What are you referring to?”
Whenever you make a map you are using symbols, and the symbols, whether pictorial or linguistic or by gestures, do not refer to themselves, but to something else. That’s what a symbol is. It works its magic by enabling you to use the word “mountain” or “river” or “road” or “dangerous bear” without having to go there and point to it. You can point to it linguistically. And while that is true for sensory-based referents as just mentioned, it is a hundred-times more true for ideas, concepts, understandings, descriptions of processes, etc.
Are you wondering about building a system on a negative premise—on a negation? The power of this is that if it is not so, then all you need to do to contradict the system or show where and how it breaks down is to produce one example of the opposite. What symbol is the thing itself? This “denial of identity” as Korzybski called it distinguishes “objects” that appear to us in our neurology via our nervous systems and the “events” out there in the world (the territory, reality) that we cannot know and experience directly.
Yes, it seems to us that grass is green, water is wet, rocks are hard, yet if we are to accept the discoveries of modern physics during the past hundred years, these modifiers and adjectives describe how we experience certain events in our neurology. The greenness is in our rods and cones, the wetness is our kinesthetic sense of touch, and the hardness is the macro-level that we live on, not what is occurring at the level where the electrons dance. We are actually describing our reactions, not the world— our maps, not the territory.
“In the era which is passing, positive premises were supposed to be important, and we did not know that a whole Non-Aristotelian system can be built on negative premises. The new era will have to revaluate these data, and build its systems on negative premises, which are of much greater security.” (p. 50)
“Two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experiences: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation. These two most important negative statements cannot be denied.”
“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.” (pp. 60-61)
Negative premises makes difference fundamental, it makes structure the link, and so it requires us to think in terms of the relationship and the system (p. 93, 399, 426, 476). If you want to know more about this foundational NLP Presupposition, see pages 58-59, and pages 10-11, 28 in Science and Sanity.
More Presuppositions
There are other NLP presupposition in Science and Sanity. Here are some that I have found and locations in the book where you can find them. If you have found others, let me know.
People communicate from their model of the world (p. 419).
The human nervous system works perfectly well (p. 466).
People have all the resources they need. “His [the average man] nervous system works continually, as does that of a genius. The difference consists in that its working is not productive or efficient.” (p. 485).
You can learn to solve your own problems (p. 529).
There’s a structure in every experience, so search for that structure; structure is the only source of knowledge (p. 544).
So Alfred Korzybski not only established some of the language of NLP— neuro-linguistics, neuro-semantics, human engineering, states, etc., but also some of the basic NLP Presuppositions as well and he did so back in 1933-1941.
Pretty amazing, don’t you think?
Alfred Korzybski Series #1
Alfred Korzybski Series #2
Alfred Korzybski Series #3
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