Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
I've spent longer looking for "amp+hash+one+seven+two+semicolong" than I would have spent on the whole darned entry! Oh well.
I'm trying to get the first bit of Harris' "The Linguistic Wars" on the page; just one line of formal notation. Been a challenge, and I think the answer's a-gonna be to include little gifs of such equations...but shouldn't there be a better way?
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If you have been reading the oblios-cap blog you'll understand why I think it's time to get to Randy Allen Harris's "The Linguistic Wars", especially after my last blip on the cogling radar. And so this new blog and category. Welcome.
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A pal sends me a smart-alecky link to an article disclaiming the "Don't think of blue," schtick. The irony, of course, is that the disclaiming gent is using many of the language patterns first codified in Grinder and Bandler's "The Structure of Magic, Vol. I," and "The Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Vol. 1" while inveighing against "NLP and other communication modalities that claim to know how our brains work." Sadly, few NLP adherents or detractors are the slightest bit familiar with this material.
The problem with the aforementioned disclaiming stems from a conflation of ideas. The relevant statement about negations, generally accepted in cognitive science, is that negations *only* exist in language, rather than direct or primary sensation, not that "your mind cannot proccess a negative command". The paradigmatic example is, "How would you draw 'The cat did not chase the rat'?" To draw, to depict visually, to recreate in the same channel sensory inputs similar to the ones to which the sentence might refer, requries the creation of positive information. The eyes see what they see. The skin feels what it feels. The skin does not feel what it does not feel and the eyes do not see what they do not see. Language lets us refer to "other-than-current direct sensation." One model I'm currently toying with is that the primary thing about language is the many ways it lets one move from direct, linear cause and effect, stimulus and response, and creates an ever widening gap from such a linear, single-input-single-ouput system.
Imagine a see-saw, a teeter-totter, a lever and fulcrum. Binary. One end goes up, one end goes down. Now imagine it looks the same but what makes the north end go up is no longer the immediate position of the south end but some indeterminite, indeterminable set of linkages. The reality of language is infinitely more complex. Our model still only looks at one "north end" (result, effect, etc.) but in reality effects are as multitudinous as causes. But even this adjusted model is infinitely less rich than reality, in which each cause is an effect and each effect is a cause.
True, that's not a particularly fruitful way to go about thinking about things. There's no way to get one's teeth in it. But that doesn't make it less valid, less isomorphic to the way things are. Does a quark chasing physicist try to add up the net results of sub-nuclear forces when asking that pretty blonde out on a date? Of course not. For better or worse we are creatures of model, a model constrained by our sensory aparata and our ability to maniuplate the relationships between the inputs of those sensory apparata. We are alway responding to sensory experience, we just don't always know it. The tone of the teacher's voice as much as the words they say can lead us to seek solace in the scene outside the window, or can transport us through time to great moments in history or just boredom-bomb us into daydreaming...all of which are comprised of sensory inputs related to the immediate environment, like the ends of that teeter-totter, through some indeterminite, indeterminable set of linkages.
Once upon a time there was a man who sought wisdom, knowledge, the power to do good in the world. He climbed a high mountain to find the temple-cave of a great master, begged admittance as a disciple, and was eventually accepted as the master's pupil. The master demonstrated amazing powers: levitation, healing, telepathy, covering with spirits of the departed, and always a compassionate radiatiant being at peace with all.
The years passed, and the student spent many of them sweeping the cave, caring for the offerings brought by pilgrims, and, slowly, patiently learning the masters wisdom, learning to create the miracles the master created, and most importantly, learning to be always in and always radiate compassionate peace with all.
The time came at least, after twice ten-years, as the master made ready to leave this plane of being, for the student to go back to the world and share his learnings. "You have learned well, suffered hardship with great patience, and your peace and compassion can be shaken by now earthly event. So go now into the world, with my blessing, do the work you were brought here to do, with this one warning in mind: All these things you have learned are your gifts, your possessions by divine right of study and knowledge and dedication, but they will only work, you will only be able to manifest these blessing in your world and for those around you so long as you . . .
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I queried on cogling about this notion of negation, giving a paragraph from the "blue monkeys" post, with truly heartening results.
For me, the main difficulty with the statement comes down to the implicit, *polar* opposition between "only existing in language" as opposed to "existing in direct or primary sensation"....Can we really assume that both language and drawing are both "fed" directly by "direct or primary sensation", with no intervening layers of cognitive or conceptual organization?
Normally this is the kind of position I would have argued, but the page that started it all had got my dander up and I missed this obvious and important point. The model to which I was referring is Grinder and Bandler's popularization of Chomsky's deep-structure/surface-structure model as found in "The Structure of Magic" (Structure). It is important to remember that this was not a work of linguistics, but, rather, a use of linguistics to inform the creation of a model of therapy. Structure goes on to postulate a relationship between sensory experience and deep structure similar to that allegedly obtaining between deep structure and surface structure. The DS/SS model is not in vogue as it once was in some circles, but as offered in Structure really isn't such a terrible thing, being at least as useful and plausible as Berne's tri-partite ego, and much more useful and plausible than Freud's tri-partite model. I think it fair to point out that my blue monkeys post did indeed offer a more rich model than the simple language/sensation bifurcation questioned in the quote above. In the end any description of these processes will be useful only to the extent that it successfully limits to a wieldly number the operands and relationships modeled.
Another respondent played the existential card, citing a Sartre example of planning to meet a friend and the let down of being stood up. I am on much firmer ground existentially, experientially than I am linguistically. When we arrive at the coffee shop we experience what we experience, and it differs from the projected expected fantasy experience we anticipated. Now the experience and the fantasy I would class as being of a kind, whereas the anticipation and the disappointment (a word that suddenly seems quite literal in this context) are of another kind. One might call the two classes "experience" and "evaluation" except this still seems to imply the evaluations are something other than positive (rather than pleasant) experiences. Anticipation may be a code for, in reference to, the fantasy, but anticipation also is a somatic event in response to the fantasy...itself a somatic event in response to...
(Later I need to come back to the idea of negation as complement of addition, both are change, the underlying concept, and both are changes in existence; this is different from exists and doesn't exist. And the positive/negative|pleasure/pain|reward/punishment cube always bears repeating.)
Finally, there was a response that included:
Consider two-year-olds during the year when they say "No!" almost constantly. Notice what they do.
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"Don't turn here" means "keep driving straight ahead."
These examples seem, to me, to *support* the notion that the negation is in the language representation rather than the sensations (if we were to cling to such bifurcation), else a list of " 'Don't N' means 'Do M' " would be a list of redundancies. "Don't turn here," could as well mean "stop here" or "put it in reverse"; trivial but not mean-spirited examples of what else "Don't turn here" could (do?) mean. Negation seems often to allow the question, "If not, then what?"; negation seems to act as a kind of place holder. It is quite beyond me to explain how or why that should be. The example, " 'Don't turn here' means 'Keep driving straight ahead' " is clearly the most likely social usage, but what is there in the out of context, words qua words, "Don't turn here" to preclude the other possible interpretations? It is the context of social convention in your example that permits the seeming certainty of the one meaning the other. (On the other hand, how can there be anything like language without the context of social convention?)
In the examples with the children, such as, "Notice what they do while they say 'No.' ", my experience and undestanding are that this is pretty much an idiomatic use of "No" modeled on similar parental use of the word, not as negation, but as a verbalization designed to accomplish behavior shaping via voice tone and facial expression, via the simple provision of approval and disapproval, which seem like a thing and its negated polar opposite in the langauge I have used (X and negated X) but which are in fact the difference between a purr and a growl, a smile and a snarl, possibly polar opposites but very much not a case of one simply being the absence or negation of the other.
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