NLP AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY

One day in 1997 at the Visionary Leadership Conference in Santa Cruz California, I joined one of the small focused groups. These small groups were used as a way for the 200 NLP leaders to work together with each other on specialized projects. I choose Epistemology and in that group were several well known NLP trainers among them John McWirton, Joseph O’Connor, Wyatt Woodsmall, Bert Feustel, Marvin Oka. When we first met, and almost before we had time to say hi to each other, Wyatt speak up and said, “Let’s begin from the premise that NLP is an epistemology.”

I was good with that assertion and wanted to hear more from Wyatt, but before he finished the others began drilling him. “What kind of epistemology are you proposing that NLP is?” “If it’s an epistemology, what specifically is the epistemology?” “Are you sure it is an epistemology? Maybe you are imposing that on NLP.” And so the debate began. I say ‘debate’ because what followed was not really a conversation, much less a dialogue, it was people with very strong opinions to battle for superiority and because of that, I began wishing I had chosen another group. Shortly thereafter I went to the Research group.*1

Some years later, after studying and re-studying Gregory Bateson’s works, and writing numerous articles about Bateson in Anchor Point and NLP World, I eventually published, The Bateson Report (2001). I say ‘re-studying’ Bateson because you cannot read Bateson only once [I have recently finished my 10th reading of Steps to an Ecology of Mind]. As one of the geniuses of the 20th century, Bateson’s writings are far too rich and intricate to understand him on a single reading. Since then, with each re-reading of his books, I have continued to write additional articles about him. I bring all of this up because Bateson is the person in NLP who had the most to say about Epistemology.

Okay, so what is epistemology? In short, it is the study of knowledge (Greek, episteme, knowledge). It is the study of how we know what we know. And since knowing is the primary purpose and intention of thinking, epistemology seeks to understand thinking, how thinking enables us to ‘know’ things, and how we think about our thinking which leads to knowing. Given this, epistemology is your unconscious assumptions about how to think and reach the state of knowing.

This explains in part Bateson’s focus on mind and thinking. Hence, Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Mind and Nature, Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred; A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. In Steps Bateson said that he wrote to present “a new way of thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of ideas which I call minds.” His aim was to create a “science of mind.” He kept asking, “How do ideas interact?” His methodology involved using a double or multiple description and to identify the economics of

patterning. It was from all of this rich content that I began modeling mind using foundational concepts in NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

Now in Bateson’s day (1920s through 1970s), he worked in multiple disciplines, first as a biologist, then as an anthropologist, he was present at the beginning of the systems (cybernetics revolution), worked in mental hospitals, led the Mental Research Institute, developed the double- bind theory of schizophrenia, etc. But the kind of thinking which dominated at that time was linear (rather than systemic), single level (rather than multi-levels, hierarchical), focused on typology (using “heuristic fallacies”) (rather than thinking in terms of relationships and interactions. So about the thinking of that time he wrote: “... the problems of psychiatry are often all shot through with epistemological difficulties” (Sacred Unity, 1990, p. 51) In saying this, he did not limit it to psychiatry, but to anthropology, psychology, medicine, and to all other disciplines. Now in targeting epistemological difficulties and errors Bateson was identifying the harmful ways of thinking which we use to decide how we know what we know.

Primarily he criticized the “misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead) that we give to words assuming that nominalizations and adjectives are referring to things, ‘traits,’ or ‘character structures.’ He also criticized the unthinking and muddled way we think about the “forms” that “things” take. We do that because we forget that we actually referring to processes and processes at multiple levels. From this NLP learned to focus on processes over content, on de-nominalizing, and on getting back to sensory-based information.

He criticized how we fuse together (con-fuse) learning a new association (first level) with learning-to-learn about the context of an association (the next higher level). He called the higher level “deutro-learning” and used Russell and Whiteheads logical levels to distinguish the levels of learning and change. Dilts turned this into his Neuro Logical Levels model and I used it to inform the Meta-States Model of Reflexivity.

In all of this, NLP arose as a new way of thinking—a new epistemology. It fulfilled both Bateson’s and Korzybski’s visions of creating a more accurate language for knowing and understanding. But (and this is a big but) then NLP got lost. It got lost in the sensational techniques that were developed and in the sensationalism of hypnosis. Because both were and are sensational, they captured the imagination of people.

In the meantime, NLP as an epistemology, as a new way of thinking— as a Thinking Model got lost in the process, trainers stopped teaching the Meta-Model or reduced it to a list of distinctions they cover in an hour or two. Yet as a way of thinking, as a set of thinking patterns—your epistemology and mind—are key to how we understand things. And when you address this directly, you have a direct route to “the heart of things” how we create rich, empowering, and productive meanings. That’s why Neuro-Semantics are recovering and expanding that thinking model.

1. I’m glad I did because when the group produced their ‘summary report,’ they never even defined epistemology, never mentioned Bateson or Korzybski and thought that the “current NLP epistemology” was flawed although they never specified what that meant.