PRESUPPOSING DISTORTIONS

Having covered the first four distortions, there is the last one in the original Meta-Model list— presuppositions. This is a distortion that you inevitably make, and you do so all the time! That’s because whenever you open your mouth and speak, you are making all sorts of assumptions. You are making assumptions about whatever you are talking about— life, reality, other people, business, health, exercise, and on and on. It is inevitable because it is how language works.

Now to complicate matters further, when you do use presuppositions, you tend to hide the those assumptions away in the back of the mind so that even you yourself are not aware of them. They are there as presuppositions and premises. These are the things that have to be true for what you say to make sense. If I say, “The dinosaurs are rampaging in New York City,” that presupposes that there are dinosaurs, that they are alive, and that they are in New York City. These are implied by the statement, and from the statement you can infer them. It is in this way, that we do inferential thinking, reasoning, and listening.