Talk:Neuro-linguistic programming/ Chat

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[edit] NLP Model

When it comes down to it, isn't NLP just another model? --jVirus 23:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The term "model" is ambiguous in conventional English usage. In science the term model finds two common uses: (a) to describe a hypothesis that has been demonstrated to be true under a well-defined set of circumstances eg. Hooke's Law of Elasticity is in fact a model because it holds for only some materials under certain loading conditions; and (b) a simulation (in software, sets of equations, in miniature etc), eg. an algebraic epidemiological model of the spread of HIV. NLP meets neither definition. Calling NLP a model elevates it epistemologically beyond where it should be (determined with reference to explanatory power, predictive power and efficacy). NLP is a hodge-podege of conjecture, speculation, mysticism, obscurantism, outdated and/or oversimplified science and ritual. flavius 00:26, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Flavius, I think you may be mixing personal opinion here. The fact is that Grinder and Bandler cite William Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Boyd, George Miller, Bertrand Russell and Paul Watzlawick amoung others as the source of the modeling, formal systems and epistemology (Grinder & Bandler 1975a). Alot of this work came from Grinder's work in linguistics including Paul Postal. These antecedants are confirmed or criticised in published papers by researchers external to the co-creators of NLP. --Comaze 00:52, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

No, I'm not "mixing personal opinion", my statements are based on those of experts in psychology and psycholinguistics. If Professor Levelt -- the direcor of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics[1] -- says that NLP is based on outdated and even falsified linguistic theory then that has the authority of a Papal bull. Who cares who Grinder and Bandler cite? There citation is a nothing more than name dropping, prestige through association. Bertrand Russell came to reject his own theory of types, Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory of schizophrenia has long since been disredited and his imperialist armchair theorising is inconsequential -- science and technology have gone in leaps and bounds without the "benefit" of Bateson's pompous nonsense. TG too was abandoned by its creator (Noam Chomsky). Miller's "7 plus or minus 2" has been shown to be wrong (I provided you citations earlier, see the archives). I've gone over all this with you before Comaze and you've yet to respond to my initial criticisms. TG is dead, double-bind is dead, cybernetic epistemology is dead, theory of types is dead, Miller's magic number 7 is dead, simple hemispheric dichotomies were never true, fictionaslism survives only amongst a few economists such as Milton Friedman, social constructivism has been discredited as has anti-realism. Many of the notions that you are attempting to appeal to make NLP looks like a serious subject are as dead as disco. flavius 02:02, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Flavius : That is some cool stuff about Noam abandoning TG. I am really interrested in that. How specifically did he abandon it? Do you have an article I can read? jVirus 11:28, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

"TG has developed through a number of versions, each succeeding the other. In his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, Chomsky provided only a partial sketch of a very simple type of transformational grammar. This proved to be inadequate, and, in his 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky proposed a very different, and much more complete, version. This version is variously known as the Aspects model or as the Standard Theory. All textbooks of TG published before 1980 (and a few of those published more recently) present what is essentially the Standard Theory, sometimes with a few additions from later work. Around 1968 the Standard Theory came under attack from a group of younger linguists who hoped to equate deep structure, previously a purely syntactic level of representation, with the semantic structure of a sentence (its meaning). This programme, called Generative Semantics, led to the positing of ever more abstract underlying structures for sentences; it proved unworkable, and it finally collapsed. Around the same time, two mathematical linguists demonstrated that standard TG was so enormously powerful that it could, in principle, describe anything which could be described at all—a potentially catastrophic result, since the whole point of a theory of grammar is to tell us what is possible in languages and what is not possible. Yet these Peters—Ritchie results suggested that TG was placing no constraints at all on what the grammar of a human language could be like. Chomsky responded to all this in the early 1970s by introducing a number of changes to his framework; the result became known as the Extended Standard Theory, or EST. By the late 1970s further changes had led to a radically different version dubbed the Revised Extended Standard Theory, or REST. Among the major innovations of the REST were the introduction of traces, invisible flags marking the former positions of elements which had been moved, a reduction in the number of distinct transformations from dozens to just two, and a switch of attention away from the transformations themselves to the constraints which applied to them. But Chomsky continued to develop his ideas, and in 1981 he published Lectures on Government and Binding; this book swept away much of the apparatus of the earlier transformational theories in favour of a dramatically different, and far more complex, approach called Government-andBinding Theory, or GB. GB retains exactly one transformation, and, in spite of the obvious continuity between the new framework and its predecessors, the name 'transformational grammar' is not usually applied to GB or to its even more recent successor, the Minimalist Programme. Hence, for purposes of linguistic research, transformational grammar may now be regarded as dead, though its influence has been enormous, and its successors are maximally prominent. (from pp. 320-1 Trask, R. L. (1999) Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, Routledge)

See also "My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky"[2] and [3] flavius 13:48, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh I'm sorry Flavius, I guess I was using the term "model" in the non-scientific, ambiguous conventional definitionyou described. A representation of some other thing not really focusing on its accuracy. Your description of the scientific model makes it much more clear to me thanks. jVirus 11:28, 16 January 2006 (UTC)