This whole thing about language and meaning is something that I've been thinking about off and on for years now, if not decades. So here are some two-penny thoughts.

In article <992Feb21.131123.15890@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu> kbradfor@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu (Kenneth Bradford) writes:
>The most powerful current view of language is that it doesn't
>have meaning, but rather that we use it to construct
>meaning. ...

This idea that language creates meaning was, as I understand it, the starting point for NLP, as described in The Structure of Magic, vol. 1 by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They took the idea from General Semantics and from George Kelly and the constructivists. [I know the name Kelly and the term constructivists from Charles Faulkner's article on NLP posted here, but that's about as much as I know.]

Bandler and Grinder's idea was that we use language to construct a "model of the world," and that our knowledge of the world and the way we behave in the world are largely determined by this linguistic model rather than by direct perception [not the best word] of the world itself -- of "das Ding in sich," in Kant's terminology, if my German is correct. (Blame me, not Bandler and Grinder, for dragging Kant into the discussion.)

A person's model of the world is formed through the operations of generalization, distortion, and deletion. The role of therapy, as described in The Structure of Magic, is to adjust this model of the world by correcting generalizations, distortions, and deletions that are not useful. As I see it, this means to bring the model of the world closer to the world itself in those respects that are relevant to a client's problem.

Later on, NLP became equally concerned with the non-verbal aspects of subjective experience -- images, feelings, tones of voice, etc. -- and the phrase "model of the world" now seems be less precisely defined.

One of the most important functions required of a human being's psychological make-up is making decisions. The alarm goes off in the morning and I have to decide whether to get up or stay in bed. I have to decide whether to go teach my classes or stay home and engage in activities that are more attractive to me.

Now these particular decisions are actually "default" for me. The commitment was already made in past time that I will get up when the alarm goes off (unless I realize that I have mistakenly set it for a Sunday morning) and will go teach my classes. But if I were to stop and remake my decision some morning, I would do it on the basis of certain values -- or "criteria," in NLP terms. I, in particular, would tell myself that it would be irresponsible to stay home and read usenet instead of showing up to teach. And I, in particular, place a very negative value on being irresponsible, whereas someone else might say ``Yeah, it's irresponsible. So what?''

Criteria exist in the subject's linguistic model of the world and are very powerful. In doing therapy, they give one leverage. If you want to convince me, for instance, to put a high priority on finishing the book I'm writing, you could try to convince me that it's irresponsible to take time away from writing the book by posting articles to usenet. If you could do this, it would be for me a compelling argument. (Obviously as things stand I'm not buying it. [smiley]

So in the process of decision making, a person takes an event/situation/ hypothetical action in the world and assigns a label -- ``irresponsible'' -- to it. Once something has been put in the ``irresponsible'' category, my attitude is determined.

In doing NLP and in my suicide and crisis work, I would encounter this pattern over and over again. A client would say something like ``But I can't do that. It would be irresponsible'' (with heavy emphasis on the last word). Period. That ends the matter. For that particular client, no further discussion is possible.

Now as a therapist, I probably wouldn't want to try to change the negative value a client places on the concept of irresponsibility -- to convince the client that sometimes being irresponsible can be very good. In any case, it's much easier to attack the other part of the process -- the assigning of the label ``irresponsible'' to a particular action/situation. (``You think of doing leaving your husband as being irresponsible, but in fact, it's remaining in a relationship that's only harmful to both you and him, as well as your children, that's irresponsible. Filing for divorce would be the most responsible thing you could do.'')

In other words, a lot of therapy (in my view) consists of changing the meaning that a client attaches to various criteria.

Instead of the word "meaning," NLP uses the term complex equivalence -- the total complex of things in the real world that are identified by the word in question in the subject's linguistic model of the world.

The two best questions for discovering a person's complex equivalences are "How would you know when ...?" and "What would be an example of ...?" For instance, someone I worked with recently said she really did not approve of casual sex. In order to find out her complex equivalence for "casual sex" I asked: "So how would you know whether sex was casual or not?" (Another alternative would have been to ask "What would be an example of sex that isn't casual?") After much thought my client [for want of a better word] said "I guess it's not casual when the person loves me." And so I asked "So how do you know when someone loves you?" which really stumped her.

And that was one of the things that made it fairly obvious (especially to her!) why she wouldn't allow herself to get into relationships even though she claimed she desperately wanted one.

If a person has to have a particular criterion satisfied in order to achieve their outcome, and if they don't have any reasonable way of knowing whether that criterion is satisfied or not (in her case, whether or not a partner loves her), then achieving that outcome is going to be filled with anxiety.

When I'm working with someone, I never try to insist that my own personal complex equivalence for a word is the correct one. What I'm trying to do is to find a complex equivalence that they will buy and which will get them past their problem.