[Neurons] 2016 Neurons #40 George Miller & Noam Chomsky -- Contributions to NLP

Sun Aug 28 21:59:11 EDT 2016

From: L. Michael Hall

2016 "Neurons" Meta Reflections - #40

August 29, 2016

Reflections about NLP #6

GEORGE MILLER & NOAM CHOMSKY'S

CONTRIBUTIONS TO NLP

The people who obviously contributed to NLP and the development of the NLP
Model were the three communication "magicians" (Perls, Satir, and Erickson)
and the two "grandfathers" of NLP- Gregory Bateson who taught and mentored
them all and Alfred Korzybski who invented the very idea of
"neuro-linguistics" and "neuro-semantics."  Yet there were others.  Other
contributors that made NLP what NLP is today who may not be so obvious.  Two
of them were the founders of the Cognitive Psychology Movement: George
Miller and Noam Chomsky.  Both men created a distinction in 1956 that
changed the face of Psychology which has led to dating The Cognitive
Psychology Movement to 1956.

Noam Chomsky and Transformational Grammar (TG)

What Noam Chomsky did in 1956 was publish the Transformational Grammar (TG)
model in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.  In doing so landed a
death-blow to Behaviorism.  For half a century from John Watson's original
work in Behaviorism and B.J. Skinner's work, in associative conditioning,
Behaviorism or Learning Theory was the Psychology of Choice.  It had proven
useful and effective in many areas.  What Chomsky demonstrated was that
Behaviorism was inadequate in explaining language development.  In fact, he
showed that it did not work.  He demonstrated that we have a "language
acquisition device" within us by which we learn language.   That's why
children learn as it were the rules of language and then invent sentences
that they have never heard.  It's not mere association.

In T.G., he presented language as rule-organized and governed.  He further
sought to demonstrate that by mapping out all of the transformational rules.
To do that, he distinguished surface statements from deep statements and
created hundreds of "transformational rules" that govern how we move from
one level to another.  This was revolutionary and a tremendous jump in terms
formulating a way to conceptualize the role of language in human
functioning.

This is what John Grinder studied.  He did his doctorate in TG and wrote his
dissertation on Distortions.  Then, two years prior to the launch of NLP, he
published the essential content of the Meta-Model in a book on
Transformational Grammar with Susette Elgin.  The book, A Guide to
Transformational Grammar (1973) offers almost everything that's in the
Meta-Model, but not in the form that we know it.  That's why I have said in
several places that my view is that he was looking for a mechanism whereby
he could offer it more practical in order to catch public attention with it.
Of course, that's what happened with the development of Meta, which was
later named, "Neuro-Linguistic Programming."

It just so happened that Perls used two distinctions that Grinder could use
to connect and Virginia also used two linguistic distinctions.  This allowed
Grinder to then introject the Transformational Grammar (TG) model and, with
the team, create the NLP Communication Model- the Meta-Model.  And in the
first books of NLP, The Structure of Magic, Volumes I and II, and in the
appendix he put in a summary overview of TG.   But thereafter TG did not
continue to play a significant part of NLP.  It was never put into any other
books or appendices.  And today, it is completely gone.  Why?  One reason is
that in 1976, Chomsky himself dis-avowed Transformational Grammar saying
that the model really did not work.  The model broke down in too many
places.  Those who continued his work created Generative Linguistics, and
after that Space Grammar, and eventually Cognitive Linguistics- where it is
today.  Another reason is that NLP did not need it.  All we needed was
"levels" and we had that in Korzybski's work and in Bateson's work.  So we
did not need the levels of TG to substantiate the language in the
Communication Model of NLP.1

George Miller and Cognitive Psychology 

What George Miller did in 1956 that changed the face of psychology was
publish his famous paper, "The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus 2."  This
paper introduced the language of "chunks" of information and presented the
amount of information that we can hold in conscious awareness.  This
language soon was adopted in the 1960s during the early development of
Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Then in 1960 George Miller with Karl Pribram
and Eugene Galanter published the book, Plans and the Structure of Behavior
which introduced the Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) model for how to follow
the internal processes from "behaviors" are created.  Both of these
developments were revolutionary and with them (and Chomsky's Aspects of
Grammar, 1956) launched the Cognitive Psychology Movement (Origins, James
Eicher, p. 125).

What is the connection of these developments with NLP?  John Grinder did a
post-doctorate study for one year in George Miller's laboratory (1969-1970)
(Origins, p. 139).  Miller mentored him!  Then in 1977-1978 Grinder,
Bandler, DeLozer, and Dilts took the TOTE model added the representational
systems and created the Strategy Model for out to model the structure of
experience.2   While Dilts wrote this in papers in 1978,3 this first showed
up in a book when Bandler and Grinder commissioned Dilts to write
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Volume I, The Study of the Structure of
Subjectivity (1980).  So the key distinctions of the Cognitive Psychology
Movement became incorporated into NLP from the beginning.  This is why NLP
is recognized as an expression of Cognitive Psychology and in Psychology
books is put in the chapters on Cognitive Psychology.4 

>From these roots came the details for how to model a subjective experience.
Without the work of Miller and associates and the TOTE model, NLP might have
struggled for years trying to figure out how to sequence or structure what
happens inside "the black box" (Behaviorism's term for internal experience).
Bandler and Grinder and the original group did not create that- they took
into the revolutionary breakthroughs that were just occurring and combined
them with representational systems (which came from numerous other people)
and presto! the Strategy Model of NLP.

References:

1. I wrote about this history extensively in Communication Magic (2001,
formally, Secrets of Magic, 1997).  Those who picked up Chomsky's work were
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Ronald Langacker, etc.  Randy Allen Harris
wrote about the history of TG in The Linguistic Wars (1993).

2. Today Grinder goes so far as to deny that the TOTE is an NLP pattern.
"There are no applications of the TOTE in any applied process pattern...  In
what sense, then, is the TOTE part of NLP?" (Origins, p. 141).

3. See Robert Dilts' books that contain his original papers, Roots of NLP
(1983) which includes his 1976 paper on NLP.  Applications of NLP (1981).

4. I noted in The Spirit of NLP (1997) that Burl E. Gilliland along with
co-authors, Richard James and James Bowman put NLP under "Cognitive
Psychology" in the tenth chapter, (pp. 249ff), Theories and Strategies in
Counseling and Psychology (1989)..

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L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

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Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

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