[Neurons] 2025 Neurons #32 NLP AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #32

August 4, 2025

NLP as Epistemology #1

 

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.

 

 

 

 



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20250804/e66edb6c/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 36723 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20250804/e66edb6c/attachment-0001.jpg>