Thanks for replying. You know I always appreciate your input

Recognising the 1st, 2nd and 3rd order presuppositions is definitely an important part of this. I really like the idea of listening for what isn’t there and more often than not, what’s not said directly often holds the key to the solution (at least that’s my experience so far).

Pragmatics is also something that I’ve been thinking a lot about (as you know) and will become part of another article in this series about patterns.

I’ve also been thinking about some of the common sayings in our society and how they play a role in metaphor and pragmatics. Things like “The best things in life are free” and “tis the season of good will” etc.

When I first started listening out for different levels of presupposition it was really interesting and even slightly frustrating because the things people were saying had so much holding those concepts in place and remembering to keep a check on what you make people consciously aware of is definitely a step that should go with learning that kind of thing.

Anyway, Puerto Vallarta will be really great, infact I’ve heard it’s going to be one of the best courses for me to attend. We’ll see what happens, it all depends on how much good will the universe decides to bestow on me in the next day or two.

Talk with you soon….Phoning home now.

Jamie

If you allow me to add to your post… and if not then “oops, sorry”.

Anyway, when you mention gathering information from the language portion of communication I think it is very important for people to realize that most times even more important than the information said is what was not said but needs to be there for what was said to make sense or even be possible.

Note. I do agree there is a lot of important information not coming from the verbal portion of communication. However focusing on the verbal aspects for a while.

For starters recognize 1st, 2nd and even 3rd order presuppositions. I recommend starting by the presuppositions of existance, possibility and relationship (causality and equivalences).

Also if we think “pragmatics” it is very likely that the people we talk to use metaphors and even conversational implicatures which means what they say is not literally what they mean.
If someone says “if you don’t tell me what I want heads will roll” we can assume heads won’t literally roll but it is a way of speaking. If you ask someone “Have you figured out what to do?” and they reply “I am not Einstein” we already knew that but what the person is really saying is “I am not smart enough” or something like that.
So in order to make sense of what people say we also must do a pragmatic analysis of his or her communication.

For anyone not familiar with the field of pragmatics we can simplify a definition by saying “it studies the realtionship between the message and who said it to whom, where, when, how and it relates to what is implicitly understood by both speaker and listener that is not explicitly said”.

Anyway I wanted to add this because I think it is common for NLPers to focus on the literal message (some doing a syntactic and semantic analysis) and not realize there is such a thing as a pragmatic interpretation of the message.

Have to go since I am teaching today (pragmatics btw). Have a great day… oh and Jamie when this week will you be sure you are joining us in Puerto Vallarta for a great time, which you will be sharing your experiences with the readers of NLP Connections soon after it is over?
oh… and phone home!