> At the risk of annoying some of my colleagues, I would like to share the
> perplexing observation that two of the most directly
> linguistically-oriented paradigms being used in organizational learning
> today -- Flores' ontology and Bandler and Grinder's Neuro-Linguistic
> Programming -- suffer especially from this poison. In the case of
> ontology, some of the language used is commonly- understood terms used in
> new and unintuitive ways. In the case of NLP, well, the name speaks for
> itself. (I am a great fan of the linguistic approach of NLP, but this has
> been a long-standing peeve.)
>
Thanks Marilyn...
Uh-huh. In philosophy, some people have that tendency too -- Whitehead,
Heidegger, and lots of people with more or less French-sounding names.
There is of course sometimes good reason for a new coinage. But a language,
in order to be useful, has got to be the common property of all of its users.
The nub of the issue is: in our constant reflecting on the world and our
situation in it, how shall we express to our fellows our insights? Mostly
these don't represent what I'd call new "knowledge of facts"; instead
they're new constellations, structures, arrangements, patterns, of the
things we're already acquainted with. And one of my deepest convictions
on this matter is that such insights are best communicated not by coining
new words but by reorganizing the way we use the ones we already have.
I believe that our common human practice fits this pattern. We say "I
never knew what love was before this"; we don't (commonly) say "Love
sucks, this is so much better that I have to call it 'freeblushtimizer'.
Experience and insight lead us, year by year, into seeing new patterns as
referents for our old words.
This applies more, I suppose, to general terms such as love and learning
(and the 'vision' of John Warfield's wonderful story from a couple days
ago), than to individual names. Nothing we're talking about here could
prevent Compaq from coming up with a new name for their next computer.
Nor should it; in such places in our language, let us all be as wildly
inventive as we please, abandon the tedious disciplines of searching for
truth or deconstructing it, whatever.
Oh - one other thought before I close. An insight or system of insights
may very well generate some adhoc vocabulary or shorthand with which to
talk and share itself. Fine. But it has to be able to be silent, in
effect, and collapse back into pure action, at will. All of us are
struck, from time to time, by insights and conceptual vistas of
breathtaking expanse. But if I can't think of some situation in life
where the vision would make some difference in my manifest conduct towards
somebody or something else, then it's worthless.
That's of course a particularly poignant temptation in groups like this,
which necessarily are restricted to 'only words'. A lot of the material
we refer to here, all of us, is essentially behavioral (another reason for
so many stories). What we'd like is a bunch of stipulative, ostensive
definitions of our terms, done with a VCR: "Here - see what that guy was
doing? See how he reacted to the other remark? That's exactly what I
mean by '----'."
Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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