Monday, February 05, 2007

NLP: What is Knowledge?

Hi,

In my last article of NLP is Epistemology, we talked about the production of knowledge. Here are some of my ideas on Knowledge.

What is Knowledge?

According to Plato, Knowledge is the "Cross-Over" of Truths and Beliefs. When you believe in something, it is you thinking that it is a Truth. But you might be wrong. Then you might not be able to make use of it to do something successfully.

However, but if what you believe is also a Truth, then, it will become useful. To prove something is really a Truth, we need Justification. That means, one must have a good reason to believe something is true. However, the Justification must also be Indefeasible, i.e. it is impossible to override that Reason of Justification.

So, Knowledge might be defined as Indefeasibly Justified True Beliefs.

Since NLP only applies to Pragmatic Knowledge, the Justification in NLP Modeling is the workability of the modelled patterns. To make the Justification near to Indefeasibility, the pattern must be tried and tested under similar conditions as of the modeling process. So, for example, even one has tested a new communication pattern which was modelled from a professional speaker on many professional speakers, it cannot be classified as a Indefeasible Justification for layman speakers, unless one also test this on layman speakers, too.

I must admit that even such test had been done, it still can't be 100% Indefeasible, unless the sample size is big enough as a scientific proof! So, I never recommend application of NLP Patterns in clinical situations. Leave that to professional psychologists, who have been trained with scientifically proved techniques. But it can be useful enough for our daily life!

This also makes Simultaneous Modeling particularly useful. The pattern modelled is just applied for that person and situation at that moment of modeling. It will become obsolete once the situation is over. We model everytime when we encounter a situation.

Next time, we will discuss the Types of Knowledge and we can then understand what kinds of Knowledge we can apply NLP.

Keith
Explore, Exceed & Excel