Carl H. Flygt
December 2005
Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/ ), the remarkable collaborative grass-roots compendium of human knowledge, is having its troubles representing neurolinguistic programming (NLP) from a neutral point of view. The debate is ongoing and vigorous, but it appears to be settling on a consensus that NLP is not psychology (it lacks a theory of personality), is not linguistics (it is built on untested linguistic hypotheses and inadequate linguistic data), is not neuroscience (it has no published neuroscience behind it), is not scientific (it has made no impression at all on the behavioral sciences) and is not religion (it lacks a moral compass and has no coherent picture of the Divine). It is more or less agreed that NLP possesses some cult-like characteristics, where in order to learn about it the novice is required, at least in some circumstances, to submit passively to psycho-social conditioning, authority control and indoctrination. There is also a clear consensus that some practitioners of NLP are prone to make extraordinary and unsupported claims about their results and that NLP is readily put to unethical use.
At the same time, aside from its commercial viability, there appear to be good intellectual reasons to take NLP seriously. For example, NLP starts from the venerable Humean doctrine that all knowledge and all experience is derived from the senses, and that the structure of knowledge and experience is best analyzed in terms of patterns of sensory organization and sensory representation. Similarly, external behavior is taken to result from internal state, the latter taken as key to understanding not only behavior and the disposition to behavior, but to understanding the range of the human capacity for experience, for value and for aspiration and motivation. Finally, NLP subscribes to the Kantian position that complete and objective knowledge of the sense world is not possible, and that human experience is generally limited to an intermediate-level representation of an unknown and unknowable existential or cosmic reality . When these premises are taken together and coupled with a clearly efficacious, if not altogether clearly interpretable set of psychosocial interventions and results, NLP appears not only to warrant an entry in an encyclopedia of human knowledge, but also to demand a program of careful investigation and enquiry, and quite possibly a new paradigmatic interpretation that would allow it to develop beyond its current and not undeserved association with pseudoscience.
My theory of conversation was undertaken in part with exactly this latter objective in mind. While the premises and techniques of NLP are sound and philosophically important, in the absence of a general and meaningful theory of human social experience and human personality, one’s experience of NLP can be something like intimacy with a dead fish. Something about NLP smells wrong. Instead of being saved by the redeeming power of NLP, one can find oneself on the brink of something that feels a little like being damned. Few things can be more demoralizing and insulting than being shown the portal to the fourth dimension but once on the other side, finding oneself clueless about how to navigate it, other than to exercise one’s own instinctive desire for ego satisfaction. Indeed, random and pointless wandering in the fourth dimension may be literally what is being delivered to most people by NLP, because without a map it is easy to lose one’s way in a territory that is both cosmically vast and socially uncharted. Human individuals, after all, are in an absolute sense very different from one another and are separated at their origins in many cases by light years of basic ontological difference. The astral territory opened up by NLP, however, is a social territory, and unless souls are given a way to maintain contact and communication when inside it, they very readily fly of into deep and solipsistic cosmic spaces with little or no hope of finding the way back . As a result of such partial initiation, experience in the sense world can become rather hollow, superficial and hungry, dominated by an all-pervading dissatisfaction with the present moment and a deep impatience for the next.
I believe I have the solution to the problem of NLP. The solution entails three or four additional theoretical assumptions which, if added to those currently in use could lead common social experience to a dimensional leap that would be congruent with the contemporaneous expansion of information and intelligence we are seeing in the world, and would represent a timely social adaptation to a general spiritual condition. These assumptions are (1) a finiteness condition on the use of language, (2) a causal picture of linguistic reference, (3) a conversational application of moral law and (4) an expansion of our conception of the number of natural senses from five to something on the order of ten or twelve. If it proves possible to implement these additional assumptions as a part of NLP, then I think we could find ourselves not only in possession of a new and bona fide science, but of a tool that will make it possible for us to control our own evolution as literal cosmic spirits intimately embodied with one another on a precious and miraculous cosmic body in an astounding, harmonious and tangibly enormous cosmic universe.
To use NLP in a conversational context, we need first to know that there are five and only five ways we can use language whenever we say or interpret anything. Either what was just said was a judgment, or it was a request, or it was a promise, or it was an expressive or it was a declaration (or it was some complex combination, in which case we would be obligated to simplify it) . From there, it is a straightforward matter of applying a good will to get explicit agreement on the propositional content (the intension) of what was just said. This finiteness condition on language use is of paramount significance, because when we take it seriously we are put in a meta-position with respect to ourselves and our circumstance, and are thus enabled, in principle at least, to function as discarnate or quasi-discarnate entities floating above and within our own bodies as we enact the mental and spiritual phenomena that NLP has shown itself able to observe and to guide with unambiguous precision.
The next new assumption for NLP would be the causal theory of reference. This is the famous proposal of the logician Saul Kripke (1980) that says that any use of linguistic reference is a moment in space and time that is linked causally to another complementary moment, often in the distant past, in which the thing referred to was explicitly given its name. The ontological entailments here are almost overwhelming. On the causal picture of reference, we in some sense invoke the thing itself when we refer to it. The picture in the mind, or the word hanging in the air, is not just a shimmering picture or a resonant word, but is one half of a living, polar thought-ball that has a real extension, across space and time, to its complement in another time and another circumstance. These acts of mind and language we take so much for granted have an actual cosmic momentum, and it is the point of real conversation (and of real NLP) to give these momenta a clear exhibition and an unambiguous contextual treatment.
The third assumption that NLP needs to adopt, perhaps more than any other, is the conversational application of moral law. NLP of course is correct to treat all personal representation and all subjective experience “as if” it were universally valid, and even veridical, because in a relative sense it is. On this relativist view, everyone is entitled to be treated and to think of himself (herself) as a universe in itself, and there is clearly something sensible in that idea. But NLP needs a more general, social and law-based theory of truth conditions. Without that, it is led to the amoral position that, for example in the case of an object of “speed seduction” (a well-known and current application of NLP), concern for that person’s overall well-being in the wake of that seduction is, strictly speaking, optional. No decent social order can tolerate that, and no genuinely good will would find it even thinkable. Relativism about truth and morality simply must be superceded by something more profound and more interesting. NLP must ultimately be used to explore a domain of ends, not a domain of means. I think the correct direction here is toward a text-dependent semantics, in which the universalizability (the truth) of sentences is indexed not to an independent world which everyone sees more or less in the same way, and may choose or happen not to, but to an independent and autonomous text, a logos, which everyone reads out of the akashic ether by stern and sublime necessity, quite literally, in exactly the same way . NLP applied to pure conversation and its ancillaries will, I feel certain, prove very effective in facilitating a clairvoyant intuition of this text.
Finally, the Wikipedian critique of NLP’s ineffectiveness can probably be mitigated by an expanded definition of sensory modalities. In addition to the classical five senses, it seems unobjectionable to add balance and proprioception as an additional two. An eighth could be the sense of bodily fluids, such as blood, tears and semen, and a ninth could be warmth. Higher spiritual senses could be added, although not without some probable controversy, and would include the sense of speech, the sense of concept and the sense of ego, bringing the total to twelve. NLP as currently practiced is more or less confined to the senses of vision, hearing, touch and proprioception, and this limitation of scope could account for some of its failures to produce convincing results under controlled conditions.
Searlean Taxonomy, Meta-Position and Dissociation
The Berkeley philosopher John R. Searle (1979) proposes a finiteness condition on the possible uses of any natural language, in which he has identified a classification of five categories. Searle’s logical analysis purports to be reveal a real pattern in nature, like the taxonomic differences between animals and plants, or between crustaceans and insects. Assuming the veridicality of Searle’s categories (the scheme has been neither challenged nor refuted since originally proposed), an intriguing possibility arises. Given Searle’s scheme, or something analogous, it should remain possible in principle, in all circumstances of language use, to attribute universal knowledge (identical representation) of the current content of discourse. If Searle is right, and given the right experimental or background frame, it should be possible to identify not just the illocutionary force and the propositional content of our social utterances and intentions, but the actual motivations and thoughts themselves, their spiritual signatures, with the precision of a biological observer.
The reification of thought! What possibilities for future existence, for psychology, for aesthetics, for social values and social organization! How much closer thereby our bodily existence to the cosmic spaces and the starry messages of the spiritual dream or the shamanic vision! How much more real and meaningful the psychedelic experience or the tantric ecstasy if society provided the spaces and the times for theaters and conversations where not just the physical body, but the astral body and the astral world themselves were granted an institutional legitimacy and a form of social status! How much less inhumanity and alienation, how much more beneficent and patient our attitudes and expectations! How much more whole our lives and our sojourns beyond life and into the deep mysteries of death and birth!
What the Searlean taxonomy allows us to take seriously, I think, is a social form of dissociation. In individual psychology, dissociation is a defense mechanism, allowing the personality to cope with threats to its existence, and leading sometimes to actions for which the individual may not be held legally responsible, or to identity disorders, in which the individual appears to possess multiple personalities. Rudolf Steiner (1947) describes another form of dissociation taking place under controlled conditions in spiritual initiation. This “splitting of the personality,” and its subsequent reconstitution as a higher personality responsible for commanding the heretofore automatic associations of thought, feeling and will, is a healthy and perhaps cosmically lawful utilization of a mechanism which, if misappropriated or abused, can lead the individual into profound mental and spiritual disorder.
A social form of dissociation would be one in which only higher personalities, and not the automatisms of psychological association, would be in play in any given social circumstance. Here human consciousness would truly come into its own as a transcendental intelligence embodied not in three dimensions of space and one of time, but in a world of four spatial dimensions, where past and future literally and actually coincide and where embodiment is less a matter of coping with existential meanings in an external world and more a matter of digesting cosmic impressions coming from a world one plays a part in creating. The social situation here may be conceived as an ethereal world of spirits in the presence of other cosmic spirits, or as a Kantian domain of ends under moral law or as a circumstance of disembodied entities hovering above and causally interpenetrating with the material world of objects, relations and historical trajectories. Here Steiner was at pains also to describe the sociological laws of such a circumstance, where the functions of economy, of political decision and of cultural development maintain a strict dissociation, with no mutual admixture and potential for corruption.
Social dissociation is thus a form of socially enabled disembodiment. The key to functional disembodiment, of course – and I can see no other – is spiritual initiation. We may experience disembodiment in a healthy way and on a regular basis (Steiner held that the astral body and ego dissociate from the physical and etheric bodies as a matter of natural law during sleep at night) but unless we are well- and responsibly trained, our conscious experience of disembodiment tends toward the pathological. The purpose of spiritual initiation is to render self-conscious disembodiment safe, lawful and medically unproblematic. It is also intended to open the individual psychology to objective knowledge heretofore occult and unavailable in principle to an embodied consciousness. Social embodiment and disembodiment, it seems reasonable to assert, can only be enabled by the transcendental powers of language and the linguistic sense.
If a society of spiritual and cosmic initiation is the logical consequence of Searle’s categorical analysis of possible language use, it remains to show how the reification of thought can as a practical matter be expected to follow from the mere fact of language as a kind of biological entity. Here my theory of conversation proposes a way to initiate and conduct social intercourse with just this outcome in mind. My theory of conversation is an attempt to render language transparent and incapable of deception or ambiguity, a mere tool or instrument for the accomplishment of a greater aim. The theory is a social contract, an invitation to those willing and able to begin to participate in a neuro-linguistic work that will require the human being to function outside the parameters of privacy, opacity and closed-mindedness. Not only can everyone know exactly what someone just said, and why he (she) said it, but everyone must know it. Unless we do, conversation in its pure form remains a vain and distant hope.
The Causal Theory of Reference and Mental Externalism
In contradistinction to the classical Searlean (neurolinguistic) position that all language and all thought, and even all human experience are internal representations of objects and relationships in the world, there has arisen in contemporary philosophy the idea that much, if not all thought and experience, is embodied not in neuro-linguistic representation, but in the actual world matrix. Meanings and thoughts, perceptions and sensations, perhaps even intentions and actions, it is asserted, are not de dicto (of or from the representation) but de re (of or from the thing itself). Perhaps the most incisive argument for this externalist view comes from Saul Kripke, the powerful, anti-materialist logician who proposed in 1980 that all acts of linguistic reference devolve directly from a causal chain linking that particular act to another, historical act in which the thing referred to was formally given its name. The baptism theory of language has some arresting ontological entailments, not the least of which is that when we use language, our mental states are constituted, in part if not in essence, by objects and events in the outer world, and not by events inside our heads.
Contemporary versions of mental externalism take their departure more or less from the embodiment philosophy that neurolinguistic programming wholeheartedly embraces, which asserts that the mind can only be understood by taking account of the body and its primitive, reflexive underpinnings. These neo-externalist arguments propose that animal brains and nervous systems are ineliminably molded around objects and artifacts – for example the sounds and marks of speech and writing – which reliably shape the on-board and enactive routines of the nervous intelligence. Those external structures and media therefore partially constitute mental life, so much so that one is forced to the conclusion, so the reasoning goes, that our minds in reality are spread out in space and over time like an etheric cloud or perhaps better, like a cosmic spirit. This view is hardly anathema to neurolinguistic programming, with its commitments to the Batesonian ecology of mind, for example, although it becomes somewhat problematic to allow a real role for internal representations if one accepts the ontological commitments of this enactive externalism.
Here Kripke’s theory of reference probably warrants a careful review. Any act of linguistic reference, Kripke claims, is one half of an ontological polarity that extends across space and through time to an original act of naming. The two acts are causally (i.e. materially) connected. Thought itself is an extended entity, a world moment, wherein the object of thought is in some literal sense conjured by the very act of bringing it to mind. The reflexive patterns that NLP has good reasons for asserting are objective, observable and to an extent predictable and manipulable (i.e. the patterns of subjective experience per se) are patterns of sensory response to those objects. When the patterns are particularly dense and involve much or most of the brain and neocortex and hippocampus, we call them “representations,” although in reality they are not. In actuality, the objects in the mind are realities in a distant part of the space-time continuum.
The causal theory of reference also appears capable of handling the problem of “inexistent particulars” and analogous mental contents in a novel and interesting but exceedingly complex way. How is reference to an object like “Zeus,” or “Pegasus” possible, where neither Zeus nor Pegasus exist in any commonsense way? The answer is that these things do exist, or did, because they were at one time given reference. That existence may have been, and may continue to be in a higher world, in dimensions not commonly available to materialist consciousness, but it was or is real. Perhaps more metaphysically troubling are the existence of false statements, such as “The Holocaust did not occur,” or “Sophia Loren is a redhead.” If someone were sincerely and non-defectively to assert judgments such as these, we would say certainly that they were false, and perhaps pathological, but that the state of affairs referred to had a certain reality in space and time. Someone thought them up, perhaps with precedent in historical time or perhaps once only, but if they were thought, they refer to something real in space and time. To determine what that something actually is, however, requires an understanding of the astral world.
Four dimensional space-time is an enormous cosmic domain, larger and more incomprehensible by an incalculable order of magnitude than the familiar cosmos of the Hubble telescope. It includes the whole of time, past, present and future, laid out in a spatial dimension. Our consensual terrestrial reality, our human life between birth and death, governed as it is by the conjunction of logic and natural law, occupies a small, concentrated segment within it, and for the sake of our sanity and our safety, we are ill advised to stray too far therefrom. Normal human experience takes place within this bandwidth, with only occasional glimpses, for example in spiritual dreams or psychedelic hallucinations, of contents that lie in other, alien spaces for which we have no adequate consensual map. Still, we are able to achieve reference to these spaces, if usually hard-pressed to remember them with the detail that does them full justice, because they are actually there, somewhere, in the cosmos. The way we achieve such reference is with the body, or more precisely with a higher part of the body’s reflexive capacity, the so-called astral body.
The human body is full of spatial and temporal relationships which are normally occluded to consciousness but which, with training, can be brought into a kind of musical alignment. These spaces and relationships function as a kind of antenna attuned to macrocosmic spaces and relationships. The macrocosm is where the objects of linguistic and cognitive reference actually reside, and it is what is sensed by all intentional acts, whether perceptual or purely mental or imaginative. The things in the mind are actual, cosmic entities, but they are entities in a higher-dimensional world. This higher dimensional world, and the reflexive and embodied faculty within us, both characterized by heightened emotional affect, is the so-called astral (star-governed) domain, the soul world. The qualia and sentience of conscious experience is no kind of simulacrum conjured up inside the skull, as the neurolinguistic internalist would have it. It is, rather, a relationship between one part of the cosmic space-time continuum and another part of that continuum, mediated by a finely controlled antenna, the human body including its finer members, that our spiritual intelligence governs according to laws our sciences are only beginning to grasp.
Probably the most salient and peculiar of these astral laws is the inversion or reversal that mental contents undergo when translated into that domain. To give an artificial example, if an English word in this world is spelled B-L-O-G, in the astral world it will appear as G-L-O-B, with some or all of the letters reversed. The strange and inchoate quality of many of our dreams, especially those that come when an internal organ is disturbed, as for example when we have eaten immediately before going to sleep, is an exhibition of this astral inversion. Higher exhibitions of the astral inversion occur when in our dreams the personalities and figures we encounter there appear as gods, and not as familiar human selves, and the worlds they inhabit as crystalline mineral, full of mysterious and wonderful property. Whatever the physics of the astral inversion, probably having to do with the reification of the temporal dimension into one of space, it is something to which our brains and nervous systems can readily adapt, if we have some basic guidance and the right sort of social culture in place to support it. Indeed, adaptation to the astral world is one of the more primary instincts in the human reflexology, once language and rationality have developed there, and ranks among feeding, fighting and sexual intercourse as a basic drive in human nature.
The reflexive control exercised by the brain and nervous system is thus, on the externalist, astral model, a modulation of a signal between one part of a four-dimensional cosmos and another, local one. These two domains are poles of a material continuum across space and time, and whenever any intentional content is manufactured in a local domain, a causal reference is generated that links it to some other, complementary domain. Normally the domain of possible reference is the consensual world we share historically, but reference to other, less trodden domains is possible. The four-dimensional astral world is immense, full of pleasant and unpleasant surprises, most of it novel and entirely individualist. It contains spaces all but impossible to rediscover when we try to navigate it single-handedly. The schizophrenic, for example, is uniquely tuned to parts of the cosmos that most of us visit only fleetingly, and with only parts of ourselves, our internal soft organs for example, in dreams and nightmares. Self-conscious navigation of such spaces would be a practical impossibility. The problem of consciousness, then, is to discover a way to navigate, explore and ultimately to settle this world consensually, bringing with us a decent set of laws and a workable social compact, much as the English Pilgrims did in the New World.
The key to human consciousness is the astral body. Only with a detailed understanding of that great mystery can consciousness be said to be understood, and the key to the astral body is spiritual initiation. Spiritual initiation, in turn, can only be accomplished by particular exercises performed according to certain principles, and these principles and exercises are subsumed by my theory of conversation. If I am correct about what conversation really is, and about what it must become in the future, and assuming our political institutions remain liberal and democratic, social life in general will become a School of Spiritual Initiation, in which sections of society, and ultimately all of society, are absorbed into an astral sphere where the laws of consciousness, and not the laws of materiality, determine the forms of human life and human experience. These laws will prove to be, I think, laws of language, rationality and linguistic reference.
The Moral Law
The most facile objection to NLP, beyond its merely pseudo-scientific status, which can perhaps be forgiven considering the complexity of the phenomena it investigates, is its relativism about objectivity and objective reality. Should a marriage between NLP and my theory of conversation eventually take place, this objection could in all likelihood be completely overcome because conversation presupposes, if anything does or can, an abiding objectivity in the phenomena involving the astral domain. Certainly sensations, feelings and mental representations are essentially in play in conversation, and certainly at the same time conversation involves the acceptance of principles, rules and laws that transcend the individual will and make of the shared space an institutional and cultural reality which cannot be coherently described as relative. Certainly a theory of conversation, should such an idea find broad acceptance, would be sufficient to eliminate subjective relativism from most domains of contemporary social and cultural discourse.
The great law of social intentionality, rationality and communication is the moral law, the transcendental principle of unity-in-experience. Without it, no experience of any sort is possible. Under it, a unity of experience, never complete in itself and always greater in the next iteration, is inevitable. The moral law is the law of consciousness, a natural law under which rationality and perhaps even life itself are ordained by intelligent cosmic design to come into being under terrestrial conditions. It is moreover the law by means of which a future world of ethereal levity, light and discarnate spirits acting to the delight and the glory of God is destined to materialize out of the universal human intuition and desire for an abiding unity of social experience.
Conversation is the critical medium of moral law. Only if we find ourselves able to characterize our conversations not as products of mere fancy and inclination, as inconsequentially abandoned as they are undertaken, but rather as world-creative moments, with sufficient material force and power not only to change us and our soul life for the better, but even to penetrate material nature and to lift it into the new and wonderful state of minerality we sometimes experience in our more exalted dreams, do we begin to fulfill it. Such world-creation will depend crucially on conversational unity, the coherent and holographic focus of spiritual energy through the multiplicity of individuals convoked in the moment to utter true statements, and only true statements, about some conversational topic. Although NLP is well-equipped to assist in the well-formedness of individual essays on truth, it is quite helpless to motivate a theory of truth conditions, a general reason for individuals, even as a matter of culture, to adhere to the rigors and to enjoy the rewards of an explicit and detailed application of moral law to their utterances, their gestures and their private, inner comportment.
Moral duty is something we owe to each other; it is not a choice that whole individuals can entertain. It is the actual structure of wholeness, of physical and spiritual symmetry and health, and its consequences ramify throughout space and time and even beyond life itself. The darkened, self-interested behavior of the neurolinguistic relativist shuns the law of universality, of the maxim that seeks only the good of the whole and never the mere advantage of the fortunate, of the capable or of the superior. Intercourse between and among human beings simply must be cosmic, harmonious, transparent and essentially disinterested. Self-interest in human relationships is basically poison, self-reference in conversation essentially distasteful. Moral duty points to a universe of ends, a world of transparent, self-actualized cosmic beings striving to be all that they can in the company and benign regard of other such beings, whose expectations and aid are as essential to their success as their emotional abandonment and abstract disinterest would be to their alienation and failure.
To me it seems a facile matter to insert neurolinguistic techniques and presuppositions into a pre-existing moral context. The two things fit like a hand in a glove – NLP conduces to the transparency that moral law requires. The only question is about priority. This is really the debate that was settled by the conversation between Hume and Kant, in which Hume took the role of the hard-nosed sense theorist, accepting the solipsistic ethical consequences that followed from his skepticism, and eventuating in a serious personal depression. Kant refuted with an argument from a priority, believing that supersensible causes are at work in our rational and ethical life, and he remained cheerful and optimistic until late in life, when he was overcome with a senility brought on probably by too much thinking. So long as NLP is inserted into a moral context - and conversation theory is probably the only such context possible - NLP can do a world of good. But if NLP is used outside a moral context, it will remain forever suspect, underappreciated and poorly employed, far from its potential to deliver human experience into a transcendental soul world settled in life, light and supernal beauty.
The Twelve Senses
In all probability, it is the incompleteness of the neurolinguistic foundation that constitutes its primary limitation. In reality, the human being is a creature of many more than five senses. What, for example, is the sense of nausea, or the sense of pain? These are not kinesthetic senses, but are mediated by an independent set of sensors, in this case within the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Rudolf Steiner classified these sensations, and many others, including the awareness of the blood circulation, of tears and of sexual enjoyment, as the sense of life. Other less vague classifications by Steiner include the senses of temperature and balance, and the sense of voluntary movement. Three other surprising classifications include the sense of language, the sense of concept and the social sense of ego.
The incompleteness of NLP’s sensory presuppositions leads to a diminished conception of human health and wholeness, and may be partially responsible for the moral critique to which NLP remains vulnerable. Particularly if these higher senses indicated by Steiner can be entertained, I think NLP could be used to pin human consciousness very precisely to its cosmo-dynamic background. If we can exhaustively catalog the human sensorium, and find ways to intervene in each such modality, and even to reduce linguistic and cognitive experience to sense experience, there will simply be nothing left in human experience to remain unindexed, free or otherwise opaque. Everything in human experience will be understood as reflex to sensory input. Under these conditions, we really would be entitled to talk about a science of consciousness. A true science of consciousness, moreover, would inevitably give full credit to the impulses of autonomy and moral freedom, even though these phenomena may be reducible in fact to sensory responses to objects in four dimensional space.
Conclusion
Neurolinguistic programming represents part of the infancy of hard social science. Other components of this science include conversation theory, logical analysis and moral theory. The objective of the science is to describe laws of nature at work in the free human being. It has for some time been a puzzle why the explosive economic-technological payoff seen in the physical sciences over the past century and a half has not occurred in the social sciences, particularly in sociology and psychology. I think the reasons have to do with recognizing the causal status of moral law (moral law as a law of nature), with institutional limitations on methods of research, particularly with those having to do with language use, and with a firm conceptual grasp of the transcendental and spiritual dimensions of human experience and of the human capacity and destiny to occupy these dimensions with full self-consciousness and sociological competence.
REFERENCES:
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Originally published in 1874. English edition edited by L. McAlister, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1995.
Flygt, Carl H. Text-Dependent Semantics for Pure Conversation. On my website at www.consciousconversation.com , 2005.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Lewis White Beck, trans. NewYork: Macmillan, 1985.
Koch, Cristof. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts and Co., 2004.
Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Searle, John R. A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Soesman, M.D., Albert. The Twelve Senses. Jakob Cornelis, trans. Hawthorne Press, Worcester, U.K, 1975.
Steiner, Rudolf. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. George Metaxa, trans. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1947.
Wikipedia. Neurolinguistic Programming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming .
The view is prevalent among idealist and psychological philosophers, e.g. Berkeley and Brentano, and has surfaced again in contemporary neuroscience. e.g. with Cristof Koch.
I ask the reader’s indulgence with the introduction of the terms “astral,” “cosmic,” and “four-dimensional.” Precise specification of these terms is beyond the scope of this paper. Some insight can be gleaned from Steiner, 1947.
This is John Searle’s (1979) taxonomy of illocutionary acts.
I have outlined an approach to this semantics in Flygt, 2005.
Illocutionary force is what is done in performing a speech act. The categories of illocutionary force are assert (p), commit oneself to a future action (p), direct someone else (p), express (p) and make a declaration (p), where p is the content of the speech act.
Propositional content is what is said in performing a speech act. It is the intension or meaning of the syntax expressed. If I utter “Snow is white,” I have said, by way of assertion, that snow is white.