Causality, WHY and its Contrapunctum

Dennis K. Chong, Jennifer K. Smith Chong, Eleanor Chong and Astrid Chong

In 1933, in his seminal work, Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski, uncovered the incredible scan of ill-formed anomalies that spun out of the Aristotelian system of Causality and the structural conditions for them. For this he described the Aristotelian system of Cause and Effect as “unsane.” Causality, known in normal parlance as Cause and Effect is also known as The Question of Why and the Blame Frame. He gave this cipher: A to represent the Aristotelian system.

He realized that a human being’s reality and his understanding of it, is derived from the human language system that he uses to think by, feel in and speak with.

Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 Sixth Reprinting page 59 - 60.

Korzybski knew that the A language system is universal and pervasive in Western culture. Logically, its unsaneness would be universal and pervasive in Western civilization. This being so, it was critical to find the language system that was opposite to A. If this were not done there would be no hope for a sane reality for any of us.

Then in 1975, in their seminal work, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming described Cause and Effect as semantically ill-formed:

We have generalized the notion of semantic ill-formedness to include sentences such as:

My husband makes me mad.

The therapist can identify this sentence as having the form:

Some person causes some person to have some emotion.

When the first person, the one doing the causing, is different from the person experiencing the anger, the sentence is said to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable. The semantic ill-formedness of sentences of this type arises because, it, literally, is not possible for one human being to create an emotion in another human being thus, we reject sentences of this form. Sentences of this type, in fact, identify situations in which one person does some act and a second person responds by feeling a certain way. The point here is that, although the two events occur one after another, there is no necessary connection between the act of one person and the response of the other. Therefore, sentences of this type identify a model in which the client assigns responsibility for his emotion; rather, the emotion is a response generated from the model in which the client takes no responsibility for experiences, which he could control.

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: The Structure of Magic Science and Behaviour Books Inc. 1975 pages 51 - 52.

To describe something as semantically ill-formed is to say that in it’s meaning it is twisted, bent, kinked or warped, i.e. insane. It is little wonder that Bandler and Grinder were deadly serious and sure when they wrote, “. . . we reject sentences of this form.”

We, in our turn, came to these determinations about Cause and Effect:

Cause/effect thinking creates inconsistencies. It creates misperceptions that become incorporated into the definition of us as individuals and as society. For by thinking in cause/effect, we perceive in cause/effect and vice versa. Previous attempts to remove cause effect from language failed, as a new language system was necessary.

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Chong: Don’t Ask WHY?! C-Jade Publications Inc. 1991 page 7.

When Alfred Korzybski came to his conclusions about Cause and Effect, he took the next logical to find a system that was its opposite, his Non-Aristotelian system. He gave this cipher to represent the Non-Aristotelian system: Ā. It was clear to him that it was critical and necessary to shift from the language system of the Aristotelian system to that of the Non-Aristotelian system, i.e. A → Ā. He sensed that this shift would entail a gestalt switch of some significance:

When all is said and done, one cannot but see, at least as far as the white race is concerned, that a change from A to } would be momentous.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co. 1933 page 12.

This conclusion, in turn, was supported by this discovery by Edward Sapir:

To pass from one language to another is psychologically parallel to passing from one geometric system of reference to another. The environing world which is referred to is the same for either language; the world of points is the same in either frame of reference. But the formal method of approach to the expressed item of experience, as to the given point in space, is so different that the resulting feeling of orientation can be the same neither in the two languages nor in the two frames of reference. Entirely distinct or at least measurably distinct, formal adjustments have to be made and these differences have their psychological correlate.

Edited by David G. Mandelbaum: Selected writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, Personality University of California Press 1949 page 153.

For us, A → Ā would be ultimate gestalt switch.

Alfred Korzybski was a extra-ordinarily prescient man and he saw the incredible enormity of the challenge before him and of the in difficulties in his search for his Ā. Certainly in 1933 the linguistic advances were not there to support him:

. . . and (5) the building of a Ā–system in 1933 is an extremely laborious enterprise, to say the least, and, in all probability, really beyond the power of any single man to complete.

When Richard Bandler and John Grinder discovered that Cause and Effect is the ill-formed in its semantics, they did not see the critical need to unravel what might be its opposite. That they did not is an extra-ordinary puzzle, given their extra-ordinary insight, wit and intelligence. What happened for them not to see that:

1. Causality was then and remains a universal philosophy of this world

2. the consequences of its semantic ill-formedness that they themselves had identified would be absolutely pervasive across the people of this world

3. attendant to this, its semantic ill-formedness would be deep

4. Korzybski, by the time, 1975 when Bandler and Grinder wrote Structure of Magic, had clearly failed to find his Non-Aristotelian language system. We think that Bandler and Grinder knew this. The evidence it that his heirs, the General Semanticists were still using the language of A-system. One only has to read the articles in their premier journal, The Bulletin, to see that this is so.

5. When one reads Science and Sanity, it is obvious that Korzybski himself was using the formats of the language of the A system

It is very clear that Alfred Korzybski realized that if he could unravel his Ā-system he would be discovering a language about language, i.e. that of the A-system. In other words the language of the A-system is a metalanguage.

To be able to consider the structure of one language of a definite structure, we must produce another language of a different structure in which the language of the first can be analysed.

If we produce a Ā-system based on ‘relations’, ‘order’, ‘structure’, we shall be able to discuss profitably the A-system, which does not allow asymmetrical relations, and so cannot be analysed by A means.

When you use the ‘language of a different structure in which the language of the first can be analysed’ then the latter, by definition, is the metalanguage of the former, the first.

It was in fact Bertrand Russell who guided Korzybski to the above conclusion:

This verifies the contention of Bertrand Russell made in 1922 that there is a ‘possibility’ that ‘every language has . . . a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure’.* What Russell calls a ‘possibility’ becomes a fact once a system of different structure is built.

*Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1922, page 23.

Russell is clearly indexing here the role of a language about language, i.e. a metalanguage. By itself and to itself, a language has ‘nothing’ that ‘can be said’ of its structure. It requires a language of a different structure, a metalanguage in order for this to be possible.

Then, in 1974, three co-researchers from the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto, California most ably delineated the critical place of a metalanguage in human communication:

Eventually we realized that this state of affairs was directly linked to the hierarchical structure of all language, communication, learning, etc. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, to express or explain something requires a shift to one logical level above what is to be expressed or explained. No explaining can be accomplished on the same level, a metalanguage has to be used, but this metalanguage is not necessarily available. To effect change is one thing: to communicate about this change is something else: above all, a problem of correct logical typing and of creating an adequate metalanguage. In psychotherapeutic research, it is very common to find that particularly gifted and intuitive therapists think they know why they are doing what they are doing, but their explanations simply do not hold water. Conversely many gifted writers are astounded and even annoyed at the deeper meanings that others read into their works. Thus, while the former believe they know, but apparently do not, the latter seem to know more than they are willing to acknowledge - which brings us back to Laing: “If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know; if I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.”

Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Richard Fisch: CHANGE Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1974 p 79.

This observation by Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, is the clearest argument for the logical basis for a metalanguage.

It is now very clear that inadvertently that Bandler and Grinder in uncovering their metalanguage, the Meta Model, were actually beginning the construction of the language of Ā-system. However, they:

1. did not entirely unravel it. It was only one quarter of the whole.

2. it was itself semantically ill-formed because they configured it within Cause and Effect!

In our view, Bandler and Grinder were the natural heirs of the challenge that Alfred Korzybski had taken upon himself and failed to accomplish. Bandler and Grinder in 1975 had the linguistic skills and the knowledge base to uncover the language of the Ā-system. They also had the wherewithal to take this world into the Non-Aristotelian system. This for us is the worlds most critical dream that was not to be. Most unfortunately it fell to us to unravel the language of Ā-language system. We have decided to name it the Watzlawick-Weakland-Fisch-metalanguage, WWF-ml because in our view these three authors were the persons who gave the definitive argument for the logic for a metalanguage. We also know it as the Gathering Information Module, GIM.

The definitive metalanguage is comprised of these components:

1. WWF-ml or Modified Meta Model

2. No-Y-ian Model of language

3. Informal Logic

4. Calibration

5. Adumbration

It is delineated in the work, Power and Elegance in Communication, People, Paradigms and Paradoxes and in the Manual of the Power Seminar, Part I.

The Modified Meta Model is a critical expansion of the original Meta Model of Bandler and Grinder. it is re-configured in the Korzybskian Non-Aristotelian system. Certain inaccuracies concerning human neurology in which the original Meta Model was based on have also been corrected. We take this opportunity to note the differences between the Meta Model and the WWF-ml or Modified Meta Model.

In 1975, Structure of Magic proposed these modeling processes:

Deletion

Distortion

Generalization.

Today, Power and Elegance in Communication expanded it as follows:

I. DELETION COROLLARIES

Verbs

Adjectives

Comparatives and Superlatives

certain words ending in -ly

Modal Operators

II. DISTORTION by -

Cause and Effect

Nominalization

Identification

Attachement

Simplification

Deception

III. QUANTIFICATION by -

a) Generalization

b) Averaging

c) Miscellaneous.

Korzybski proposed his semantic reaction, s.r. as the basic unit of human psycho-logical response to the spoken word. From this he realized that there would be awesome consequences:

We do not realise what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s.r. and that the structure which a language exhibits, is automatically projected upon the world around us. This semantic power is indeed so unbelievable that I do not know anyone, even among well-trained scientists, who, after having admitted some argument as correct, does not the next minute deny or disregard (usually unconsciously) practically every word he had admitted, being carried away again by the structural implications of the old language and his s.r.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 6th Reprint 1980 pages 90 - 91.

If this is true, it is clear that insightful as one might be, by the s.r. of the A-system one can still be ‘enslaved’ by it and one would not be aware that one is. In this context, we truly appreciate the incredible wit and intelligence of Bandler and Grinder. They knew the link between the question “Why” and Cause and Effect. It was for this, in their training of their first generation of students they tried to get them not to use it:

It was at the Mission Street groups that we first began acquiring our information gathering tools that were later to become the meta model patterns. The foundations of the information gathering tools began with the how, who, and what questions from the Gestalt framework, deleting that unspoken question, why.

We used to get yelled at and sometime bopped on the head for saying why. In a very therapeutic way of course.

Terrence L. McClendon: The Wild Days NLP 1972 -1981 Meta Publications 1989 page 40.

By the usage of why and all the other words of the Ā-system, generations of Neuro-Linguistic Programmers have remained trapped in the language of A-system and they have continued to activate the A-system and its unsaneness, insanity and semantic ill-formedness against each other. By using the A-system, they have allowed their nervous system to be concordantly configured by it. There are serious consequences to this:

Investigations further show that such nervous reactions in man lead to non-survival, pathological states of general infantilism, infantile private and public behaviour, infantile institutions, infantile ‘civilizations’ founded on strife, fights, brute competitions. , these being supposedly the ‘natural’ expression of ‘human nature’, as different commercialists and their assistants, the militarists and priests, would have us believe.

From the infantilism come the being of: “Its all mine, mine, mine. And you cannot have it and I will not share.” Infantile institution assert, “We are the chosen ones. We are the one true faith.” Infantile civilizations are those that claim: “All others are savages. They have to be civilized.” We do not have to go into the details and examples of the semantic ill-formed things that are then done to the unfortunate savages.

In describing these “non-survival pathological states: Korzybski is mapping what is known as the Aristotelian alpha ape mind vs the Humean human mind. Such a mind is situated. It cannot enter into a collaborative frame to attain common future goals that benefit the group. All it is interested is to have and own everything within its boundaries. As the alpha, its ideas about itself is that it is superior, more important and exalted above all others. And within the Cause and Effect 2-valued system of Right/Wrong, it is always Right. This in turn places everyone else in a grotesque disadvantage. They in turn will resist in turn this is the mother for ‘strife, fights, brute competitions.’ We may dress it with the language of legalese but it will not hide the truth in a court battle, it is nothing but a struggle of brute competition. In the end one is the winner who crushes the other.

These same “non-survival pathological states” are the human conditions for the suffering of people by fear and anger, anguish and frustration, pain and suffering and woe and tears. Every psychiatrist, psychologist, psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in working with patients who have semantically ill-formed analogical problems will witness that this how they suffer.

In turn we have created a world in which this condition is pervasive:

A realization of the aimlessness of life lived to labour and to die, having achieved nothing but avoidance of starvation, and the birth of children also doomed to the weary treadmill, has seized the minds of millions,

Perhaps this may explain how it is that it seems to be a common feature in the community of Neuro-Linguistic Programmers that they fail to achieve rapport with each other.

All reality is configured by the language system that we use. If we use one that is unsane, insane or semantically ill-formed then we shall unfold to ourselves a reality that would be commensurately and concordantly unsane, insane and semantically informed.

The unsanity, insanity and semantic ill-formedness of the Aristotelian system of Cause and Effect is universal, pervasive and deep. It is for this, by its s.r. that we:

1. do not see it because it is obvious

2. are habituated to it

3. are fully accommodated to it

4. use our powers of rationalizations to go into denial about it.

In the end, we need to ask: Is this a happy and sane world that we live it? And if it is not:

1. how long has it been so

2. is it to be so forever?

3. what are the conditions for it?

4. can these conditions be changed?

Clearly, from this time on, we view the future with better hope.

References:

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: The Structure of Magic Science and Behaviour Books Inc.

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Chong: Don’t Ask WHY?! C-Jade Publications Inc.

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Chong: Power and Elegance in Communication People, Paradigms and Paradoxes C-Jade Publications Inc.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company

Edited by David G. Mandelbaum: Selected writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, Personality University of California Press

Terrence L. McClendon: The Wild Days NLP 1972 -1981 Meta Publications

Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Richard Fisch: CHANGE Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution W. W. Norton & Company Inc