The Hidden Curriculum of Everyday Life:
the details of how we generalize
©2004 

Overall this workshop will explore in detail how Perceptual Scope, the
range of our Sensory-based Experience, and how we Categorize that experience, are the two fundamental building blocks of both our greatest skills and most troublesome limitations. This allows us to reexamine all the skills and methods of NLP to understand them in more depth, as well as the unifying simplicity that underlies them all.

In some ways it is like what happened in Chemistry roughly a hundred years ago, when they began to understand that the hundred or so elements, and the bewildering number of different compounds between elements, could be understood as resulting from different arrangements of much simpler building blocks--electrons, protons, and neutrons.

Another way of describing this workshop is that we will be going inside the nominalization “generalization” to find out how it works in great detail, and as usual in NLP, this understanding makes it possible to change troubling beliefs and create more empowering ones.

Among the topics we will explore are: perceptual scope, simple categories, scope-category interactions, criteria, subcategories and categories of categories, hierarchies and heterarchies, logical levels as a content-free function of categorization, recategorization at larger, smaller, and different logical levels, humor, meaning, negation, modes of operating, categorical opposites, judgement, implication, self-reference, contradiction, paradox, certainty, double-binds, and metaphor.

Although we will begin with somewhat theoretical understandings, these will always be anchored to specific experience, and then the practical uses and applications to everyday problems will be explored. One result of this will be to clarify at what logical level, or which sequence of logical levels to intervene to resolve a problem.