Name: Transformational grammar
ISBN: 9780511840425

What Hacker News says

3131sJun 2017

For pure linguistics I'd recommend Transformational Grammar by Andrew Radford and Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

And for NLP, Dan Jurafski and James H. Martin's Speech and Language Processing is excellent, and there are great projects like spaCy, NLTK, WordNet, FrameNet, COCA. etc.

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carapaceJun 2022

I see from your homepage that this may not be an idle request. Cheers!

Let me reply to your questions in reverse order.

> What convinced you that it is rigorous?

I originally stumbled across some books on (the other) NLP and they just made sense, and the "algorithms" they described worked. I had some emotional issues and used the techniques to overcome them to some degree. I also carried out informal experiments, mostly on myself but occasionally with friends, to double check that I wasn't fooling myself. I suffered from pretty severe depression that interfered with living a normal life (I was homeless for a few years after high school) Eventually, I managed to go see one of the co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler, and he cured my depression in a single ten-minute intervention. (I know how that sounds, but it's true. I've written about it once or twice before in comments here on HN if you want more details, or just ask.)

So that pretty much clinched it for me. After my depression was cured I went on to have a fairly successful career as a programmer, and I am more-or-less a functioning adult thanks to Bandler. But I also lost interest in NLP personally (I mean, I still use what I've learned, but I don't feel called to be a therapist or anything like that.) I mention it from time to time because what kind of a monster would I be if I didn't? But I often get flak for it. (One fellow on here has called me a liar, fool, and scammer for talking about getting cured of depression.)

When I say that the material "made sense" I don't mean merely that it sounded plausible, I mean that it was similar to electronics or mathematics: there are formal patterns in the structure of subjective experience, and we can learn to notice and deliberately manipulate those patterns in repeatable codified algorithms. (E.g. the "Five-Minute Phobia Cure" pattern, which eliminates phobic responses quickly and durably (the phobia never comes back.))

The original work grew out of linguistic analysis of particularly effective therapists (Satir, Perls, Erikson), they were literally transcribing therapy sessions and started applying ideas from Chomsky's Transformational Grammar.

> What resources could you provide on this for a skeptical cognitive scientist?

First of all, I'm sorry to say that most of the stuff on the Internet about (the other) NLP seems to be fluffy and nonscientific (to put it politely). If I'm being frank, I don't think most people practicing NLP understand it very well from a scientific viewpoint.

I would recommend going to the source. Find and read "The Structure of Magic" (both volumes but especially the first, which explores linguistic patterns, the second volume then generalizes to the sensory channels.) You're probably going to be interested in what they call the "Meta Model" which is a set of questions designed to elicit elided information in a therapeutic setting.

Beyond that I don't really have any recommendations. It really depends on what you want to do. You might enjoy "Trance-FORMATIONS" which is IMO one of the best books on hypnosis ever written, it's all about how language affects and guides the mind. I suppose you could also go take a class or course?

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carapaceJan 2020

> Jungian, by chance?

Nah, Neurolinguistic Programming. The "guy" is Dr. Bandler.

> Much of psychology (at least in the non-behaviorist arena) and self-help deal with ideas that are really grounded in philosophy proper. Philosophy is the original psychology and the original self-help.

FWIW the origins of NLP are grounded in Chomsky's Transformational Grammar. That's not philosophy, of course, but it's something. (Computer language hierarchy stems from the same linguistic modeling.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

> Philosophy is no luxury. It saves lives. It's a deep failure of culture that it isn't a core area of primary and secondary curriculum.

Oh I agree wholeheartedly!

I meant it's a luxury only in the sense that "Even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."

Even then I don't deny that many a book of philosophy has seen more than one person safely through their long dark tea-time of the soul.

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carapaceJan 2020

> Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society?

Yeah, it's called Neurolinguistic Programming, and it's not quite a science yet. (E.g. the Wikipedia entry just straight-up calls it pseudo-science.)

In brief, it started with linguistic analysis of transcripts of videos of therapy session with some very talented and successful therapists. (The analysis was informed by the same Transformational Grammar of Chomsky that also informs formal language design.) It was noticed that some people tend to favor "preferred" sensory systems, and a model of subjective experience was developed that allowed for eliciting and encoding subjective processing "strategies". (E.g. most good spellers use visual memory to recall a picture of a word, and then check it kinesthetically for correctness ("it feels right"), and read it off from their minds' eye. Bad spellers typically do something else. Teach a bad speller the good "strategy" and they can suddenly spell well.)

That was nearly half a century ago.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." ~William Gibson

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carapaceNov 2019

> I think we're all all right, but we just can't see it, and we're too <?> to look.

After thinking about it and actively investigating for about 30 years, I've come to much the same conclusion, I think: to wit, most people secretly enjoy their problems and suffering. I remember remarking to friends back in high school, in re: "going steady", that it seems like people are less interested in healthy relationships than in finding the kind of pain they favor.

IMO, We have all the answers.

1.) Early on I found my dad's Neurolinguistic Programming books in a box. Now (the other) NLP gets a lot of mostly-deserved flak for being pseudoscientific, but I understood it then pretty well (it grew out of the same Chomsky Transformational Grammar that informs programming language design, eh) and I can vouch for it's rigour and effectiveness. In a nutshell these folks have discovered the "operating system" of the mind.

The problem there is that first, most people still haven't heard about it, second, many who have dismiss it, and third, many of the people who practice and utilize it are working on marginal improvements (money, sex, etc.) rather than becoming better people.

(The old Illuminati slogan "Our method is science, our aim is religion." seems to me to resonate here. We have discovered the science, whither shall we aim?)

2.) I'm also a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He's an engineer who had a kind of spiritual epiphany one day on the banks of one of the Great Lakes and became a kind of secular techno-scientific messiah. He calculated that, by sometime in the 1970's, our technology would be advanced enough to provide for everyone on Earth "without disadvantaging anyone". During his life he traveled around the world ~85 times (IIRC) and was perhaps the most famous American outside of the USA for a time.

3.) Now that's before you factor in applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) Bill Mollison's "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is one of the finest manuals of design ever written, with ramifications way beyond farming and food production. (And with D. Blume's "Alcohol can be a Gas" there's even a model of integrated ecologically harmonious carbon-neutral fuel production. (Bonus: the emissions aren't poisonous.) Geoff Lawton is being pretty literal when he says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

1.) NLP, 2.) Bucky Fuller Design Science Revolution, and 3.) Applied Ecology taken together seem to me to be the obvious, fun, and easy way to Save the World! I'm not sure, what, if anything, to do about it though...

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carapaceNov 2019

In re: cybernetics and psychology, Gregory Bateson said that the Neurolinguistic Programming folks achieved what he had been working towards, a cybernetic psychology. If you're interested, start with the very first books "Structure of Magic" vol I and II https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964154.The_Structure_of_... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821993.The_Structure_of_...

Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.

Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

- - - -

In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e. what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor "seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?

I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video: https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth

He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.

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