In a message dated 99-06-30 00:24:27 EDT, you write:
Tony Padgett wrote,
> I have never been able to understand the meaning of this story. In fact,
>I came across it when reading "Turtles All the Way Down" by Judith
>Deloizer and John Grinder, some of the founders of NLP. Can someone
>enlighten me on what this story is getting at?
I was amused to see the qoute used by John here on the list. It is one of
my favorite stories.
I also taught NLP on a fairly regular basis and I am familiar with
"Turtles All the Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius"
In order to understand "the story" a good NLP instructor would put the
story first into a context. The context of the story was a preface to a
book on understanding and expanding ones epistemology. Another way of
looking at it is, how we make sense of our world; our mental models and
their means of construction.
The story contrasts two ways, that two different people were attempting to
explain planetary orbits, their mental models.
That the gist of situation being different ways of precieving the world,
the differences that make the difference.
The William James story being one where the differences in explaining the
planets positioning were "very" different.
So my understanding of the "meaning" of the story is how we as individuals
create meaning. How one or more persons can be exposed to a concept, or
set of stimuli, can come to completely differing conclusions and how they
might be deriving those conclusions.
Just some thoughts on the matter,
Glen R Burns
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>