Long before I started in NLP, it was attacked by academics and scientists. If you wonder what I mean, ask Wikipedia or an AI and you will notice that the tone is not objective: NLP is treated as nonsense acceptable only to quacks and the deluded.
What’s behind the attacks? Of course some NLP is bad. Some science is also bad. So that’s not it.
I think it’s a particular way of looking at knowledge, especially science, as a ladder that places some ideas (and, by extension, some people) above others.
This is, I suppose, one way to look at it. There is good science and bad science, and even mediocre science is more reliable than other forms of knowledge. Some of these forms of knowledge are practical: people use them successfully every day. Others are part of wisdom traditions that have survived for hundreds, or even thousands, of years.
But I’ve heard so many people make speeches based on the idea that science is somehow the highest form of knowledge and the people who practice it with big funding and large teams are also higher on some scale than the rest of us. And, like most dangerous attitudes, this mixes a little truth with a lot of bias and rhetoric.
I think there is a better way of looking at science. I believe that good science extends our ability to know the world around us, and to know the processes within us. And I think that the reason for building that ability is not to raise some of us up and keep others down, but to build bridges between people and between people and the world they inhabit.
Science at its best gives us a new way of seeing so that we can uncover common ground. There is no necessary conflict between science and poetry or science and philosophy or even science and spirituality. Science is not a combatant. It’s a way of establishing reality in terms that we can share even when we know in different ways and make different meaning from the same facts.
I chose to be certified as a neuroplastician because I believe that it connects me with other people who want to use science to build bridges, not ladders.
