The Term “Meta” ↑

metanymous 04 января 2018, 10:23 в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

The Greek term “meta” literally refers to something “above, beyond, or about” something else. As a relational term meta speaks about a thought about a thought, a feeling about a feeling. In meta-communication we communicate about our communications. In meta-linguistics, we use and/or develop language so we can talk about our language.

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“The ability to communicate about communication, to comment upon the meaningful actions of oneself and others, is essential for successful social intercourse. In any normal relationship there is a constant interchange of meta-communicative messages such as ‘What do you mean?’ or ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘Are you kidding me?’ and so on.” (Bateson, 1972, p. 215)

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In the NLP Strategy Model, the meta-move is a move along a set of representational steps in which a person as it were “steps back” or “reflects back” onto a previous step or response and responds to that response. (NLP, Volume I, pp. 90, 91-92, 96, 109-110)

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Steve has identified three definitions of “meta” and detailed them with some thought experiments. I fully agree with those and then see several additional definitions of “meta,” especially the role of self-reflexive consciousness. My guess is that this is the source of our differences, hence the emphasis (below) on self-reflexivity.

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Relying on both Korzybski and Bateson, I have relied on and run with the idea that Korzybski put forward about “the theory of multi-ordinality” as the source of so many human disasters. “Going meta” for him meant that the ability for an infinite regress of responses explained how the same word at different logical levels would have very different meanings, his introduction of multi-ordinality as an important linguistic distinction.

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From that I developed the Meta-States Model as one expression of delving into a theory of multi-ordinality. When Richard Bandler asked me to review the history of the Meta-Model and write a book that we would jointly author, I added “multi-ordinality” to the extended Meta-Model (Communication Magic, 2001).