Reality Reconstruction

Imaginary Things – All Around You

This is the second article in a series on how to use linguistic presuppositions to easily, powerfully, and covertly persuade others. There are 28 specific linguistic presuppositions, as identified in “The Structure of Magic,” by Bandler and Grinder.

The presuppositions are separated into two groups, simple, and complex. The first few simple presuppositions are rather straightforward and not particularly effective on their own, but it can help a great deal to go through the slowly so as to understand how they work.

Later, when you start using and applying complex presuppositions in various combinations, you’ll be glad you started slow and built up your understanding.

The first one is using simple nouns. Whenever you use a simple noun, or a noun phrase (e.g. big blue banana) you presuppose its existence.

Sounds obvious, right? It is pretty straightforward, but by watching your thoughts make sense of some of the following sentences, you’ll notice something happen. When you hear a noun that you’ve never heard of before, you won’t likely question whether or not it exists. You may try and determine it’s meaning from the context, or the various parts if it’s a noun-phrase (more than one word), or you may search your memory for clues.

Have a look at the following examples:

Yesterday I was reading a book and I remembered I forgot to buy a whiffleshrinker at the supermarket.

I heard an ad on the radio the other day for the new traxtalgram that everybody is talking about.

My friend told me he saw an elphanphalyn at the park. I didn’t think they were allowed there.

Now if you’re like most people, when you read those three words that didn’t make any sense, you likely tried to figure out what they meant. Perhaps you even assumed (had you not known I was using them specifically to demonstrate this particular presupposition) that they were names I made up to refer to something.

But you wouldn’t likely assume that the noun was a complete fabrication, and didn’t even stand for any real thing in my warped mind.

That would mean discounting the entire sentence, which would mean questioning why I made the sentence in the first place. That’s quite a lot of brainpower to be used in a casual conversation, and the brain conserves energy at all cost (as it uses about 20% of our daily calories anyhow as it is).

So the question of the existence of those three made up nouns is completely ignored, and they are assumed, or presupposed to exist.

So by using just this first (out of twenty eight) presuppositions, you can convince friends and family that imaginary things exists out in the real world.

Of course, if you carry on talking about imaginary things, you may find yourself locked in a rubber room, so be careful. Later on, when we go over some of the “complex” presuppositions, you’ll find many cool ways to combine them, and how to convince anybody of almost anything.

Stay tuned.

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