Tag: psycholinguistics

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There is deep meaning underlying this cartoon. The metacognition of intense identities and ecstatic politics, psycholinguistically, resides in the mind at the same place as religion. All religions are metacognitive categories or top-level rules for the cognitive categories that lie below them—values, intentions, behaviors, etc. Religious anything does not have to be rooted in something from the deep past though most of the traditions we have from the deep past have much to offer. Religion is a way to understand the world and align yourself with it. An important basis of religion is morality. A religion with weak, contradictory, or even absurd, morality must be abandoned or improved. Buddhism is a good religion because it has a strong moral foundation, an excellent philosophy, an accurate description of the human condition, and it is dynamic and open to new information. Putting religious weight on transient identities or political causes is a bad idea because it replaces your best metacognitive categories with lower thoughts. ABN

China accused of linguistic ‘genocide’ in Mongolia

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A rights group has accused China’s communist regime of continuing a “cultural genocide” with an attempt to replace ethnic Mongolian language-based education with Mandarin Chinese in Inner Mongolia province.

In a statement on April 11, the US-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Center said it deplores Chinese authorities’ order asking schools in the province to introduce Mandarin-medium teaching and stop Mongolian-based classes from September.

The group said it has obtained a 52-minute audio recording of the principal of 30th Middle School in the provincial capital Huhhot during a parents-teachers meeting. The recording reveals the principal informing parents about the decision

“Under the directive from the Central Government, all Mongolian schools across the region will use the national common language [Chinese] as the language of instruction starting September 1 this year,” the principal said.

link

How to do FIML and why

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FIML stands for Functional Interpersonal Meta-Linguistics. It is a method of communication that helps people understand each other better by focusing on the present moment and the contents of their working memories. FIML can be practiced by two or more people who are willing to be honest and respectful with each other.

The basic procedure of FIML is as follows:

  • One person initiates a FIML query by saying a code word, such as “FIML”. This means that they want to ask the other person about something they said or did that caused them some confusion or emotion.
  • The other person responds by describing what was in their working memory at that moment. They do not give a long explanation or interpretation, just a factual description of the few items that were in their working memory.
  • The first person then asks the other person about the exact word or gesture that prompted their query. They both agree on what that was and have a clear and objective understanding of the micro-exchange that occurred between them.
  • The first person then compares their own motivation for initiating the query with the other person’s motivation for their speech or gesture. The first person then corrects their own misunderstanding if there is any and accepts the other person’s description as being correct.
  • By doing this basic Q&A many times, FIML partners will greatly improve their communication while also improving their overall emotional and psychological habits.

The purpose of doing FIML is to improve one’s communication skills and interpersonal relations. By doing FIML many times, one can:

  • Clear up any misunderstandings or assumptions that may arise from ambiguous or unclear micro speech, tone of voice, or gestures.
  • Learn more about oneself and the other person by exploring micro communicative motivations and perspectives.
  • Build trust and intimacy with the other person by being open and attentive to their working memory.
  • Reduce negative emotions and conflicts that may result from miscommunication or misinterpretation.
  • Gradually or quickly eliminate newly arising or ongoing misinterpretations or neurotic responses between partners

The benefits of doing FIML are many and varied. Some of them are:

  • Having a more accurate and realistic view of oneself and the other person.
  • Having a more satisfying and fulfilling relationship with the other person.
  • Having a more efficient and precise way of communicating with the other person.
  • Having a more positive and constructive way of dealing with emotions and problems.
  • Having a more creative and innovative way of using language and meta-language.

FIML is a powerful and effective method of communication that can help people understand each other better and improve their interpersonal relations. It requires honesty, respect, attention, and willingness from both parties. It also requires practice and patience to master. However, the rewards of doing FIML are well worth the effort.

Evolution of the smile and the inherent ambiguity of signs

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Michael Graziano proposes a interesting, and quite convincing, hypothesis on the evolution of a good many human signals, including smiling, crying, laughing, and subtle versions of these.

His essay can be found here: The First Smile. I highly recommend it.

Evolutionary psychology is without question a real field capable of explaining a great deal about human beings. At the same time, it is often very difficult to separate what actually happened during thousands of years of evolution from what we think happened.

Graziano proposes that the human signals of smiling, crying, and laughing all evolved from a single more basic cringe reaction employed as defense against an object or person striking us or otherwise threatening us.

The evolutionary transformation from primitive reactions to subtle social cues is fascinating to contemplate. I am particularly struck by how ambiguous our present-day understanding of these social cues can be. As Graziano, the evolutionist, says, “So long as both sides of the exchange keep deriving benefits, the behaviour floats free of its violent origins.”

The violent origins of smiling and acting nice only sometimes play a direct role in why people do these behaviors today. Added to them is a plethora of cultural and idiosyncratic interpretations. And so, Graziano the social scientist also says, “We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life: we are always caught between authenticity and fakery, always floating in the grey area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretence.”

I would contend that this aspect of human emotional life is maddening, that it is literally driving people crazy. Because how can you really tell if an expression, a statement, a gesture is authentic or fake? And how can you be sure you know how to interpret it?

In most cases, you can’t be sure. Yes, we can make vows, proclaim fealty or allegiance, swear till death do us part, or repeat familiar, comforting routines for years, but none of these methods is certain. Indeed, our need for them only shows what thin ice we are on. All of them can be faked and all of them often are.

I do believe that many, if not most, of us do not want to be either fakers or the one faked to. Yet we seem all but trapped “between authenticity and fakery, always floating in the grey area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretense.”

This is why we all need FIML practice or something very much like it. With FIML, much greater communicative detail can be made available to both partners. Rather than wonder what words, smiles, tears, or a tone of voice means, FIML partners have the means to find out.

Evolutionarily, you might say that FIML allows the human neocortex to understand and control the human limbic system. FIML allows higher thought, reason, and reflection to control base reactions and base signs that inevitably cause serious misunderstandings even between people who are very well-disposed toward each other and who share a strong desire to interact honestly.

Humans are characterized by a delicate and intricate web of thought, language, and culture that has been grafted onto a base of animal behavior. I do not see how it is even remotely possible to fully realize the potential of that delicate and intricate web of thought, language, and culture without frequently analyzing how animal signs and signals interfere with it during even the most ordinary of interactions.

Graziano mentions the Duchenne smile, a supposedly authentic smile that includes the muscles around the eyes. But Duchenne smiles can easily be faked. They are a required social expression in most of East Asia and can be seen faked by actors on American TV all the time.

The distinction between a Duchenne smile and a super-fake one is valid and valuable to a point. But it is also a woefully simple distinction. We cannot as thinking beings expect to find satisfaction in noticing minor, and easily faked, distinctions like that. The same thing goes for tones of voice, gestures, word choices, behaviors, and everything else we use to communicate.

In public, in the world at large, we have to use best guesses about what is going on, but in private guessing about what your partner really means is a recipe for mutual disaster, if not complete destruction.

first posted AUGUST 18, 2014

Latent Diversity in Human Concepts

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Many social and legal conflicts hinge on semantic disagreements. Understanding the origins and implications of these disagreements necessitates novel methods for identifying and quantifying variation in semantic cognition between individuals. We collected conceptual similarity ratings and feature judgements from a variety of words in two domains. We analyzed this data using a non-parametric clustering scheme, as well as an ecological statistical estimator, in order to infer the number of different variants of common concepts that exist in the population. Our results show at least ten to thirty quantifiably different variants of word meanings exist for even common nouns. Further, people are unaware of this variation, and exhibit a strong bias to erroneously believe that other people share their semantics. This highlights conceptual factors that likely interfere with productive political and social discourse.

link

This study shows a very basic reason to do FIML. The study emphasizes semantic variation at the level of social discourse and common words. FIML operates at the interpersonal, idiosyncratic level where our sense of being lurks like a chained animal in the midst of an enormous plethora of semantic variation and semiotic ambiguity. Simply stated, there is no way to negotiate the intimate interpersonal realm well without doing FIML. In this realm, the kinds of misunderstandings identified in the linked study are multiplied in literally every imaginable way. At the same time, the dangerous importance of communication errors is greatly amplified and psychologically cumulative. This is a main reason interpersonal relationships can become volatile and end in suffering. If you can see what the study is about and understand the importance of the ‘semantic disagreements’ it describes, you should be able to see the importance of doing FIML in real-time with an understanding partner. From birth to death, our entire psychologies rest on the dynamic foundation of our intimate, interpersonal communications. If you want to optimize your psychology, you must clear up communication at this level. ABN

Interpersonal pragmatics in real-time

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Interpersonal pragmatics are absolutely fundamental to human psychology.

Understanding interpersonal pragmatics in real-time is the holy grail of human psychology because there is nothing else that reveals as well how human psychology actually functions.

Pragmatics “is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.” It is the study of why we say what we say when we say it and how that is understood by others and vice-versa.

Real-time interpersonal pragmatics are highly idiosyncratic. This means that psychological generalizations can be and often are seriously misleading when applied to real-time interpersonal situations. And this means that you will never figure out your own psychology or anyone else’s if you do not have a method for understanding real-time interpersonal pragmatics.

One day AI will help us with this task and when that day comes, our understanding of human psychology will change completely. After that day, people in future will have a very hard time understanding how and why we are so limited today in our comprehension of human psychology. They will see that, yes, we functioned, but Lord what a mess we make of it!

The way to understand interpersonal pragmatics in real-time today is FIML and I do not believe there is any other way. At least I have not found one after over ten years of searching.

The following comments are for readers who already practice FIML and/or those who are contemplating doing it or just getting started:

  • It is very important to fully grasp the difference between knowing that real-time communication details are extremely revealing of something else (how your mind functions) and becoming lost in the emotions of those details.
  • It is very good to be passionate about wanting to understand the minutiae of real-time communication but very bad to get embroiled in the emotions of those small, originating exchanges.
  • FIML works with small bits of data because only these can be reliable isolated and viewed analytically.
  • To lose perspective and become emotionally embroiled in these bits of data because they are being focused on (for FIML reasons) is to waste time and create unnecessary problems. Don’t do it. Be smarter than that.

first posted MAY 1, 2018

Psychological optimization through analysis of communication in real-time

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The best way to analyze how you communicate in real time is:

Get an honest partner who cares about you.

Together and separately observe the small units of your thoughts and communication.

Use only units of communication small enough to be held in your short-term memory(s). This means the five to seven things you are able to hold in your short-term memory.

Discuss what you find in yourself with your partner.

Then discuss these units as they arise during communication with your partner.

If both partners understand what comprises a small unit (the 5-7 things in short-term memory), you are ready to share this information in real-time (that is, very close in time to when the small unit arose).

This small unit could be a gesture, a word, an expression, a tone of voice. Anything small enough that communicates to you and that seems to be coming from your partner.

The unit should be small and agreed upon by both partners.

Then analyze it as it functioned during the moment(s) it arose.

Example: the small unit might be a fleeting gesture—your partner drops their hand. You feel something and juust start to think maybe it is a dismissive gesture.

Stop the flow of communication immediately at that point (as you first perceive a reaction arising in yourself).

Then ask your partner what was in their mind when their hand dropped (or what was in their mind “just a moment before,” without identifying the hand drop).

(Your partner must previously have agreed to welcome this sort of intervention.)

Listen to what they say and compare that to what you were beginning to think.

If it was dismissive, find out why.

If it was not, examine yourself and how your psychology was actually functioning in real-time.

You can also do this with units based on positive emotions or unemotional states of mind.

It’s good to practice this technique on neutral states of mind.

What you will find.

You will find that a significant number of your real-time impressions of your partner are mistaken, either slightly or very much.

If both partners keep correcting these mistakes, you will come to have fewer and fewer of them (though they will always continue to arise due to inherent ambiguities in communication).

As both partners clear up communications between them, both will also clear up many cloudy parts of their own psychologies.

This is because our psychologies are based on communication. (Bad data in = bad conclusions both inside you and what you do with them outside you.)

I have used the above technique for many years and guarantee it works wonders.

The hardest parts of this are getting a good partner, getting them to agree to do it, then doing it your first few times.

It is hard at first because it goes against basic cultural instincts.

To overcome this, remember the units are very small and you agreed to do it.

This technique doesn’t hurt at all but will make you feel wonderful.

It doesn’t hurt because the units are so small.

It makes you feel wonderful because each mistaken unit you remove clears up mental space for something better.

When you observe and remove more and more small (micro) units of the same type, you will tend to eliminate the meso and macro (mistaken) psychological frames that support them.

Some frames can be eliminated after 1-5 micro units have been observed. Some take longer.

first posted MARCH 29, 2017

When first posed, I used their and them in the antiquated sense of a gender not identified, which is how I mean it today as well. This essay describes how to do FIML and briefly explains the value of doing it. ABN

Dr Ardis is back on Diamond and Silk Chit Chat

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The rant at the beginning is priceless. Cucks, Christians, Buddhists, and Conservatives all need to listen to it. Speech takes many forms. Emotional or passionate speech is typically proscribed in “polite society”, but copious tears and quavering whining voices are all but worshipped. That alone says a lot about us. Dr Ardis enters at 10:00 minute mark but don’t skip the rant. Filing this one under psycholinguistics. ABN

Comment on a worthy article on modeling excess deaths caused by vaxxes

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I’m a simple guy. If you’ve developed a 95% effective vaccine that’s a safe preventative for the 3rd leading cause of death in your society, then total deaths CANNOT increase. Any attempt to attribute that increase in death to something else is farcical because, sure, it’s possible, but it’s blatantly unreasonable. I’m an attorney, and I remind people that we don’t execute criminals based on proof; we execute them based on proof BEYOND a reasonable doubt. When you start vaccinating & total deaths increase, you have no reasonable doubt – the vaccines must end. Over-intellectualizing, over-thinking are extremely dangerous trends, especially for the intelligent. It’s very easy to persuade yourself that there’s some universe in which these vaccines work, or there are 73 genders, or that socialism just hasn’t been tried, but none of these beliefs are reasonable – they’re all nuts.

It’s really very simple: if you “cure” the third leading cause of death, then total deaths MUST decline. Anyone claiming there’s an exception to that rule must present extraordinary evidence, not speculation. Indeed, the exception would be obvious (like CA fell into the ocean & drowned millions). It’s not some BS about masks make people sad, which makes them sick…such subtle things are not plausible in light of the obvious: you’ve “cured” the 3rd leading cause of death but deaths increased.

Please stop taking the world “reasonable” out of your analysis/discussions. It’s great that you have theories about how the vaccines might not be to blame, but are those theories reasonable? That’s the threshold question we must demand our adversaries answer. (You reason from what you know to what you don’t, not from what you don’t know. We know deaths are increasing despite the cure; what do we infer from that? Granted, we don’t know why deaths are increasing, but so what? Uncertainty drives INACTION, not action. That is, you don’t vaccinate until you know it’s unsafe; you STOP vaccinating until you KNOW it’s safe.

link

The full article is well-worth reading and can be found here: A Weltanschauung causal model of excess deaths. This article provides an excellent overview of the factors in a statistical model and how to consider them. Many readers may already appreciate the problems. I am glad I read the whole thing because it is valuable confirmation. But the comment above is more or less how I felt at the end. Next to all the science arguments is an argument about rhetoric. How do we best present our case so it is noticed but not so sensational or oversimplified it can be easily refuted with concomitant simplifications? In my view, we need to be brief and forceful in what we say. Some amount of error, oversimplification, and sensationalism must be tolerated if it communicates with more people and/or gets them to research the topic and discover supporting complexities themselves. We have the winning argument and should sound like it when addressing a wide audience. Lives are at stake. My own brother was deeply affected by Died Suddenly. That’s an example of the power of rhetoric. He has done more research and reading since viewing that film than anything else. ABN

Robert Malone and Ryan Cole on the nuances of covid science

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This is an interesting video if you want to get into the details of errors made during covid. In light of the discussion from earlier today on in-fighting among top covid scientists and the kinds of rhetoric that are appropriate for discussions of covid, the video above shows how two scientists talking about the science of covid does not make for gripping cinema and will not communicate with a wide audience. And this shows where and why Stew Peters and Alex Jones can and do play an important role in informing an audience much wider than Cole & Malone can hope to reach. Covid is a sciencey subject and also it affects everyone. Thus, strong voices, non-scientific voices, imperfect sensationalist voices also have a contribution to make. My brother watched Died Suddenly and was deeply affected by it. He will not have the patience for a video like the one above. ABN

Reason is signal organization

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If we view the universe as being made up of signals rather than matter, what we call “reason” looks very much like a method for organizing signals.

We can visualize this and from our visualization imagine other ways signals organize.

We say something is reasonable when we cannot find elements that do not seem to be in place among elements that do seem to be in place.

In this respect, the term “aesthetic reasoning”—musical, visual, poetic, etc.—makes good sense. It explains how the elements of an artwork are put together, how they are organized.

Engineers generally reason in more utilitarian ways then artists, but there is a great deal of overlap between these pursuits.

Not all reason works only with tangibles and how to organize them. We also fit things  together in our minds by what we normally think of as reasoning, inference, intuition, purpose, and so on.

In many cases, it is simpler and easier to think of signals than matter.

Signals organize into networks that signal other networks and receive signals from them.

A more “reasonable” network organization will work better than a less reasonable one. This type of network will tend to evolve.

first posted MARCH 8, 2017

Edit 12/26/23: We can also see how our fractured world today, divided but not yet conquered, cannot come together. From almost every angle it is unreasonable or simply savage. Signals do not align, we do not even know who is in control or what they want. ABN

FIML and ‘sins of omission’

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By “sin of omission” I mean refraining from doing a FIML query because you feel it will be too much trouble, seem contentious, take too long, expose a failing or weakness in yourself, hurt your partner’s feelings, and so on.

Some time ago we came up with the slogan: “It is always cheaper to do a FIML query than not do one.” This slogan is meant to help us guard against “sins of omission.”

If you refrain from saying something because you are afraid it will cause one of the problems mentioned above, you are right there causing a worse kind of problem in that you are assuming something about your partner that may not be (probably isn’t) true.

Even worse, you are refraining from informing your partner that you have concluded that some kinds of speech acts are not safe or pleasant to engage in with them.

It would be far, far cheaper for both you and your partner to deal with whatever you think the problem is the moment it arises.

This is so because small matters are much easier for us to understand and deal with than large matters. When we deal with small matters as they arise in normal conversation,we are doing at least two very important things: 1) we are dealing with the matter and its ramifications and 2) we are learning something very important about how we speak.

FIML changes the way we think not just what we think. If we fully understand that our understandings of each other can be very far off and if we fully understand how serious these misunderstandings can become, we no longer will see discussing minor mix-ups as a waste of time or something to be avoided.

I saw a post the other day by a beginning Buddhist who was confused about his mindfulness practice. He asked: “Every time I try to be mindful, my mind seems to fill with thoughts, words, and feelings. How do I stop that?”

Mindfulness is about being clear about what your mind is really doing. It’s not about pretending you have an ideal mind, or acting as if you do. If that Buddhist has a partner and if they both do FIML, they will experience the value of mindfulness in a very direct and beneficial way.

Human languages have evolved within violent hierarchical social systems that exploit our normally poor abilities to understand each other.

FIML practice allows us to be mindful of these limitations and go beyond them to achieve real understanding with our partner. The deep reward of FIML practice lies in that and in the profound feeling of resolution you will reach with your partner each and every time you carry a FIML discussion through to a mutually satisfying resolution.

first posted JUNE 15, 2012

FIML and Symbolic Interaction Theory

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Symbolic Interaction Theory, also called symbolic interactionism, provides the best large-scale framework I have found so far for explaining FIML practice.

Three basic premises of symbolic interactionism are:

  • “Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.”
  • “The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.”
  • “These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.”

These basic premises have been taken from the Wikipedia article linked above. I tend to agree with most of the general framework, as I understand it, of symbolic interactionism and believe that FIML practice can reasonably be understood as a method that can fit fairly comfortably within that framework.

FIML differs from symbolic interactionism in that FIML is much more a form of interpersonal psychotherapy than a sociological theory. FIML is a communication technique that focuses on meaning as it arises and is apprehended during short periods of time. FIML’s focus on very small units of interpersonal communication is what allows partners to understand how their sense of meaning intertwines with their emotional responses.

From a FIML point of view, society does not appear very well structured in many of its contexts, especially interpersonal contexts involving emotions, friendship, and intimate bonding. From this point of view, a great deal of social structure appears to be a substitute for authentic interaction between individual minds.

FIML seems also to show that a great deal of human suffering arises from the paucity of meaning that can be exchanged between individuals in most social contexts. Indeed, even in intimate contexts, most individuals, if not all of them, have great difficulty in attaining profound mutual understanding. This happens because our perceptions of our selves and others—due to how we use language and semiotics—are too crude and vague to allow for communicative complexity equal to the complexity of our minds/brains.

FIML corrects this problem by focusing on the details of interpersonal communication. Incidentally, FIML theory/practice can be falsified by having many couples do FIML practice and measuring the results. A criticism of symbolic interactionism is that it is not falsifiable. FIML differs from symbolic interactionism in that it is a practical technique that uses objective data (agreed upon by both partners) to optimize communication and improve psychological well-being.

I am pretty sure I will have more to say about symbolic interactionism in the days to come. A friend just sent me the article linked above, so I put down a few thoughts after one reading. FIML partners may find that symbolic interactionism helps with a general understanding of FIML practice.

first posted JUNE 26, 2014

UPDATE 01/13/22: The Wikipedia page has been updated since the excerpt above. I found this update interesting:

[Symbolic interactionism] is a framework that helps understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions helps create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the shared meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people live in both natural and symbolic environments.

I agree with this and would add that the the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals occurs all-importantly and very profoundly on the level of intimate interpersonal relationships. What FIML does is discover, foster, and create a much more accurate shared understanding and interpretations of meaning between FIML partners. The benefit of this is enormous since it has an extremely profound effect on individual psychology and all other shared understanding and interpretations of meaning encountered in society everywhere. ABN

Big mistake: We often own what we didn’t mean

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A fascinating study from Sweden confirms something that FIML practice has shown us to be a fairly common occurrence and a potential source of serious interpersonal problems.

In FIML terms, the mistake is that we own something we didn’t mean. Or we take on an attitude, mood, or belief that we did not hold after we have been misheard or misunderstood.

In the study from Lund University in Sweden—How to confuse a moral compass—researchers found that:

People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions…

I was not surprised at all to read that because FIML practice has clearly shown my partner and me that it is really easy to fall into the trap of owning what your partner erroneously thinks you meant.

Continue reading “Big mistake: We often own what we didn’t mean” →

Fabula and semiotics

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Fabula are “the raw material of a story or narrative.”

I want to borrow this term to denote the raw material of a purposive conversation. For example, if I say to my partner that I want to have a salad for dinner, the notion or idea of that salad is a fabula that we can now discuss.

Our discussion of this as yet non-existent salad, this salad fabula, will include particular items, acts, and visualizations. For example, I may want sliced tomatoes in the salad, my partner may mention some olives in the refrigerator. We may both visualize our salad bowl and kitchen while we decide who does what.

Before the salad is made it is a fabula. The particular elements that go into getting the salad made while they are still only in our minds are semiotic elements.

In this sense, semiotics can be defined as the units or parts of a conversational fabula. We use these semiotics to discuss how to make what kind of salad.

We do the same thing with virtually all other conversational subjects. That is, we declare or grope toward determining what our fabula is and use semiotics to further clarify our vision of it. While doing this, ideally, we will remain open to real-time alterations and misunderstandings about both the fabula and the semiotics.

In these terms, most reasonable (and many unreasonable) conversations can be understood as two (or more) people negotiating* the “meanings” of their imperfectly shared fabula and semiotics. The fabula is a sort of context that defines the semiotics used in the discussion of it.

When the conversation is about salads, much of the process of going from a salad fabula to a real salad is straightforward and unproblematical.

When a conversation is about matters that are more ambiguous, subjective, emotional, or existential, there may be more problems because the fabula often will not be as clear as a salad to both parties. Or if it is, it may lead parties to quickly cleave to cliches or obvious explanations, thus limiting fresh responses or creative insights.

FIML practice can fix these problems by getting partners to clarify their fabula while also allowing them to alter it, or even change it entirely, as their discussion progresses.

The same is true at a different level for the semiotics they employ in their discussion. With FIML practice these semiotics often can be adjusted and clarified as soon as diverging understanding is noticed in either person’s mind.

Even if diverging understandings persist for some time, experienced FIML partners will be better prepared notice them when the opportunity arises.

A more complex example of this is an ongoing discussion my partner and I have had for several years. The basic discussion involves a strong reaction I sometimes have to cosmetic surgery. I admit that my reaction can be irrational and I can’t quite explain it. My partner frequently makes the point that I do like cosmetic surgery as long as I don’t notice it and/or like the results. We have gone back and forth on this quite a few times without ever getting a really good resolution, until a few days ago. The core problem had been that I do dislike the idea of cosmetic surgery, period. And also, I do recognize that it can be necessary and that if I like the results, I may be able to accept it even when it is not necessary.

We had never been involved in a simple dichotomy—like versus don’t like—but we both had been speaking as if we were. This was mostly my fault as I sometimes expressed revulsion at some forms of cosmetic surgery, but it was also not true that I actually liked the surgery if I liked the results or didn’t notice it.

________________________

*I mean the word negotiating not so much as making a deal but more as negotiating a narrow foot bride across a stream or negotiating a turn in an automobile. Negotiation in this sense is an effort between two or more people to make many small adjustments to arrive at a mutually satisfying result, the “meaning” of which is understood in roughly the same way by all parties.

first posted JANUARY 8, 2014

UPDATE 12/12/23: Wow, did I have a huge misunderstanding of a conversational fabula last night. I had trouble falling asleep over it and woke up ruminating on it. My partner is a genius and all I did was bring it up and describe exactly what I had thought and within minutes, everything was cleared up. I can’t go into it because it is too complex. But I can say that this kind of mistake is what causes neurosis, emotional agony, even mental illness. This is the kind of mistake FIML was designed to correct. Usually, FIML mistakes are small and involve semiotics but a huge fabula mistake is always possible, as I saw very clearly over the past 12 hours. I cannot thank my partner enough for having such deep understanding of me, herself, and what we had been talking about and how we generally talk. FIML is a profound training exercise. If you have ever gotten anything from this site (or not), please try FIML. It is by far the best unique thing I have to offer. ABN