People think they understand what the other person means by what he says. According to NLP this is an illusion. Communication is always miscommunication. We think we understand what the other person is saying, but we don’t. We create our own interpretation of what the other is saying. There are three processes here at work in both the speaker and the listener: deletion, distortion and generalization.
A ‘thing-in-itself just as wrong-headed as a ‘meaning-in-itself, a
‘significance-in-itself. There is no ‘fact-in-itself; instead,for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in. The question ‘What is that?’ is the positing of a meaning from the viewpoint of something else. ‘Essence’, ‘essential being’, is something perspectival and presupposes multiplicity. At bottom there is always the question ‘What is that for me?’ (for us, for everything that lives, etc.). A thing would be determined only when all beings had asked of it, and answered, their ‘What is that?’ If just one being, with its own relations to and perspectives on all things, were missing, then the thing wouldn’t yet be ‘defined’.
Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 149