Marketing Tricks the BIG Companies Use to Fool You” Series Use the Same Tricks to Build Your NLPCoaching Business XVII

“Marketing Tricks the BIG Companies Use to Fool You” Series Use the Same Tricks to Build Your NLPCoaching Business

These articles are written to be equally useful for the beginner of NLP and the NLP Trainer although some of the articles may be more advanced than others.
If you find yourself reading an article that’s too advanced, give us a call or send us an email. We will be happy to clarify the issue for you.

Article No. 17

This is a great one folks if you can master it quickly. If you read carefully the news, you see it used quite often, although as you will see it does not
make much sense when you really think of it!

It twists your brains a little, but it is all for a good cause!

Use it with integrity!

Pattern No.17 – ASSUME “THE TRUTH” or “BURDEN OF PROOF” — this technique assumes that something not yet proven, is true.

Here we deal with a claim that whatever has not yet been proved false must be true. This statement is neither correct nor is it logical. Basically here
we’re talking about a person claiming that his argument is correct only because there is no opposition against his statement.

You cannot claim that “out of body experiences exist unless someone proves that they do not exist.”

It really makes no sense to maintain that something exists unless you prove that it doesn’t.

What is illogical is to affirm that something “exists” and when asked to prove it, to use as a defense of that something’s existence the fact that no one
has proven that that something does not exist.

Did you manage to get your head around this? Read it again slowly!

Moreover, it is also not logical to think that just because you can’t prove that something exists that does not mean that the very something does not exist and therefore something else does exist.

By the way, if you have been trained in NLP Coaching at Master Practitioner level, do you recognize Quantum Linguistic patterns here? The ones based on
Cartesian Logic?

Here is a good point I would like you to consider.

Why is it that the “burden of proof” is on the person who makes the statement?

Very simple. Would you prefer to go through life believing everything told to you by others? Every person that cares to begin to think for themselves,
should at least assume that there is a certain degree of uncertainty in what other people claim to be “the truth”.

Shifting the Burden Of Proof

Now here is something really interesting. If we shift the burden of proof, this means that the responsibility is now on the person who objects to the
statement being made.

But, the person making a negative claim (something does not exist) cannot logically prove non-existence.

And here’s why.

How do you know something non-specific does not exist?

Hmmmm,,.

As the American Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler has pointed out, the attempt to prove a universal
negative is a self-defeating proposition.

This pattern could be very effective if the audience lets the argument pass by (IE not challenge it with Meta- Model type Questions).

Of course green aliens with big horns exist. Nobody has ever proven otherwise.

Of course there are animals we have never seen. Nobody has proven otherwise.

One cannot prove broad overall claims that are negative claims.

Here is a great quote from Richard Carrier as quoted on

Philosophy of Religion

article:

“Negative statements often make claims that are hard to prove because they make predictions about things we are in practice unable to observe in a finite
time. For instance, “there are no big green Martians” means “there are no big green Martians in this or any universe,” and unlike your bathtub, it is not
possible to look in every corner of every universe, thus we cannot completely test this proposition–we can just look around within the limits of our
ability and our desire to expend time and resources on looking, and prove that, where we have looked so far, and within the limits of our knowing anything
at all, there are no big green Martians. In such a case we have proved a negative, just not the negative of the sweeping proposition in question.”-Richard
Carrier, “Proving a Negative “(1999) by Richard Carrier”,

As we have seen, in most situations one side has the burden of proof resting on it and therefore it must provide support for its position. Thus as a result
so far and unless proven otherwise, the claim of the other side (the one that does not bear the burden of proof), is assumed to be true.

Examples of Burden of Proof

X: “I think that we should invest more money – wisely of course.”

Z: “This would really be a bad idea considering the state of the economy.”

X: “How could you be against investing more money wisely?”

X: “I think that some people are extraterrestrials.”

Z: “What is your proof?”

X: “No one has been able to prove that some people are not extraterrestrials.”

I hope you had fun with this one. It scrambles your brains a little,.

Until next time, be well.