Thanks so much,Ryan; I especially like your description of the gene as an example of inside/outside articulations. And yet, let's see if I can get clearer as to my question.  I guess I am interested in what we believe about our relationship to the world before we form conclusions about the veracity or reliability of that knowledge.  That is, before we all agree that language inherently carves up the world in ways that can be epistemologically confusing, it seems that we share a set of highly specific intuitions in regards to our separateness from the real world. When I say 'we', I refer to anybody who no longer naively accepts what he/she perceives through the senses as being 'out there' and recognizes that what he/she is perceiving is a transformation of something else that really is 'out there'.  It is our intuition of the latter 'out there' that I am wanting to consider at the moment.  If we are to spend much time at all talking about transforms (as we do on this list and as the authors do, quite helpfully, in their book), I assume that whether or not we speak much of it we implicitly accept that there exists the transformed.  The transformed would be that world which exists independently of our transforms.  NLP recognizes this separation between the transformed (out there) and the transforms (in here) and humbly accepts our inability to say much of anything about the transformed, other than, perhaps, that without the transformed we wouldn't get to have so much fun figuring out and experimenting with the transforms.  NLP recognizes that anything useful it has to say about human experiences falls on the line of the transforms.  I wouldn't say that Descartes has been overcome, but just successfully ignored. In fact it seems that Dr. Grinder and Mrs. St. Clair's phrase 'the Cartesian sin' must be referring not to the split between 'out there' and 'in here', but the urge to seek some sort of satisfying bridge between them.  By making explicit the distinction between the transformed and the transforms (including F2), the authors do share the starting point at which Descartes also stands. I'm wondering about the nature of our thinking activity. Let's say that there is a disjunction between the transformed and the transforms (there it is, already codified in our language, but our words are merely attempts to express a set of intuitions about the fact that we recognize an 'out' and an 'in').  Obviously the transforms that we have first access to tell us nothing of this distinction because by definition they tell us nothing ABOUT anything; they simply are.  What are they? They are qualities.  A second set of transforms come on the scene to begin forming 'abouts' and 'becauses'.  We regard this second set of transforms as 'linguistic' in nature.  Clearly, the end result of the second transforms is linguistic, but surely that is not the way they start- look at child development; they don't learn to speak by already having hidden words inside their brains.  They engage, intuitively, with F1 transforms and slowly build linguistic structures, which, no doubt, shape the way in which they continue to engage with F1 transforms. Here, I am simply wanting to point out that something is connected with capacity to linguistically articulate ourselves and that this something is cognitive in nature and non-linguistic.  We might locate this something as a material function of the brain, but speaking experientially, we can only say that it stands in an antecedent relationship to the final product of words.  Think about the fact that I can correct what I am saying mid-sentence because something in me is able to form a relationship to the words I am presently typing, and I can say from my own experience that this something which initiates the correction is not the same things as the correct words which result from its instigation.  Clearly, before anybody ever got around to the idea that there is the transformed and the transforms (F1 and F2), this guiding, non-linguistic something was doing its thing. In fact, this guiding, non-linguistic something is what obviously inspired Dr. Grinder to begin reexpressing himself in regards to fundamental distinction in NLP (old code vs new code), and it will be this guiding, non-linguistic something that will help Dr. Grinder choose new words in the future to express even better distinctions and insights in these regards.  Now, I don't think it is merely an academic exercise to seek the relationship between the transformed and that which allows us to posit its existence.  In fact, I believe that congruence in this matter is important in the same way that the congruence between NLPa and NLPm is important.  At this point, I don't see how it is possible to accept the distinction between the transformed and the transforms when that which makes the distinction possible is reduced to some type of a transform of a transform.  It seems almost like saying that all of the hard work of the construction crew is a RESULT of the finished home.  Jerry