Hello. In the post that this post replies to, I wrote that ethical therapist responses could depend on: (1) statement synonymy (2) deductive entailment (3) analytic predication (versus synthetic predication) (4) necessary truths (versus contingent truths) (5) statement presupposition and I want to add to that list: (6) syntactic ambiguity (7) semantic ambiguity (8) semantic vagueness My formulation of an ethic for hypnotic communication to clients depends on the elements: (9) principle: the subjective connotations of your client's communication, when changed by you, needlessly and undesirably manipulate your client's experience. (10) policy: for each therapeutic speech act you deliver, make the content of your speech act match the content delivered by the client, in his prior speech acts. (11) procedure: ... I haven't tried to produce justification for each element, but a presentation of this ethic to the NLP community will need to include a separate justification of each element (9) through (11). I think another principle plays a part in development of procedure (11).  Earlier, I formulated that principle as: (12) the therapist does not need to understand, in certain ways, the verbal content that the client delivers to him. Now I think principle (12) is too vague with respect to what client content need not be understood. My problem is I don't know enough about: (13) NLP or Ericksonian hypnotherapy in practice; the steps to follow in use of some kinds of NLP and hypnosis techniques; NLP and hypnosis techniques to which principle (9) applies. I can perform the actions: (14) outline what I don't know, to get feedback (15) describe speech act conditions in which a therapist does not add content to his client's communications. I think (15) has been done before - a literature search ought to turn up work, work on active listening, therapeutic objectiveness.  I'm sure that Freud had ideas with respect to the ethic I'm discussing,a lot of others must have after him.   With some effort, I might be able to perform action (15), by synthesizing, or just passing on, some work on the subject, work that I think is valuable to the NLP community. So, my future posts will explore a revised topic, and respond to the question: (16) what defines therapist->client speech acts, speech acts that do not add content to a client's prior communications? A good explanatory response to question (16) will: (17) provide useful input to an effort to justify and develop elements (9) through (11), the elements of a hypnotic communication ethic. In the process of answering question (16), I will probably have to: (18) introduce terminology that labels the participants involved in the target context of procedure (11). I also want to perform the actions: (19) introduce concepts from the philosophy of ethics on this forum (20) define terminology useful for evaluating ethical arguments for and against formulations of a hypnotic communication ethic I welcome any response to this post, any response that addresses my possible activities (14), (15), (17), (18), (19), and (20), or that provides knowledge about topic (13).  Anyone have any kind of answer to my question (16)?  General feedback is also welcome. -nj