Friday, June 24, 2005

Using pre-listing to find assumptions

The pre-listing method can be used to help find assumptions about a subject. If I am looking for assumptions about a particular subject (the Wimbledon tournament, for example), the assumption search could be expressed as the following directive:

List assumptions about Wimbledon

If I convert this to pre-listing format it now reads:

List X-assumptions about Wimbledon

Then I can specify the 'X' by using a word from pangram trigger, directed-association or flip-flop directed-association. If the word chosen is 'end', for example, then the final directive is thus:

List end-assumptions about Wimbledon

What does this suggest? There is the assumption that the tournament will end. Or an 'end-assumption' could be a different category of assumption - perhaps the very last assumption that someone would consider - something unrelated to tennis. (the first assumption about Wimbledon would probably be that it's a tennis tournament.) There is the assumption that the tournament venue has an end (the boundary of the venue). An assumption that the games end. An assumption that players shake hands at the end etc. One pre-listing directive can suggest a lot of possibilities.

1 comment:

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