The metamodel is a model for communicating in order to get more clarification. It has three categories: deletion, distortion and generalization; and twelve rules or guidelines: simple deletion, comparative deletion, lack of referential index, unspecified verb, nominalization, cause and effect, mind reading, complex equivalence, lost performative, universal quantifier, modal operators of necessity or possibility and presuppositions.
The strength of the metamodel lies in the fact that it is also a model of how the brain store information. Everything you learned from experience about the world can be said to be stored in the brain in your world model. Whenever you describe something honestly then the way you phrase it reflects your world model. If you violate one of the rules of the metamodel this indicates an issue where your world model can be improved, because there is something that either has been deleted, distorted or generalized.
On psychology and theory of knowledge. I maintain that the inner world is phenomenal as well: everything me become conscious of has first been thoroughly trimmed, simplified, schematized, interpreted – the real process of inner ‘perception’, the causal association between thoughts, feelings, desires is absolutely hidden from us, like that between subject and object- and may be just a figment of our imagination. This ‘apparent inner world’ is managed with quite the same forms and procedures as the ‘outer’ world. We never encounter ‘facts’: pleasure and unpleasure are late and derivative phenomena of the intellect … ‘Causality’ escapes us; to assume an immediate, causal bond between thoughts, as logic does, is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts there are, in addition, all sorts of affects at play: but they move so fast that we mistake them, we deny them … ‘Thinking’, as posited by the theorists of knowledge, simply doesn’t occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction achieved by selecting one element from the process and subtracting all the others, an artificial trimming for the purpose of intelligibility … The ‘mind’, something that thinks: maybe even ‘the mind absolute, pure, unmixed’ – this conception is a derivative, second consequence ofthe false self-observation that believes in ‘thinking’: here first an act is imagined that doesn’t occur, ‘thinking’, and secondly a subject-substratum is imagined in which every act of this thinking, and nothing else, originates; i.e., both doing and doer are fictions.
Notebook 11, November 1887 – March 1888 paragraph 113