Booman hates framing because he just doesn’t get it. And he just doesn’t get it because he’s been schooled in the one of the Western Tradition’s Big Lies–the Big Lie of disembodied knowledge.
Understanding Lakoff’s framing theories involves understanding basic logic. And I don’t feel like giving an academic explanation of all the intricacies of symbolic logic. So, I’ll just use layman’s terms.
To which media girl quite rightly responded:
Thanks for the contempt
Silly me! I just don’t understand logic! Goodness! That means the tarot cards are wrong?!
/sarcasm
Again, I think you’re arguing with a straw man. Framing is not willy nilly manipulation.
Booman himself is operating inside a frame. The frame of disembodied knowledge. And as media girl quite aptly notes, it’s a frame drenched in elitism. It’s also utterly wrong.
The irony and the puzzle to be explained here is that on virtually every specific example Booman and I are in agreement. But I see them as misunderstands, distortions, misapplications, or corruptions of framing, while he frames them as the essence of framing. The reason for this, as I see it, is a fundamental, quasi-religious belief in a mythical realm of knowledge beyond framing, beyond the body and the earthly realm, beyond politics, beyond us all.
The frame of disembodied knowledge received its classical formulation in Plato’s Theory of Forms. Plato was entranced with mathematics. The truths of mathematics do not depend on the senses. They are what we call analytic truths. They are truths of reason. And because they do not depend on what comes in through our senses, they appear to have no dependence on the body, no dependence on the world as we perceive it. They represent a “higher” truth, dealing with higher objects–numbers.
Plato took this example, and ran with it. He assumed that there was an entire realm of similarly higher objects–the “Platonic Forms”–and that all true knowledge was the knowledge of them. All else was illusion. He used the metaphor of the cave. Men dependent on their senses were like men trapped in a cave, and what passed for knowledge among them was nothing but shadows on the wall of the cave. They knew nothing of the world above, directly illuminated by the Sun–the world of the Platonic Forms.
The problem is, Plato was utterly wrong. His theory cannot possibly work, because there is no logically coherent way to connect his ideal forms with the empirical world. Platonists have been trying to solve this problem for 2500, and they have repeatedly failed.
There are other problems as well, which have not figured as prominently in the annals of philosophy. One of them was pointed out by America’s greatest and most original philosopher, William James. James–who started out as a neurologist–pointed out that analytic truths were the product of the human nervous system, which in turn was the product of human evolution, which in turn was the product of empirical events. Thus, James coined the term “backdoor empiricism” for the way in which the physical world gave us analytical truths.
Platonism Est Mort, Vive Platonism!
Despite the fact that Platonism is logically incoherent, it retains enormous appeal for certain kinds of people. People like me, in fact. Or at least, who I used to be at one point in my life. I was a teenage math geek, way back in second grade.
Platonism in one form or another is constantly being reborn. And why not? Logic holds enormous appeal, in part because it’s such an efficient way of cutting through BS.
But human beings aren’t logical. We want and mean and need and value contradictory things. The answer is not to abandon logic, but realize its limitations. Logic is a tool. How do we apply it? We apply it within a context. And context is what framing is all about.
In his heart of hearts, it appears to me, Booman would just like to solve all our political problems with a simple equation expressed, perhaps, in the language of formal logic. I shared that desire, once. Hell, I share it still. Only now I know that it’s an illusion.
Because he can’t do this, Booman sometimes swings to the opposite extreme. Just SHOUT IT!
And lastly, you can usually do better by just saying, “I’m for goddamn small class sizes, America’s children deserve it.”
adding
Mind you, that is NOT framing. That is just a declarative statement.
But, as ubikkibu wisely retorts
Plain talk can be the best framing. [Ducks head]
No really. The above is a statement of values that does not employ Republican-leaning words like “school choice” or “performance accountability,” etc.
Yup! You can’t escape from framing. Declarative statements involve framing, just like every other form of language. Booman doesn’t like this. It makes him angry. He wants his realm of pure Platonic thought. He wants his policy wonk discussions where real thinking goes on, and problems are solved, once and for all. And everything else that is not what he wants is pure manipulation, which utterly disgusts him:
Framing is a concession to the stupidity and impressionability of the electorate. It is cynical thru and thru. (That doesn’t mean it isn’t effective).
Booman’s thinking–reflecting the dominant Western Tradition–is deeply dualistic. There is the higher realm, the realm of Platonic Forms, of formal logic, of policy wonk discussions, of reason. And there is the lower realm, of sleazy used car salesmen, politicians, and people who try to frame arguments in ways that reach other people.
This sort of pernicious dualism–in which all that is above is good, and all that is below is bad–is clearly seen as delusional and destructive when we witness it on the right. “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” we rightly ask of the new Crusaders. But Booman is doing precisely the same sort of thing, only in a more subtle way. But it’s just as firmly entrenched in his thinking as anything in the Neocons’ or Theocons’ group mind.
That’s why he can back off momentarily when confronted with compelling evidence, and then a nanosecond later be back to his old ways.
For example, he was when confronted directly by someone who really knows her stuff, Janet Strange, here:
I heard Lakoff speak a few days after Rove made his asinine comment:
Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
Lakoff blasted the Democratic response – which sounded a lot like, “No we are not wimps. We don’t want to offer terrorists therapy.” He said the Democrats should have just changed the f’ing subject.
That they should have said – this war is a disaster, it was sold to the American people on lies, and it has made us and the entire world less safe. Say it loud and don’t back down. I do not see this as spinning, packaging, or deceiving.
and he responded:
you keep acting as though I am saying Lakoff is wrong. I’m not. I’m saying that using his theories to package failed or unpopular policies won’t work.
We can never out-lie the Republicans and we don’t want to.
And yet, Booman continues to attack framing, not the misapplication of framing. Why? Because, despite his brief backing off, he sees it as fundamentally dishonest. Logic is good. Rhetoric is bad. Framing comes from the realm of rhetoric, and therefore is inherently bad.
Underlying all this is the ever-reincarnated Platonic dream, involving (1) The belief in objective knowledge. (2) The belief that humans can have such knowledge. (3) The belief that it can be had of the empirical world. (4) The belief that it can be expressed in pure, literal, uncorrupted language.
But Plato was a reactionary. And this vision is not just epistemologically wrong. It, too, is fundamentally reactionary. The fact is, knowledge, like freedom, is the product of constant struggle. We have to fight for it. It is something we construct.
That is how even the most basic of human cognition operates, not just the formulation of political consciousness, but formation of primative sensations. This can be seen in optical illusions, which work by revealing something of the mechanisms of how we automatically construct the images of the world that we naively take to “just be there.”
Once upon a time, what I am saying here was philosophy. But now it’s science. We study information processing scientifically. And one thing we see, over and over and over again is that useful information is constructed out of inputs that need to be pre-processed before they are processed, and then can be formated for output in order to be useful for any other process to use. That is, information is continually being constructed. It is not data–which means “given.” Nothing is “given.”
It is taken.
John Van Neuman, meet Frederick Douglas.
