Comments on: Framing

By: Tommaso Sciortino

Tommaso Sciortino — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 19:06:38 +0000

Lakoff goes into more than just framing arguments to sway listeners. He talks about using frames to help us build a liberal vocabulary that unifies diverse liberal groups. Lakoff is trying to find a way for liberals to have as much solidarity as conservatives. After all, there’s no good reason why a libertarian and an intolerant Christian should be on the same side. Finding common values they both agree with is important and clearly much more effective than the traditional liberal strategy of proposing a bunch of policy positions.

By: Abi

Abi — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 05:32:41 +0000

As “passing fancy” said above, Tony Robbins and others have done much to popularize framing and other such concepts which, they claim, form a part of NeuroLinquistic Programming (NLP). These people see NLP as a well developed, complete (and proven!) system for “personal change”. Their working vocabulary includes frames, metaphors, mental models, and many other such things. See also the entry on NLP in the skeptic’s dictionary (skepdic.com/neurolin.com) for, well, a skeptical view of NLP and NLP-based “technologies”.

By: Stephen M (Ethesis

Stephen M (Ethesis — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:17:48 +0000

I have to note that the entire issue has been the source of multiple posts by a linguist at: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/ (You may remember Dr. Elgin from The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense or some of her other books). Interesting stuff. The key is to find a metaphor that resonates rather than rings false.

By: dick bell

dick bell — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:43:51 +0000

I have been following Lakoff’s work since Metaphors We Live By. It has been interesting to watch him move slowly move away from being an interesting academic to someone who has become increasingly involved in the electoral political process. Whatever else you may say about Lakoff’s analysis of language in the political arena, he is at the very least trying to engage progressives in a debate about message. It’s true that framing is not a new idea, and Lakoff does not claim to have invented it. But what he has come to do, more than anyone else I can think of, is push us hard to understand why the images and the metaphors which Democrats have relied on for long are not as resonate as we expect them to be. Much of what he writes sounds like common sense once you have heard it, and yet one can only imagine Lakoff’s frustration at watching one election after another go by (Moral Politics came out in 1997) without the Democratic Party ever engaging in a wholesale critical review of how it presents itself to the world.

By: dick bell

dick bell — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:40:54 +0000

By: carsick

carsick — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:01:26 +0000

Jimmy Carter was labelled as a ‘flip-flopper’ in 1976. John Kerry was labelled right out of the gate as a ‘flip-flopper’(before the ‘I was against before I was for’ comment). Kerry spent his whole campaign fighting that ‘frame’. Other years the ‘tax and spend’ frame is used to great affect. What’s the last Democratic frame, you can recall, that the Republicans had to address for the duration of a campaign? It’s not framing that’s new it’s that the democrats have never utilized it to any effect. Perhaps due to an arrogance that if people knew the opponent they would agree with the democrats. That isn’t an effective approach obviously.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 19:50:30 +0000

Moreoever, the idea that metaphors underpin our concepts is very similar to the idea that the social structure decisively shapes our thinking: immensely suggestive, almost certainly right in some sense, but very difficult to specify in a satisfactory way. But it’s not a purely constructivist position: as you say, metaphors do underpin conceptual thought in Lakoff’s view, but the metaphors themselves are largely driven by bodily (pre-social? pre-cultural?) experience. A primary schema like “MORE IS UP,” which in turn generates scads of more elaborate metaphorical constructions, is grounded in experience of the physical world: as you add more to the pile, the height of the pile goes up. This presumption of a baseline universality to metaphor has raised (and continues to raise) hackles among anthropologists for not taking cultural differences sufficiently into account. Sorry if that attempt at a contribution was clumsy…I chewed on all of this thoroughly some time back, but it’s not exactly fresh in my mind.

By: EricinTexas

EricinTexas — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 16:30:12 +0000

I read Metaphors a few years ago, and very much enjoyed it. So, I picked up Moral Politics and read that, and just bought 25 copies of Elephant to pass out to people. If you want to dig into what Lakoff really says, read Moral Politics. Elephant is just a shortened version of it – still quite good, but not covering everything.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:50:05 +0000

Just when i was ruminating about the “stop whining” treatment complaint usually gets in the u.s. discourse (izzatathing?) As i’m not big in linguistics-an-stuff, you can pretty much take it as a document, one that casts a pessimistic light on the “framing” issue. To an untrained eye, the problem seems indeed to be that progressive won’t see it nor react to it, and even sometimes appropriate it.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 11:20:28 +0000

nick, I’m not sure Lakoff’s goals in the two political books allows that sort of thing to be within his project in those books. Even if it were, I imagine it would bore the stew out of the majority of his readers. The books are written for people who are more interested in the practical, rather than theoretical aspects of Lakoff’s framing analysis. In other words, they’re books for laypeople, not for experts (or even amateurs who like to read the sort of stuff you mention). Neither book is meant to be an academic presentation of framing analysis. If you want something like that, read his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which is much more thorough than Metaphors We Live By, by the way). He doesn’t really detail the history of framing in great detail, there, but he discusses framing at length, without explicit political motivations. That’s where you’d have to go to do a serious scholarly critique of Lakoff’s theory of framing anyway.

By: nick

nick — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:26:56 +0000

My big problem with Lakoff—which isn’t so much a problem as a regret that he doesn’t address it—is that he doesn’t talk about the origins of ‘framing’ per se, and how the frame-model has gone through revisions over the past few centuries. (After all, a ‘frame’ is itself a conceptual metaphor, ‘POLITICAL THOUGHT IS A PICTURE’: hypotheses non fingo etc.)

By: Passing Fancy

Passing Fancy — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 09:51:21 +0000

“Reframing” has been around in a popular form for some time. Self-help guru and zombie titan Anthony Robbins included a chapter on it in his first book, “Absolute Power”. Success-driven businessmen – the kind Teresa Nielsen Hayden calls “pointy haired bosses” – love it. It lets them reinterpret failure as something else. To turn to the political side of this debate for a moment: For those on the left, I think Lakoff’s book might be a double edged sword. Many people are turned off the left for two reasons – they dislike what they perceive to be a relativist approach to morals and reality; and they dislike the idea of being manipulated, either by self-appointed philosopher kings or focus-group oriented politicos. Of course, these are not necessarily true accusations. But they are common perceptions. I know that at one time I shared them. And Lakoff is talking about perception. Ironically, therefore, I would say that if democrats are too widely perceived to be reading books about manipulating people’s perception, they will do themselves no favours image-wise. It might be better to spend more time sorting out what people on the left actually believe in and then communicating that, as simply and clearly as possible, to as many people as possible – and defending it trenchantly and fiercely. At the very least, they could be a bit more bloody subtle!

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 05:29:51 +0000

Kevin Drum doesn’t even bother to actually read this quite short and lucid book before leaping to criticize it based on “excerpts.” God forbid he should have to read a thick book like “Moral Politics” when another sci-fi thriller awaits him on the bedside table. How do people like this get to be political commentators? The more political blogs I read the more I wonder why any of these semi-literates with spellcheckers get taken seriously. Then I read their comments sections and see why.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 05:15:44 +0000

As Josh notes, Lakoff doesn't pretend to have created the concept of framing, and cites Goffman and several others in the reference section on framing in Moral Politics, but he does much more than apply the concept to liberal politics. He reframes framing in terms of his conceptual metaphor theory, and all of his political works (starting with the essays on the Gulf War) use a fairly unique version of framing analysis to explore American politics and suggest ways for liberals to use framing better. There seem to be a lot of people who like his conceptual metaphor theory. That's OK until people start to try to use it, in politics for example. Lakoff's growing influence genuinely scares me because of how bad his theory really is. You don't have to take my word for it, though. Just look at the empirical evidence. You could start here, here, here, here (all are pdf files), and then read: Keysar, K, & Bly, B. (1995). Intuitions of the transparency of idioms: Can one keep a secret by spilling the beans? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 89-109. and McGlone, M. S. (1996). Conceptual metaphors and figurative language interpretation: Food for thought? Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 544–565. There are many more where those came from.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 04:32:56 +0000

Fair enough—like I said, I’d only seen the compressed TV versions.