framing

19 Oct 09

We might call this the Pundit's Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the player's best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn't just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.
the trap of counterintuitiveness

29 Sep 09

Lucy Suchman on framing technology – Og så alligevel…

andreaslloyd.dk/...-suchman-on-framing-technology - Preview

technology framing anthropology research humanism

This frame cuts out a lot of context in order to focus on the specific interactions.
Where are we to make the cut between human and machine in a given research frame? How do we make those frames? How might we expand those frames? How can we take responsibility for the cuts we make?
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- Suchman says that this illustration is a good way to illustrate the word “reconfiguration”, which she finds to be a vital part of using technology. She cites Donna Haraway’s notion of technologies as ‘materialized figurations’ (from her book, “Modest Witness”). That is: Technologies take part of our activities and practices and materialize them. Configuring a tool to fit with a certain activity or practice.
- She uses the example that when roboticists are designing human-like machines, they are expressing their notions of what it means to be human - of human practices - in their design.
- What they found was that this sort of utilizing different information sources is unremarkable everyday stuff to the controllers. This led to a new understanding of what an information system is:
  
  - multiple, partial information sources
  
  - assembled into a working system through the skilled practices of their use
- practices … used by members of a profession [that] shape events in the domains subject to their professional scrutiny. The shaping process creates the objects of knowledge that become the insignia of profession’s craft.
- We get different entities when we put technology and people together. She ends by quoting the feminist physicist Karen Barad (in her book “Meeting the universe halfway” (2007)):
  
  Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.

26 Aug 09

When Cognitive Science Enters Politics — Rockridge Institute

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framing cognition language politics

In thinking, the old view comes originally from Descartes’ 17th
Century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was
formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the
20th Century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky
in the 1950’s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it)
“old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here reason is seen as
the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic.

The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The
brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames,
image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends.
The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but
rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s
recent MIT Press book, From Molecules to Metaphors, discusses such mechanisms.

Contrary
to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason
is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’
Error, rationality requires emotion.
“Old-fashioned …
universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the
same way, that differences in world-view don’t matter. But anybody
tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody
reasons the same way and that world-view does matter.
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- n short, I’m a realist, both about how the mind works and how the
  world works. Given that the mind works by frames and metaphors, the
  challenge is to use such a mind to accurately characterize how the
  world works. That is what “reframing” is about — correcting framing
  that distorts truths and finding framing that allows truth to be seen.
- “Spin
  is the manipulative use of a frame. Spin is used when something embarrassing
  has happened or has been said, and it’s an attempt to put an innocent
  frame on it—that is, to make the embarrassing occurrence sound normal
  or good.
  
  Propaganda
  is another manipulative use of framing. Propaganda is an attempt to
  get the public to adopt a frame that is not true and is known not to
  be true, for the purpose of gaining or maintaining political control.
  
  The
  reframing I am suggesting is neither spin nor propaganda. Progressives
  need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe,
  frames that express what their moral views really are. I strongly recommend
  against any deceptive framing.”
- “Surface frames are associated with phrases like “war on terror”
  that both activate and depend critically on deep frames. These are the
  most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political
  philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without
  deep frames there is nothing for surface frames to hang onto. Slogans
  do not make sense without the appropriate deep frames in place. “
- The results coming out of neuroscience and the cognitive sciences
  show that, far from there being “old-fashioned disembodied universal
  reason,” people really reason using frames, prototypes, image-schemas,
  and metaphors — and bring emotion into the mix as an inherent part of
  rationality. All of these mechanisms of thought are embodied —
  resulting from the nature of brain structure and neural computation on
  the one hand, and embodied experience on the other. They lie outside of
  the mechanisms of formal logic, which is the basis of the contemporary
  version of 17th Century rationalist thought.
- “higher rationality,” a mode of thought that
  takes into account the understanding of the view of mind that comes
  from cognitive science and neuroscience — a rationality that talks
  about frame-based and metaphorical thought explicitly and discusses
  their effects, especially in politics. But this is only possible if the
  true nature of thought is widely understood, and that takes honest,
  open public discussion.

27 Jul 09

Obama Girl Takes On Energy and Climate Change : Framing Science

scienceblogs.com/...a_girl_takes_on_energy_and.php - Preview

video environment politics framing

10 Jul 09

On the Pew Science Survey, Beware the Fall from Grace Narrative : Framing Science

scienceblogs.com/...he_pew_science_survey_bewa.php - Preview

science attitudes public research framing

30 Mar 09

Framing Science : The Ethics of Framing Science: Four Guiding Principles

scienceblogs.com/..._ethics_of_framing_science.php - Preview

framing science evolution controversy communications ethics

upcoming April 13
dialogue should be a focus of science communication efforts, rather than traditional top-down and one-way transmission approaches.
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- scientists and journalists should always emphasize the values-based reasons for a specific policy action.
- accuracy is a third ethical imperative.
- avoid using framing to denigrate, stereotype, or attack a particular social group or to use framing in the service of partisan or electoral gains.
- Framing will always be an effective and legitimate part of social criticism and electoral politics, but for scientists and journalists to simplistically define critiques of religion or opposition to a candidate as a "matter of science" only further fuels polarization, alienating key publics and jeopardizing the perceived legitimacy of science.
- (see YouTube clip)