Framing

There are certain blogs and websites I keep coming across framing -mainly because for the left in the USA it seems to be the hot new concept deriving from LAkoff and Johnson's work on neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics demonstrating [I think] that most human thought is metaphoric, not just the literary stuff; really foundational stuff. 'Literal' is only applicabel to a very small number of things. Now this is being taken up into an analysis of why the US right have become dominant in national discourse; it's about the way that issues are framed. Viz. "A 'frame' is not just a buzzword. It's a foundational metaphor, a complex web of associations, memories, and feelings, instantiated at the neural level. Changing these frames is a difficult, extended, and intensely personal undertaking, not something a politician can do casually, with well-chosen terminology. Rather, smart framing has to do with what frames are evoked by the language we use. As a concept, framing is entirely truth-neutral. It is not synonymous with spin, and certainly not with lying. Rather, it's best thought of as an underlying theory that can explain why certain spin works. It can explain why some lies are so compelling and effective."

Actually this is not so new in the sense that cultural studies has been about this for quite a while [another discipline deeply influenced by insights from linguistics] in CS though it's usually going under the label 'connotative meaning'. I see an opportunity for some cross disciplinary study here. Anyway, the issues flowing out from this are about just how we analyse the fundamental metaphors and their connotative/framing meanings and how we can choose them better.

I'm reading Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh at the moment and finding it really interesting. One of the things I hope to do once I've read it is a bit more writing about prayer and body. This is a vital peice of thinking, I suspect, when dealing with ritual and sacrament as well as thinking about why it is that bodily prayer can be so powerful for some people and why enacted learning works so well. I suspect it all links up, too, with the different intelligences in particular thinking about kinaesthetic...

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