Frame Analysis
mixingmemory | July 2, 2008Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty of gratuitous neuroscience to top it all off.
First, let's look at what will inevitably piss conservatives off. Lakoff writes that there are "thoroughgoing progressives" who "hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues," and that these progressives "are the bedrock of our democracy" (p. 46). Progressives, then, need to "reclaim"…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2008The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the best chapter in the book. That's because it contains a pretty good discussion of scripts, schemas, frames, and the like, and how important they are in our thinking. The discussion is dotted with what I've taken to calling "gratuitous neuroscience" (I even mark "g.n." in the margins any time he uses it, and he uses it a lot throughout the book), but overall it's pretty good. If…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2008Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense, because the chapters are pretty disjointed and, at least after the first few, it's hard to really say anything general about the book. Really, the sections within the chapters are really disjointed as well, so even chapter-by-chapter reviewing is a little tenuous, but I imagine reviewing each little section would be tedious in the extreme. I guess after a couple posts, we'll see…
mixingmemory | June 22, 2008There's a review of George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, in today's New York Times. You can read the review here. Some key excerpts:
Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a "New Enlightenment," progressives will exploit these discoveries. They'll present frames instead of raw facts. They'll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It's not the platform that needs to be changed. It's the voters.
I have to say, I've always thought there was a not-so-vague Orwellian quality to Lakoff's…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas about how to use framing in a particular area of discourse. And because the Science article has made framing a hot topic again, and because it is clear from much of the discussion that many are still very confused about what framing is (if I see someone describe framing as "spin," again, I'm going to throw something at them), I think it's important to talk…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007In the recent dust up over "framing science," there's been more hand waving than any actual discussion of, you know, framing. However, I was struck by one point that fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet, one of the authors of the Science article that sparked this whole mess, made in comments to my post on the discussion. He wrote (emoticon removed, for your sanity):
In part what we have across the various disciplines studying framing is a classic "levels of analysis" problem. Some working at the micro and cognitive level, others working at the macro and sociological level.
My reaction that…
mixingmemory | April 10, 2007As you all know, fellow ScienceBloggers Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney published an article in the April 6 issue of Science on the topic of "framing science." The article has sparked a great deal of (sometimes heated) debate on ScienceBlogs and off (Bora has a list of links, to which I'd add John Hawks, Greg Laden, and Sean Carroll; especially the Laden post, because it points out how wrong Nisbet and Mooney get the idea of "framing" in many places). The impression I've gotten from reading this discussion is that most scientists (or at least most science bloggers) agree that we need to do a…
mixingmemory | March 14, 2007I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the category norms that I discussed. That is, I want to have people list features of political concepts like abortion, social security, war, etc., along with concepts related to Lakoff's framing analysis such as family, nation, and the like (if you'd like to help me write the code for this, let me know). However, not long after I discussed the project on this blog, my perspective changed…
mixingmemory | November 8, 2006It's time for another reposting of something I wrote on the old blog. Laziness reigns again. This is a post on research on political analogies, originally posted on March 29, 2005. If it looks like it's starting in the middle, that's because it is. I left out the beginning of the post because it had to do with some nastiness in an analogy-laden post on a conservative blog. I see no reason to rehash all that nonsense. So, without further ado, political analogies.
The Basics of Analogy
First the basics. I may have said all of this before in more detail, but I don't really expect people to go…
mixingmemory | November 6, 2006You know things have taken a turn for the surreal when George Lakoff is described as "an admirer of Noam Chomsky." I may dislike his linguistics and his political theory, but I have to pat him on the back for striking such a nerve with the wingnuts that they are willing to call a man who was once denounced as a heretic by Chomsky, and who's devoted the bulk of his adult life to anti-Chomskyan linguistics, an "admirer of Chomsky," or a "Chomsky protege." I mean, some guy wrote a book about how much these linguists dislike each other.
mixingmemory | November 1, 2006Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory is, well, wrong. I guess I think that since I've been posting about such evidence for two years, and I remember those posts, everyone else must as well. Once I realize that not all of you have been reading Mixing Memory from day 1, I think, "I should write some more posts on the evidence," but then I remember something else:…
mixingmemory | October 26, 2006Just to let you know where things stand, I'm in the process of setting up the study. Some of the coding is a bit over my head, because I've never done this sort of thing on the web before. Fellow Science Blogger Razib has been helping me a great deal, but if you have knowledge of how these web page thingamajigs work, and you'd like to help, feel free to send me an email. The coding should be really simple, but I'm web design illiterate. Razib suggested that I save the data using MySQL, which should make it easier for others to access and analyze the data however they please. Below the fold, I…
mixingmemory | October 24, 2006OK, the initial response to my quesitons about the internet study was overwhelmingly positive, so I'm going to go ahead with it. I just need one more thing from you. Ordinarily with a study like this, I would run a pilot study to figure out exactly what concepts to include in the final version, but since this is my first time doing this web thing, I don't want to have a bunch of people spread the word, get a bunch of people who will do it once, and then only have the pilot data. So, I need to come up with a list of concepts related to current political issues. What I need is ten higher-level…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006I'm working on writing up a lengthy description of an alternative to Lakoff's political theory, mostly because I feel guilty about doing little more than trashing it without offering anything positive to the discussion. My approach is based on, well, actual research, and unlike Lakoff's, it won't be designed to prove the superiority of one political party over any other. If it works, it would be equally useful to anyone of any political bent. Part of what my approach requires is actual empirical research on the structure of people's representations of the concepts involved in political…
mixingmemory | October 7, 2006George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New Year's resolution this year was to not read any more bullshit), but Steven Pinker has, and his review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic (the review is behind a subscription wall, but you can read it in its entirety below the fold in this Gene Expression post) has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and…
mixingmemory | July 21, 2006Those of you interested in this whole frame analysis thing, or in George Lakoff's new cult of personality, might find his blog interview at Emboldened. I'm planning on writing a post about Lakoff when my computer access is more consistent, because I've been thinking about his (and Mark Johnson's) theory of concepts, and by extension, his version of frame analysis, from a different perspective lately. I'll give you a taste of that perspective with a quote from Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (p. 103 in the Second Edition; all emphasis mine):
The ritual-authoritarian language spreads over…