Lakoff’s Framing Advice to Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) - We love America & are here to fix it with your help

by Gary Berg-Cross

My past blogs have included references to George Lakoff’s idea on Frames - cognitive-metaphorical structures (such as geospatial words) routinely used to organize thought and interpret the world. So we conceptualize well-being as wealth, both of which plug into pre-existing notions that trigger emotional responses. It is easy then to see wealthy people as good, healthy folks.

I've also blogged on the Occupy movement and Oct2011. In a recent Truthout Op-Ed Lakoff provided advice (by request) on how the protester movement occupying Zuccotti Park near Wall Street can avoid being framed by others with differing political interests. Lakoff believes that framing is epistemic – it influences the methods we use to understand the world and our concept of truth. In combination with language it central to making clear says what the character of something like a movement is. A proper frame may help solve that criticism that others don't know what the movement’s ideas and objectives are. But to do this effectively we need some principles by which a movement can properly frame itself. I found that some of these principles suggestive of ways that Secular Humanists might employ frames (We are all Citizens of the World or We are part of nature) to help with a wider understanding of our values. Perhaps that will be a topic for another time.

In advice to OWS Lakoff first notes that in charting political & financial action frames often evoke competing moral systems. In short, a movement that seeks some political and financial system influence needs to understand politics as part of a moral dimension that is framed in its language. Political figures, as well as movements and their spokes people, tend to make policy statements/recommendations with implied or explicit claims about what is the right thing to do. Appeals to the benefits of Capitalist System or a Democratic System claim to do more good than harm and are thus moral statements. You can see this in the OWS movement's statements with an implied sense of the common good. The lead one is "Democracy Should Be About the 99 Percent". Others are aimed at progressive causes such as the idea that strong Wages & Unions Make a Strong America and related grievances - middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years and there is conservative/corporate pressure to lower them. In criticizing the top 1% an implied claim is that they are just in it for themselves and can get away with unfair gains it since they have power.

Implied in such things are values and principles fit the common sense claim that “Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.” We might ask broadly what are they for the OWS folks and what are they for their “opponents” (just as we might for Secular Humanists and our opponents).

Broadly Lakoff sees “Two Competing Moral Framing Systems” each with political slants and differing idea of democracy. The bulk of American conservatives have a particular moral system that you see in the actions and mentality of Wall Street. Lakoff’s list of these includes:

1. The primacy of self-interest 0 yes they are in it for themselves but this is seen as moral

a. Of course financial folks want big bonuses – well all do.'

2. There is Individual responsibility, but not broad social responsibility outside the core group. It’s OK if I can game the system to advantage

3. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power.

a. A moral hierarchy of who is "deserving," defined by success within the system.

b. We in Wall Street are on top. You are just jealous.

And the highest principle is the

Rigid primacy of this particular moral/truth system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy and especially government.

Derived from these we have the idea of Conservative governance in their version "democracy" - a system of governance and elections that fits this model. Strong leaders who see decisions and moral judgement in system of black and white, devalue compromise which is seen as surrender etc.

The alternative view of democracy has a progressive with more of a social frame:

1. Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one's family, community, country, people in general and the planet.

2. The role of government is to protect and
empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on.

3. Nobody makes it one their own.

a. As Elizabeth Warren said, if you got wealthy, you depended on The Public and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future.

b. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. We’re in this together

4. Corporations exist to make life better for most people.

a. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.

OK so we have 2 frame systems. What should the Occupy movement do? Lakoff suggests that OWS should take an approach to policy that follows from its own moral focus. Thus OWS should frame the following types of messages:

1. We Love America. We're Here to Fix It

That is OWS is a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of the Public, that is the country. This combats the idea that patriotism that just about the self-interests of individuals. There is a level of the Public Good.

“Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That's what love of America is about. I, therefore, think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.”

Publicize the Public

Get the word about The Public out. Democracy being about the 99 Percent is in this frame.

“nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets ... That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.

There is also a more practical political message to formulate based on the recent Tea Party experience. They:

“solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it, too, brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are.”

The message is that money directs our politics and that is not for the common good. In a democracy, that must end to move towards the common good. A long tern solution is that we need publicly supported elections.

Proper framing will help us get there.

Boxing Ourselves In with Category Errors

by Gary Berg-Cross

In April I wrote about the “Binary Thinking” Habit. The habit is illustrated by the phenomena of asking seemingly simple questions framed so they evoke up or down/yes or no responses. Beyond yes or no this style of forcing answers into 2 possible responses is institutionalized in cultures through dichotomous language labels like “liberal” and “conservative”. But it also finds it way into philosophical discussions. A popular example of a binary framed question is- can machines/computers be conscious? Yes or no seems to be the positions. Speaking of positions, since American politics is organized around a 2 party political system we often get discussions with left-right orientations. These are collapsed into polar opposite positions and people are expected to line up on one side or the other.

In June Edd Doerr followed up on this by further “ruminating” on the topic of binary (i.e. two-valued, either/or, black/white) thinking. He noted that the real world is far more complicated than is allowed for in religious frames, but also for some freethinkers' frames which contrast "god-believer" as dumb while "god-unbeliever" are smart or "bright". We all have to avoid pigeon holing things into binary bins.

I had some drive by examples of conservative framing of the abortion issue in life and death terms, government vs. public funded schools and the label of Obamacare in my Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist. This evoked some Anonymous conservative comments on the complexity of the issue. which in turn stirred a bit of a debate. A bottom line on this issue is that the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, but handled delicately and not in a binary, adversarial fashion. Beyond that I wanted to respond to a portion of this debate.

First, I find that vocal parts of the anti-abortion side ignore grey-area nuances in their debate. They wish the issue to be debated as an absolutist, true-false way. They frame the act as immoral and not subject to nuanced decisions by the family. These allow a range of considered options, including the right to decide on an abortion. This is not the flexibility of an emotion-targeted moralist position which sees the act as immoral and therefore illegal (by the law of God). Details of this type of argument framing are discussed by clinical psychologist Drew Westen in his book Political Brain. He notes:

The political brain is an emotional brain,” he said. “It prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data.”

Westen discusses how Frank Luntz-style wordsmithing of negative ads and talking points about abortion has stirred deeply felt passions that immobilize reasoning about the topic. An issue like abortion cannot simply be treated in the blank/white terms. It is more a nuanced issue that involves at least two complex issues:

1. The competing rights between the mother's rights to bodily integrity (and in the extreme the right to her life) and the fetus's right not to be killed.

2. At what point (or beyond this point) does the fetus become entitled to become a person and have rights ascribed to it?

Both issues come with nuance and many degrees of graduation on concepts like rights, personhood and tradeoffs. The first involves the issue of whether the mother/family decides the tradeoffs with medical advice or whether the state and religion has a say in rights and decision. That is there is conceptual analysis required rather than absolute assertions such as the idea that a soul (élan vital?) enters fetal cells at conception – an un-testable hypothesis. And you see where we can get into trouble if we involve God in the decision making. The hypothesized God is an omnipotent creation, while humans are not. We have 2 different category of beings with two completely different knowledge and decision making abilities. God is also given rule the giving and taking of life while the individual is not. This is all part of a conceptual analysis.

In Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics the philosopher Simon Blackburn addressed the 2nd issue this way, "...the biological fact is that foetal development is gradual. The one cell starting point is a different kettle of fish from the baby about to be born. The complexity arrives gradually, hour by hour, day by day".


I think that complex topics like this not only suffer from binary thinking that excludes a range of positions, it also shows examples of what logicians call category errors or category mistakes. Simply stated a category mistake/error, is a semantic or ontological error in which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. A category error occurs when you think about what in the real world is close to a continuum/ spectrum as if it were clearly broken out into a small series of discrete, boxlike categories. A classic case involves color labels. You and I may disagree about whether to call something like a flower blue or purple. It is better to think of blue and purple are occupying nearby area on a continuous spectrum of colors. So if we disagree about whether something is blue or purple, we can both be right or wrong. There may be a convention to guide us about the fuzzy boundary where purple shades into blue. As with binary bins, category errors are often built into the very structure of our language. Our category words feel like boxes with hard (non-fuzzy) edges: blue, purple, short, intelligent. But like colors, most of terms really point to directions or suggest someone’s idea of vague zones on a continuous spectrum. This side of culture there’s no objective foundation for saying “Warren is short,” unless we just mean “Warren is shorten than most people I see, know or hear about.” “Short” as a concept is not such a rigid box; as much as a convention for range or direction on a spectrum of possible heights. We sort of learn this growing up and don’t call a 3 year old short when they are the tallest in pre-school. Simple ideas like color, height or position rarely causes trouble, but the more complex and social concepts of “fat” or “smart” do. These involve emotions and so does a decision like abortion.

We see the possibility of a category error as discussed earlier by Blackburn on gradual cell development. Anti-abortionists place a fertilized human cell in the category of person, but there is no fuzzy boundary for them. There is a more complex boundary for other camps and having the women/family decide is a way to handle the complexity with advice from medical specialists. That is just more nuanced than what I hear from the soul-based moralist. Any activity to abort the fetal clump of fertilized cells is labeled murder. They are drawing rigid boxes where some degree of uncertainly exists.

Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist

By Gary Berg-Cross

The choice of vocabulary is central to favorably framing an issue. Framing things from one point of view can be like taking the high ground and letting others climb a hill to get close to a fair conversation. Recent examples include calling the health reform legislation Obamacare. It’s official, and more neutral name, is the Affordable Care Act. The “right to life" is a good example of older, glib positive phrasing for one side of a complex topic. It seizes the high ground of an issue by siding with life. Aren’t we all for life? It’s a conservative slogan that packages lots of assumptions into it and encourages a defensive, catch-up conversation by the other side. Indeed since there is usually more than one side to an issue, as I discuss in my Binary Thinking habit blog, one value of a frame is to create a false dichotomy that buries the idea of shades of grey and nuance to an issue.

Being shoved around by a neat framing vocabulary makes it pretty easy to get into an argument. We can disagree just based on how we label things. Labeling one side of issue in a negative way often produces such misunderstandings and disagreements. It evokes negative connotations. Some call this a dog whistle to a group that hangs on emotional phrases. I saw what I thought was an example of this in the recent blog discussion of education where I was surprised to read the phrase “government education”. This labeled what I usually think of as “public education”. To conservatives calling it “government education” dog whistles in Milton Friedman-like overtones of government control, intrusion, carelessness and inefficiency (as observed in my blog contrast Scientific and Political Culture in the Capital views of life inside the Beltway).

It’s pretty hard to avoid running into frozen frames in most conversations and they abound in debate since they are powerful weapons to seize audience attention. One of the powerful ones is attaching the adjective “flaming” to a person. It seizes the attention and in today’s social network we run into that term and to real instances of flaming rhetoric. The old exemplar use of the phrase probably comes from calling someone a flaming a-hole. Not a complement. Some might use it in pejorative way as in discussing a topic and requesting that no flaming Xes (pick a category) participate. They say that flaming Xes just aren’t nice enough or tolerant of others beliefs. Flamers scorch up the conversation with put down phrases such as:

"obviously you don't know what your talking about....."

“You are both incredibly rude & incredibly misinformed, which is a deadly

Applying the adjective “flaming” to such rhetoric seems apt. But, back to semantics again, flames can have other, softer characterizations. Flaming could mean just TOO passionate, as in controlled by emotions rather than intellect. But it can be a judgment, since some arguments have both passion and reason.

I recently heard the term “flaming atheist” tossed about as a label. It’s simple enough to understand that the term used to characterize someone who is a passionate atheist. Indeed some atheist blogs use the term in this way. The Blog site thespitfiredragon's Flaming Atheist is an example. The fire dragon offers spirited but reasoned arguments which she explains this way:

“Logic and reason have led me to reject any and all belief in the supernatural, whether it's gods, devils, angels, demons, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, fairies or leprechauns. Since 2007, I have worked to discuss the fallacy of supernatural beliefs with as many people as possible in an attempt to ignite the fires of logic and reason in stymied religious minds in the hopes of making the world a better place for the coming generations.”

This is a flame I can live with, although I recognize that it is not impossible to imagine that there are some atheists whose emotions and conversational dynamics are vaster than their knowledge and thought. Atheists can be passionate about labels and what they mean too. I’m often in a discussion where different ideas and labels come up and someone says, “Well that’s just a question of semantics.” If semantics is about what things mean then that’s not just a simple thing of being bogged down in a word like say “tom-ato” vs “to-mato”. It is central to understanding what one is really talking about. What I think most people mean by the “only semantics” statement is that people are focusing on some framed vocabulary that is getting in the way of mutual understanding. This is even true when the atheist-secular humanist community talks about proper labels. What do we call ourselves? Is atheist best? Is it inclusive? How about skeptics, brights or freethinkers? Are they included in a broad term like atheist? What’s the best term or label? Any term may quite different things to different people. To some atheism means Militant atheism which implies an action oriented anti-theism. This means not only being philosophically opposed to theism, but actively working to end it.
We may use atheist as a means of distinguishing passionate belief from a "weaker spirited” freethinker, an agnostic or perhaps a secular humanist. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins formulated a 7-point belief scale that formalizes some of these ideas so that there is less confusion. The scale goes from:
1 Strong Theist: I do not question the existence of God, I KNOW he exists, to
7 Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.
In between (2-6) are people who feel they cannot be certain, are very uncertain about God or non-God; with a 4 being a Pure Agnostic - God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.
I like the scale, but I’ve known some strong atheists who feel this scale is foolish. To them agnostics are wimpy, afraid of a fight and not willing to peruse an argument with the ultimate truth as an objective. To others flaming atheists are too certain. For still others it is more logical thing to be is skeptical, since you can prove or disprove every idea that comes up. To them it is wrong to choose a side if not enough evidence is presented and not enough proven.
To me it is very interesting to have conversations with people along the scale particularly 3s-7s. Some passionate religious folks (1s) prefer to have a conversation with a polite ardent atheist (7) than someone who is agnostic at a 5 or 6. They say that it’s just easier to dialogue about religious matters since they both know where they stand. But to me I hear more of 2 framed vocabularies passing in the night with little real interaction. I prefer conversations where there’s a good chance that the group will come out knowing and thinking about more than when we started. This often means that we have come to appreciate honest differences of vocabulary and the model behind it. But that’s just the intelligence I expect in a secular humanist community, or whatever term you prefer.

combination….”

Towards Understanding Rationality and its Limits Regarding Complex Issues

Rwahrens recently penned an article on this Blog addressing what he called real challenge for Democrats and “progressive voters” – should they support Obama for a 2nd term, or should they send a message to a party and president who is not being progressive enough. Rwahrens presented what seems a reasonable argument that Progressives should agree on one thing: “beating the Republican Party and preventing them from getting into office” For example he pragmatically cited the damage that a Republo-Conservative tide could effect which should override “every single other issue you may have.” It also makes reasonable arguments, including historical precedents such as what happened when moderates were beaten by ideological conservatives. But it is also true that some of the assumptions can be challenged. I’m not writing here to fight this specific battle, which is obviously an important one, but rather to briefly (very briefly) frame some of the problems that make it difficult to reach objective conclusions on such issues. The questions concerns conceptualization of truth and objectivity and why we think certain things (x, y, z) will happen if we have a or b. Well it is usually complex and there is a threefold mix of rational, empirical and pragmatic elements in all such arguments that make the pursuit of good judgment difficult.

All 3 elements (rational, empirical and pragmatic) are part of the humanist tradition, but the type of reasoning we call rational is probably a good place to start. The pre-Socratic Greeks, starting with Thales, gave us a style of natural/rational explanation of phenomena. History notes that Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of rational inquiry from it start in Ionia to Athens where it developed further. Much later the Enlightenment humanists built of this idea and its products using what they called reason and logic to create moral and ethical systems. This was not just armchair philosophy as they advanced the proposition of using reasoning as a progressive tool to effect good in society. It is natural for modern day humanists to pursue a rational system of inquiry to advance the good in and through the political realm. The Secular Coalition, for example, commits to:

“ promoting reason and science as the most reliable methods for understanding the universe and improving the human condition. Informed by experience and inspired by compassion, we encourage the pursuit of knowledge, meaning, and responsible ethical codes…” http://www.secular.org/

Which brings me to the scientific-empirical side of reasoning and logic. We now know more about the limits of human rationality and reasoning. It is deeply flawed and subject to leveraging by all kinds of biases. Indeed the American Pragmatists like Peirce, James and Dewey, who built on Kant’s critique of reason (pure reason ends in irresolvable paradoxes), were all over this limitation in the late 19th and early 20th century. Humans reasoning, as given to us through the building blocks of our animal evolution, is in practice, often limited and not strictly logical. Our reasoning includes adaptive heuristics that offers quick and compelling judgments, which ignore details that are too hard to compute. Indeed cognitive studies have shown that much of thinking depends on emotion, and that people’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. This means for example, that we find it difficult to employ all relevant facts. For one thing facts and asserted arguments are not passive, objective things. People are actively trying to make their case and using selective facts, shading issues and fuzzing up arguments all the time. We live in a dynamic mix of half truths and manufactured positions. We often have to rely on external fact checking because, to paraphrase Twain, much of what we are exposed to in the media just ain't so. This inability to handle all the uncertainly and complexity that we find in our culture means we focus on some details/facts and avoid or dismiss others. We are aware of this in debates on complex topics, but often in debate we aren’t sure of why reasonable arguments, based on empirical evidence, do so poorly in persuading others. Can’t we see the facts, for example, of what a Conservative administration has done (2000-2008) and just extend the inferences to current and future situations? Well yes, but mechanistically it requires lots of assumptions and long lines of reasoning that can be challenged along the way. It is an inexact science and subject to influence by the intents of the reasoner.


Another way of speaking about such reasoning (and reasoning in general) is that it is practical and serves our pragmatic purposes. A tool for this pragmatism is to frame issues and using metaphors to organize our thought. This idea has been developed by the linguist George Lakoff, who argues that most (if not all) thought is based on unconscious metaphors that are usually physical in nature. So when arguing about the economy we heard then Fed Chairman Greenspan talking about “headwinds” slowing down recovery. This grounds us in the idea of resistance, but what exactly is the nature of these headwinds? They are certainly an uneconomic item. The familiar metaphor allowed him to ignore real economic details but give us a sense that we understand what is going on. Beliefs on complex issues, such as economics or politics, are largely determined by the metaphors in which these ideas are framed. Facts are organized to serve the purposes of frame designers and they influence how we feel about them. We see this in some of the arguments used in the Wisconsin union collective bargaining dispute. Actions by the executive, that seem extreme by one standard, are framed as powerful action to avoid fiscal disaster. Increasingly, such political arguments are understood in terms of physical conflict, struggle, disaster and war or sports metaphors –e.g. They shot down my argument, He couldn’t defend his position, or She attacked/tackled my theory. These are all motivating metaphors which can push rational argument to the back of the bus.

This view of our rational abilities is humbling. It further undermines the Enlightenment ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic. It even challenges an easy scientific formulation that empirical facts combined with reasoning gives us a privileged view of the world. This is possible, but it requires great discipline since we are attracted to compelling arguments that offer a good story (as previously posted on the Meme idea). Such narratives do make sense based on our experience, but these too are shaped by a non-logical process. To make sense of the world we inevitably see things from a particular point of view. This point of view includes the many experiences and biases accrued over our lives and is hardened into beliefs that serve our immediate needs. Beliefs and opinions are further shaped into belief systems by our cultural experience, exposure to stories and as member of political groups and parties. In most conversation these selective, easy to communicate and attention-getting, subjective experiences and judgments tend to be dominant over purely objective experiences.

Which I guess brings me back to the recent blog on “beating the Republican Party and preventing them from getting into office”. How do we decide? We are rarely isolated and reflective enough to have an objective base, but it may be possible to expose the issues involved, the relevant data and the chains of reasoning over time. It takes time and we need tolerance in our conversation to avoid continued conflict between formulated and preprocessed perception of reality. This is especially true in complex situations such as political topics which are generated from frame models of reality. This is not to criticize the Humanist tradition of rationalism, science or empiricism. Indeed these are important. It is just that these aren’t enough, without being integrated together into a system that deals with the imperfections of human cognition. These remain part of a larger systematic solution which includes a sustained effort to understand. Understanding rather than debate for its own sake is a useful goal and part of real process of inquiry. Open inquiry in turn depends on critical thinking, some tentativeness if not doubt and pragmatic ways of resolving uncertainty.