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Category: language

We dwell in language: Lakoff and the politics of the frame

Published March 2, 2008 by cgerrish

If you haven’t taken the time to listen to Dave Winer’s conversation with George Lakoff, it’s worth your while. If you subscribe to the Morning Coffee Notes RSS feed, it may already be on your iPod. Lakoff is a co-founder of the Rockridge Institute and a practitioner of what’s called cognitive science. He posits that “words matter,” and in politics they matter more than you might realize.

Lakoff investigates the currents of language, rhetoric and influence that swirl below the surface of our everyday language. Political language is by its nature adversarial; by various methods it attempt to persuade and influence. One view of campaigns and elections is that candidates have platforms that can be rationally evaluated. Here are the positions, which candidate holds the ‘right’ ones? The voter is a rational actor.

Can a person step into a frictionless abstract space where “facts” can be evaluated and decisions made outside of time and our mortality? Lakoff says no. Do people always make decisions that serve their best interests? No, they don’t. Lakoff has the political sphere covered, but this thread started much earlier. Look at Daniel Kahneman‘s Nobel Prize winning work in behavioral finance and economics.

While the sciences have only recently weighed in, the poets and philosophers have long understood this idea. How can we make “objective decisions,” when as TS Eliot says in Burnt Norton, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” We dwell in language, it’s where we make our home and compose the stories that we tell each other everyday. And language isn’t neutral.

The idea of the frame is that by controlling the context and lexicon of a conversation, you can shade the outcome. For instance, if I ask you “when did you stop beating your wife?” and if you accept the frame, you will be left with a limited and incriminating set of answers. Political strategists and candidates attempt to do this to gain an advantage. The interesting thing about the idea of the frame is that it’s most effective when it’s hidden from view. When the frame is brought out into the light, and becomes a normal part of political rhetoric, it loses its special power.

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As though language weren’t of humans, but eminated from the world around us

Published February 25, 2008 by cgerrish

Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away earlier this month. I first became aware of Robbe-Grillet as the writer of “Last Year at Marienbad.” I saw that film twice in one day. (At least I seem to remember it that way) There are a few movies I’ve found so compelling that I had to see them again right away. “Wings of Desire” was another one. The film lead me to the novels, and I read them one after another.

Robbe-Grillet’s writing seems very much of a particular time and place as I look back on it now. But what he accomplished was very important; it’s as though he created an element, a fundamental substance which were added to the periodic table of writing.

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How would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?

Published January 31, 2008 by cgerrish

Ludwig Wittgenstein


I liked this podcast so much, I listened to it twice. And I may listen to it again. It’s a beautiful discussion about the philosophy and impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein. You can find this gem on the Philosophy Bites site. Regular hosts Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton discuss Wittgenstein with Barry Smith of Birkbeck College London.

I particularly like the discussion of Wittgenstein’s later work and the Philosophical Investigations. Although they even made the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus sound interesting. There’s a great story recounted about Elizabeth Anscombe saying to Wittgenstein, that she can “understand why people thought that the sun revolves around the earth.” Ludwig asks, “why?” Anscombe says, “Well, it looks that way.” Wittgenstein responds, “and how would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?”

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Did Memes Create the Digital to help us Remember?

Published January 29, 2008 by cgerrish

If there is such a thing as “memes,” did they drive humans toward the digital? A meme has been defined as a theoretical unit of cultural information. Digital replication is exact, whereas human memory is fallible. Some say human memory doesn’t even remember things, but rather the relationship between things. If a meme wanted to persist in an exactly identical form as it passed from human to human, it could only do so through the digital. In some ways this is counter to the idea of evolution, it’s not an adaptive system. The digital meme can’t adapt because it would become unreadable. This meme, and no other, shall survive.

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