Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it diffi... See more

Framing is decisive. At every moment, we live and operate and relate to the world from inside our framing of it, our mental model of it. Relating to the world as made up of ecosystems will result in very different outcomes than relating to the world as made up of individuals, of discrete things that can be treated distinctly.

What is included in a narrative, what is left out and the values it embodies are determined by what cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff refers to as ‘frames’. These cognitive structures are shaped by our personal and collective histories and allow us to conceptualize and organize what we see (and fail to see) and how we see it. The meani... See more

At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more

To name is to create a frame by separating the ‘thing’ from the rest of the world around it. It is by means of these frames that all thought takes place and models of reality are constructed in our minds. These models of reality afford us the opportunity to interact with our world.