Re-Framing

Metaphor originates from the Greek word meta meaning ‘across’ and pherein meaning ‘to carry’. Metaphor allows us to bring forth or carry over a deeper context which words on face-value can lack.

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place... See more

A key shift in consciousness is when one learns to break frames. This does not mean to discard them, but rather to recognize that every frame is in need of constant updating. In order to allow the updating of any frame, we must remove any sense of identity from that frame.

We might not be able to escape the sociopolitical systems that structure the world at large, but by knowing they exist, we can be more intentional about how we move through and beyond them.

The role of metaphor and narrative, as opposed to new theories or experiments, is too little recognised in discussions of the historian of science Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, supposed (and contested) moments of dramatic change in science. All scientists know how to go about scrutinising a theory: you use it to formulate some testable hypothesis,... See more