Representationalism and frames

In this post I would like to briefly comment a couple of things about the relationship between representationalism and conceptual frame theory. In a previous post I was explaining how in my years of education in the economics' faculty, I was not able to question the use of concepts within economic theory, specifically regarding the destructive kind of human-nature relationship that it was portraying on its textbooks and equations. In retrospective, I can explain this because, on the one hand, I didn't have the intellectual knowledge to be able to notice the limits of economic theory and how, for example, many cultures establish relationships with their environment that have little to do with exploitation, pollution and destruction, but rather with positive values such as care, respect, reciprocity, interdependence and harmony, all of these usually mediated by a profound ecological knowledge of species of plants and animals in the local environment, treated not as objects to be used but as animated subjects that have intentions and their own worlds and relations. 

Because I was unaware of these alternative modes of relationship with nature, I didn't have the tools to question the economic framework, especially when it had algebra and complex mathematics as part of the theoretical package. Now I can safely say that I was operating with an implicit belief in representationalism, the belief that words match reality perfectly, in other words, that reality is reflected in words. This is an extremely common implicit theory that we come to believe, because we experience language to be referring directly to the situations and experiences we have.

My way of reacting to this situation at the time was mediated by a sense of inner conflict. Despite I implicitly believed that these concepts were fitting the reality of the world I was seeing, with its financial institutions, global economy, economic crises and so on, I had the feeling that there was something deeply wrong about this way of presenting and teaching theory. And this had to do also with the consequences of the global economic system: climate change, extinction of species, soil destruction, plastic pollution and so on. 

In other words, my reaction to representationalism was implicit in the sense that even if I thought that the conceptual framework was fitting the world 'out there', I found this world inadequate or unsatisfactory in comparison to an imagined alternative were ecosystem destruction and pollution came to a halt and ecological restauration practices became the norm.

More recently, with the help of multiple readings from linguistics and philosophy, I have been able to write and articulate the notion of 'partiality' which adds a radical caveat to the representationalist frame, namely in that words do not fit reality perfectly, they fit it partially, and the part or fragment that they fit is defined by the frame or metaphor used to conceptualize it.

I claim that we tend to be blind to the frames we employ all the time because our attention tends to be focused on the content of thoughts, judgments, theories and explanations, and not on the vehicle or medium through which they are presented (or the underlying assumptions that sustain them), which can be linguistic (a frame, a metaphor, a cluster of metaphors) or audiovisual (an imaginary scenario in thought, a video). The function of a frame, as it name suggests, is precisely to frame or portray something in a certain manner or through a certain arrangement that highlights certain aspects and downplays others. Marshall Mcluhan used to explain that a medium is not a neutral or transparent vehicle, but rather that it has a certain implicit structure that shapes the content of what is presented as well as the manner in which a person perceives it and engages with it.

The notion of partiality has a rather surprising consequence: it means that discourses and theories necessarily entail values. It implies that theories cannot be purely 'cognitive' or 'rational', devoid from emotion and feeling because, in order to speak, one has to make a choice of terms which necessarily implies the exclusion or disregard of alternative terms which could have been used but are not. For example, in speaking about environmental issues, an economist might describe this as 'natural resources being overexploited', a biologist might say 'we are facing severe biodiversity erosion' and an ecological activist might say 'global capitalism is destroying life on Earth, we are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of living species'. 

One might feel that each of the descriptions (of the same situation) evoke different degrees of a feeling of the gravity of the situation. Hearing about 'biodiversity erosion' might not evoke any concrete image of forests or landscapes; the concept of 'natural resources' conceals that beyond these resources there are living beings with intentions and values; and finally, the idea of 'destruction of life on Earth' sounds as a very serious and dangerous issue that requires prioritary attention.

These are all partial descriptions of a same situation, and they all imply their own values. For example, even the scientific notion of 'biodiversity erosion' is partial in that it values concepts that seem highly abstract and value-free, which in turn, serve the purposes of making scientific measurements and studies of the 'object' of their research.

Thinking in terms of partiality is a good starting point to start abandoning the belief in representationalism, since it emphasises that discourses and theories entail the values that their concepts highlight, so there are always potential reframings and concepts that will imply alternative interpretations and inferences, and this is something that few theorists are willing to recognize. Humberto Maturana was also prone to say that 'all rational systems are founded on a-rational premises', meaning that any theory that we use will be implicitly or explicitly based on a certain preference for it, i.e. a value.

Are emotions also frames?

In his discussion about moods, Martin Heidegger noted that:

"I am always in some mood or other. Thus say I'm depressed, such that the world opens up (is disclosed) to me as a sombre and gloomy place. I might be able to shift myself out of that mood, but only to enter a different one, say euphoria or lethargy, a mood that will open up the world to me in a different way.".    

This description ressembles a lot what I previously said about conceptual frames, in this case what moods do is that they also portray the world in a specific manner that affects how we engage with the world. The big difference is that the framing is not conceptual but qualitative. If the world that we experience seems dangerous, sombre, boring or optimistic, this has to do with something qualitative, a felt sensation that in its distinctness reveals one of these possible moods. 

We could also argue that there is going to be a certain continuity between a qualitative frame and a conceptual frame. For example, if I regularly feel insecurity and danger about my environment, then it is likely that my language, my judgments and my inner dialog are going to be coherent with this underlying qualitative frame. 

As we know, whenever we feel a sense of danger or insecurity, these qualities tend to be total in the sense that they penetrate or saturate the totality of our experiential field. Nevertheless, however total they might seem, we can have an awareness that they are partial in the sense that, for example, through a more positive experience in the future our mood might shift to another which changes the quality of our experience and hence the content of our thoughts and judgments. 

Structurally, the difference between a conceptual frame and a qualitative frame concerns their ontological primacy. As Heidegger notes, we will always be in some mood or another, in other words, being in a mood is something structural that permanently accompanies our experience while being awake (unless we have something like damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as Damasio studied). In contrast, a conceptual frame is not strictly necessary to our experience because we can live (at least temporarily) without speaking and making judgments in language.