Ok, I give up. I’ve stayed out of the framing debate until now, but I just can’t take it anymore.<\/p>\n
As much as I respect people like PZ and Larry Moran, the simple fact is: they’ve got it wrong<\/b>. And not just them: there is a consistent problem with the political left in America when it comes to things like framing, and it’s a big part of why we’ve lost so many political battles over the last decade.<\/p>\n
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“Framing” is not<\/em> spinning. And even the most vocal opponents of framing I’m going to start with a metaphor. I just changed jobs, so decoration around my desk is pretty sparse at the moment. The main thing I’ve got is a picture of my wife. A picture of my wife sitting on my desk means something. Anyone who sees that picture on my desk understands what it means and why it’s there. Suppose I took the picture, but instead of putting it on my desk, I put it on one of the side-tables in the conference room around the corner. Same picture – but would it mean the same thing anymore? No. Now people, when they see it, aren’t going to react to it by saying “Oh, there’s Mark’s picture of his wife”; they’re going to react by saying something like “What the heck is that picture doing in here?”. It means something different because of its environment<\/em>.<\/p>\n Communication is always like that: the environment in which you are communicating affects the communication. The way in which information is presented affects the way in which it will be interpreted and understood. The same idea, the same information, can produce drastically different impressions on people depending on how it’s presented. Taking the time to think about the context in which you present information is worth the effort – because it can change the way that the information will be received.<\/p>\n This is something that the conservatives in American politics have been really<\/em good at. Sometimes it does<\/em> amount to malicious spin: for example, discussions of the estate tax that call it “the death tax”. But sometimes, it’s just presenting information in a way that will set the interpretation of the information in the way that the presenter prefers. Look at virtually any debate over the last decade in American politics. The conservatives are constantly<\/em> setting the terms of the debate, and the liberals are left arguing from a very weak position – because they refuse to acknowledge the importance of framing the debate<\/em>, and by doing that, As scientists, we face pretty much the same problem. There is a large, vocal, and powerful group of people who are opposed to the teaching of real science, who fight against public acceptance of what should be undeniable public facts. But all too often, we let them<\/em> set the terms of the public debate. We act as though by simply dumping the facts out in the blandest possible way that we should win the debate, because the facts are on our side. But communication doesn’t work that way<\/em>. If we blandly dump the facts, and some antiscience asshole argues passionately against them with a nonsensical but attractive argument, who’s going to win the debate? It won’t be the facts.<\/p>\n
\nare doing<\/em> framing in their arguments. It’s unavoidable. Whether you like it or not, framing is an inescapable part of communication. Framing is, quite simply, a term for describing the way in which you present information or argument. If you’re communicating, that communication takes place in a frame<\/em>. The people who advocate framing are
\nsimply saying that it’s important to consider how you frame your arguments: that the way in which arguments and information are presented affects how they’re going to be received. It seems like an astonishingly obvious point – and I think that some of the pushback against it is really coming from people either trying to present it as if it were something deeper than that (on the “pro-framing” side of the debate), or people trying to interpret it as something deeper than that (on the “anti-framing” side of the debate.)<\/p>\n
\nwind up arguing within the frame created by the conservatives. Look at the debates about the Iraq war when it started – how the liberals completely caved to the warhawks. There was
\nabsolutely no question from before the war started that the evidence being used to justify it was shaky at best, that the claims about how easy it would be were unsupportable nonsense, that the planning was totally inadequate. But the conservatives consistently pushed their framing of the facts: “We may not be sure<\/em> that Saddam has WMD, but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”. That statement contains the admission that they lacked evidence – but it sets the terms of the discussion. The correct response to that isn’t to accept that framing of the information, but to re-frame it to put the burden of argument back where it belongs – on the people who were trying to start a war.<\/p>\n