Framing the mind

If framing is a way of organizing our experiences, as Erving Goffman puts it, then misframing can be a source of a lot of trouble and a source of manipulation as well. Moreover a situation we are confronted with can be that way that we don’t have a scheme for it: We are puzzled about what is going on.

In his book Frame analysis Goffman devotes a big part to examining what can go wrong with framing. Sometimes errors in framing or discord about what is going on is even a matter of dead and life. Indeed, framing is not an “innocent” affair but it is substantial for meaningful action, for in many respects framing and acting are one. Didn’t the sociologist W.I. Thomas say some 25 years before Goffman published his book that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”? For sustaining the same view, Goffman quotes another sociologist, namely Aron Gurwitsch, who said that “to experience an object amounts to being confronted with a certain order of existence” (see Frame Analysis p. 308). Misframing, so Goffman, will involve the framer in “the breeding of wrongly oriented behavior” (ibid.). But, as he continues, “then the misperception of a fact can involve the importation of a perspective that is itself radically inapplicable, which will itself establish a set, a whole grammar of expectations, that will not work. The actor will then find himself using not the wrong word but the wrong language. And in fact, this metaphor is also an actual example. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language’, then it would seem that speaking a sentence presupposes a whole language and tacitly seeks to import its use.” (id. pp. 308-309) Everybody who knows more than one language knows how much it is true that a langue gives you a framework of the world and how the same sound spoken within one language frame can mean something very different within another language frame, with all its consequences. When a Frisian – a speaker of a minority language in the North of the Netherlands – says “it kin net”, he means the opposite of what a Dutchman thinks he does if he wrongly interprets it as “’t kan net”, as often happens. For although the Frisian says “it cannot”, this Dutchman thinks that he means that “it just can”, so that it’s just possible (with sometimes fatal consequences).

Goffman’s remark on Wittgenstein brings me to philosophy. Also here we find the idea of framing everywhere, but often in another wording. Thomas Kuhn analyzed how the transition from one theoretical paradigm to another leads to a scientific revolution. But what else is such a paradigm shift than looking at the world through a new frame? And actually it is so that theories are frames of a lower level that are continuously renovated, polished and painted until the wood has become so rotten that the frame has to be replaced by a new structure.

When Gilbert Ryle attacked Descartes’ idea that man is a kind of machine with a ghost in it that steers the machine (the body), he introduced the idea of category mistake. Once in a blog I explained this idea with the example of a river. A river consists of a countless number of water molecules. Nevertheless it is a category mistake to say that a single water molecule streams. It is not the water molecule that streams but the river does. So if we want to study fluvial processes like erosion or the velocity of the flow, we do not study the movements of the water molecules but we study the river. Nevertheless it is possible to study the river molecules as such, just as it is possible to study the river and fluvial processes. And so it is also a category mistake, I continued in the same blog, if we confuse brain and mind. It is true, as a river cannot exist apart from the water molecules that produce it, so also the mind cannot exist apart from the neurons and what else makes up the brain. In this sense the mind is the brain. Nevertheless it is a category mistake to reduce a typical phenomenon of the mind like thoughts to a phenomenon of the brain and its neurons. It is not our brain that thinks but our mind does, i.e. “we” do. But as we can study the river molecules and the fluvial processes, we can study the brain and the mind. It’s simply a matter of perspective; it’s simply a matter of aspect. Seen from the view that I have developed in my last blogs, is it then too far-fetched to say that a category mistake is nothing else but using the wrong frame? And that confusing brain and mind (and reducing the mind to the brain) is also nothing else but applying the wrong frame? In many respects, science is a matter of developing frames and then making the right choice.