M. C. Nisbet and C. Mooney were on the right track in their "Framing science" article (Policy Forum, 6 April 2007, p. 56). But they left out the relevant science about framing, itself. The basic results are these: (i) Most thought is unconscious and reflexive, and only a small part is conscious and reflective (1). (ii) The role of emotions in motivating the construction of conscious thought is critical in effective decisionmaking, including rational thought (2). (iii) Knowledge comes in highly detailed and well-studied mental structures called "frames," which arise from structures found in the sensory-motor system (3). (iv) Frames that are learned are physically instantiated in the brain, like any other knowledge (4). (v) The brain automatically forms conceptual metaphors that map these frames from more concrete to less concrete experience (5). (vi) Frames can be "deep," organizing many major areas of thought, or "surface," organizing one issue (6). (vii) Words are defined with respect to frames, mostly surface frames (7).
Framing is not merely linguistic manipulation or a communication strategy, as Nisbet and Mooney suggest. It is the scientific understanding of mental structures built on converging evidence from the many disciplines involved in the cognitive sciences.
Frames are used in all thought. They are necessary to tell truths, they can be manipulated to distort the truth, and they can be chosen to emphasize certain aspects of the truth over others (truthful framing for social benefit, which Nisbet and Mooney recommend). Facts are meaningless without proper context, and most people do not have the proper context to understand scientific information. This is because most members of the public do not have deep mental structures in place to automatically understand what scientific knowledge is. Science itself has not been framed adequately on the deep level. For example, most people have no idea that science requires converging evidence from multiple scientific areas, or that science is a massive web of results and hypotheses that must cohere.
Scientists have a moral commitment to seeking the truth. We take this responsibility very seriously and recognize the importance of honest communication with the public. This is why understanding how to use frames is so important. In science, the facts and figures are crucial, but they must be framed honestly and effectively in order to be understood at all, and to communicate their relevance in an authentic way.
Joe Brewer
Fellow at the Rockridge Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
George Lakoff
Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
References
1. S. Epstein, Am. Psychol. 49, 8 (1994).
2. A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Putnam, New York, 1994).
3. R. Gibbs, Poetics of the Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1994).
4. P. Churchland, T. Sejnowski, The Computational Brain (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992).
5. L. Boroditsky, Proc. Nineteenth Annual Conference of Cognitive Science Society (1997).
6. R. Jackendoff, Semantic Structures (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992).
7. C. Fillmore, Quaderni di Semantica 6 (no. 2), 222 (1985).
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