Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding

Our ordinary and theoretical talk are rife with “framing devices”: expressions that function, not just to communicate factual information, but to suggest an intuitive way of thinking about their subjects. Framing devices can also play an important role in individual cognition, as slogans, precepts, and models that guide inquiry, explanation, and memory. At the same time, however, framing devices are double-edged swords. Communicatively, they can mold our minds into a shared pattern, even when we would rather resist. Cognitively, the intuitive power of a frame can blind us both to known features that don’t fit easily within the frame, and also to “unknown unknowns” we have not yet encountered. Thus, perhaps Locke is right to disavow such “eloquent inventions” as “perfect cheats” that “insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.” Against this, I argue that while the metaphor of double-edged swords is indeed apt, this is because frames are tools for thought. Like any tool, they can be used well or badly; but they do not fall outside the realm of rationality altogether. I describe how framing devices express open-ended perspectives, which produce structured intuitive characterizations of particular subjects. I argue that frames can make effective, distinctive epistemic contributions in the course of inquiry, and that the cognitive structures that frames produce can contribute to, and constitute, epistemic achievements in their own right, even in highly idealized circumstances at the nominal end of inquiry. Throughout, I focus especially on scientific understanding, because it serves as a paradigm case of rational inquiry, from which frames and perspectives are most likely to be excluded.