My reply was getting long, so I’m going to break it into a few different comments. (woo threading)
The problem is: sure, maybe you could think of things in that way. But so what? You could also just as easily not think of things in that way.
Yeah; suppose I said “you can think of an elephant as a very large person with a single tentacle for a hand.” This will both capture something real about elephants, imply some things that are false about elephants, and point at many possibilities that are not realized on Earth. Without some actual elephants (and non-elephants) to look at, you’ll end up like the medieval bestiary artist.
What’s so special about this one? Does it allow you to make unusually accurate predictions? Does it allow you to compress / transmit information unusually efficiently / accurately? Or does it, perhaps, instead provoke you into false analogies, mistaken conclusions, salience distortion errors, or flawed reasoning of other sorts?
IMO having frames as a model helps counteract a naive bias in language, which is pointed at with 2-Place and 1-Place Words. If Fred describes a woman as sexy, I see that as a fact both about Fred’s frame and about the woman’s projection into Fred’s frame (in the geometrical / mathematical sense). General semantics makes a big deal out of this sort of ‘consciousness of projection’, and they recommend including markers of it in speech (as seems helpful when one isn’t operating in a context where the listeners would insert that by default). A bit from People in Quandaries:
Semantically, there is a great difference, for example, between saying “Poetry is silly” and “Poetry is silly—to me.” The latter leaves poetry a leg to stand on, as it were. It reminds both the speaker and the listener that the speaker is necessarily talking about himself as well as about poetry.
I think the majority of the value comes not from simple communication tricks, but the inferences upstream and downstream of communication; “what frame could cause Fred to emit that sort of sentence?”, “what can I say that will land in Fred’s frame?”, “how can I direct Fred’s attention to his own frame?”, “what’s going on with my frame around this?”, or so on.
It does not do to forget that this is just one perspective, and not at all a uniquely compelling one.
Yeah, I do think there’s something pretty ironic about taking a device that’s designed to ward against projective universality and project that it’s universal.
That said, I think there is a limited sort of universality. Suppose we’re talking about point objects in a 3d space, all of them will have position coordinates, but not everything will have position coordinates (because not everything is a point object in 3d space).
I feel pretty good about statements like “humans sense the world (the ‘territory’) through their sensorium and infer mental constructs (the ‘map’) from those sensations in a multi-layered way” and see how frames fit into that picture (roughly, the whole strategy of sensation → mental constructs, tho often we’ll be interested in the consciously accessible bit at the end that goes from percepts to concepts, or how concepts relate to each other, or how our memories relate to concepts).
That picture has some flexibility to it that makes it not very constraining. For example, the “sensorium” is defined by what it does rather than what it is, so when you show me a new sense organ the picture adapts instead of breaks, which means it’s not asserting I’ve found all the sense organs.
My reply was getting long, so I’m going to break it into a few different comments. (woo threading)
Yeah; suppose I said “you can think of an elephant as a very large person with a single tentacle for a hand.” This will both capture something real about elephants, imply some things that are false about elephants, and point at many possibilities that are not realized on Earth. Without some actual elephants (and non-elephants) to look at, you’ll end up like the medieval bestiary artist.
IMO having frames as a model helps counteract a naive bias in language, which is pointed at with 2-Place and 1-Place Words. If Fred describes a woman as sexy, I see that as a fact both about Fred’s frame and about the woman’s projection into Fred’s frame (in the geometrical / mathematical sense). General semantics makes a big deal out of this sort of ‘consciousness of projection’, and they recommend including markers of it in speech (as seems helpful when one isn’t operating in a context where the listeners would insert that by default). A bit from People in Quandaries:
I think the majority of the value comes not from simple communication tricks, but the inferences upstream and downstream of communication; “what frame could cause Fred to emit that sort of sentence?”, “what can I say that will land in Fred’s frame?”, “how can I direct Fred’s attention to his own frame?”, “what’s going on with my frame around this?”, or so on.
Yeah, I do think there’s something pretty ironic about taking a device that’s designed to ward against projective universality and project that it’s universal.
That said, I think there is a limited sort of universality. Suppose we’re talking about point objects in a 3d space, all of them will have position coordinates, but not everything will have position coordinates (because not everything is a point object in 3d space).
I feel pretty good about statements like “humans sense the world (the ‘territory’) through their sensorium and infer mental constructs (the ‘map’) from those sensations in a multi-layered way” and see how frames fit into that picture (roughly, the whole strategy of sensation → mental constructs, tho often we’ll be interested in the consciously accessible bit at the end that goes from percepts to concepts, or how concepts relate to each other, or how our memories relate to concepts).
That picture has some flexibility to it that makes it not very constraining. For example, the “sensorium” is defined by what it does rather than what it is, so when you show me a new sense organ the picture adapts instead of breaks, which means it’s not asserting I’ve found all the sense organs.