Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding

We frequently employ “framing devices,” like metaphors, telling details, and just-so stories, in ordinary conversation and in political, pedagogical, and scientific discourse, in order to coordinate our intuitive patterns of thinking about their subjects. Such framing devices, and the perspectives they generate, are thus tools for understanding at least in the sense of helping us to comprehend one another. But they can also seem like mere cognitive mechanisms: suitable for manipulating ourselves and one another, but at best heuristic proxies for, and at worst noisy obstacles to, genuinely rational engagement with the world. This chapter argues that frames can make an essential epistemic contribution within the course of inquiry, by guiding investigation in distinctively fruitful ways, and, ultimately, by producing characterizations that aptly reflect the explanatory structure of the world.