Welcome to the first section of the session three of this week. We will be discussing something now which we have already anticipated in the previous lesson, which is the use of frame to encapsulate an issue and provide it with a narrative, and how this is relevant to the issue of quantification. We will see that they are indeed very important and we will try to give you examples. We will we go back in doing this lesson to the issue of experts having issues on disciplinary lenses. This will be an important things of this lesson and I will try to give you some example of what I mean. We have already mentioned that cost-benefit analysis is something we should treat with extreme care because it's very often used beyond its range of applicability. And in this book of Langdon Winner, The Whale and The Reactor - which by the way is a very beautiful book, I advise you to read - they say that most analyses offered as an input to environmental policy are cost-benefit analyses, and chapter eight suggests ecologists to be very careful of those analyses. Otherwise it will be remain trapped into the analyses and the analyses will we bring an issue in a way in which the ecological side of the argument will be lost. Dewey introduced the concept of occupational psychosis, if you wish, is a nice way to characterize my idea of the lenses. And this is a case that cost-benefit analysis could be characterized as a professional psychosis of economists who always want to quantify in this way. And then we have the issue of the extended peer community which is adopted because of the adoption of lenses. Also Feyerabend who's discussed the same issue in relation to the relationship between the experts from a body of discipline and the lay public. And the part of Feyerabend is very nice because he says, "When the public sees how the experts disagree and how they are ignorant of one another discipline, the lay public understand about the ignorance of the expert themselves." And this is a very important element for Feyerabend of a maturing democracy. Let's go to example of frames now. You may have heard that especially in North America, is often discussed about tax relief. This seems like an innocuous expression but when you think of it, if a tax is something from which I have to seek relief, then it's a kind of a disease or an oppression. But this is not what taxes are about because taxes are also what pays for the hospital, for the army, for the schools, for the infrastructure of a country, which allow the market then to operate. So the framing of tax as something from which one should seek relief is a fabrication, a rhetorical fabrication to argue for small government for less taxes for, especially for the very rich as you know from the discussion in North America. When you look at statistics of accident, you always have information about the driver: the sex, the age, whether he or she was under the influence of drug. Surprisingly, you will discover that you never have information about the car which provoked the accident. Why so? Clearly, the making of the car and the safety feature of the car would be very important variable to include in an analysis, but in fact they are not. Why? Well, this is simply a consequence of the way this particular statistics have been framed to start with. "This is a more serious example of frame," says a book from Akerlof and Shiller about the markets and the free hands. You know that economic theory established that the market is populated by agents, each agent is individually selfish, if you wish, but by the interaction of all these agents, you get a common good, which is the idea of Adam Smith, "Invisible hand". Well, Akerlof and Shiller says that this idea needs some important qualification because exposing a market especially in today's consumerist society, in order to stay on the market, you need to exploit all possible frames and mostly this exploitation takes place against the consumer. So if you want to survive in a market, you have to fish for the consumer; you have to exploit the foolishness of the consumers. An aspect of frames which has to do with hypocognition, so with, let's say, reduced understanding which is called socially constructed ignorance. This is something which was described in some very old article by Jerry Ravetz and by Steve Rayner, and this is the idea that normally sense-making is only possible if you simplify complex issues. So you have a process of interpretation and translation leaving out many aspects which allow you to build a narrative which can be eventually communicated. The process of doing so, nevertheless, produce some socially constructed ignorance. This may not be the result of a conspiracy, but indeed is something which may lead to considerable complication if you want to understand an issue. Rayner describes several strategies you may use to achieve this compression of information. One is denial; you may deny that there is a problem. You may try to say that the problem is minor, which is dismissal, or you can say that you are working on the problem but then you are using a different frame. You are in fact working on something else. This would be a strategy or diversion. Displacement is a strategy which has more to do with quantification and mathematical modeling. In displacement, you tell people that the model you are using to predict the process is giving you, for instance, reassuring signals but now you are talking about the model no longer about the process. So displacement is when you replaced reality with your model of reality, including through mathematical model. Clearly, you may say that the more a society need to remove uncomfortable knowledge, the more the society is close to a situation of ancient regime. An ancient regime can be characterized in this way; you can say an ancient regime is a regime which doesn't process the signals, including the signals of danger and this is why it's an ancient regime. This is why it will eventually collapse and there is an interesting article on this subject which is given there in the references. There is an important angle which links the issue of frames to evidence-based policy. I give you some reference there because very often, the evidence which is used in science for policy is the result of a struggle for the selection of the frame. It's a struggle for epistemic authority and very often what is now called evidence-based policy is precisely the result of a process of selection of the frame operated by power, which in a sense in this way monopolize knowledge and try to avoid also blame, and it's also in this case, is an oversimplification. In general, I think evidence-based policy is something one should be very careful about. And my last slide, and this has to do with why frame are so persistent in a sense, is that frames can be convenient to a number of actors and I'll let you read the slide.
