On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:28:42PM -0000, John Bunzl wrote: > What we need to distinguish is the difference between a competition on the > one hand, and its holding framework on the other.
My example from the realm of political discourse was not meant to stand for the entire domain; I was riffing, and the joy of it is that you were on hand to shape the exhuberance into something more refined. That's a blessing. As background, perhaps seemingly tangential but I promise to connect it up, I have misgivings about Professor Lakoff's discussions of framing and counter-framing and re-framing, all of which pretty much presuppose a holding framework of what I will here call principled dialectic, itself like that tennis match, an overt competition on one level of analysis, and an equally overt cooperation in search of more refined truths at another level. His work, "Don't Think of an Elephant" is explicitly directed at political discourse, and, in a flax-seed sized nutshell, argues that where liberals go wrong is in letting conservatives frame issues. The argument more or less goes that proffered frames need to be rejected. It's an almost purely defensive, responsive orientation, but it could work in a debate-club setting. It most assuredly is inadequate in the larger world of political discourse...because the holding framework is quite different from academic dialectic. Trying to better model these things, I found myself looking to game theory, that very rudimentary sub-set of game theory related to the scenario known as "The Prisoners' Dilemma". I had some years earlier read "Nested Games" by Tseblis, but came to the conclusion that nested games, while important, were just a subset of concurrent games, in which one "move" might be a loss in game alpha but a more-than-compensating win in game beta. This, to my eye, allows the best understanding of what I have seen many times in political discourse: One person clearly has the win on reason or rationality, but the other has the win in a larger game of convincing his audience. (Cue video of Nick Naylor in "Thank You For Smoking", saying, "It's that I'm not after you. I'm after them.") So I have to agree that my riff had holes through which one could navigate large shipping vehicles. But I can't agree that the tennis players are clearly competing any more than they are clearly cooperating, at least to the extent that they play by the rules. If they participate then they both compete and cooperate, not neccessarily at different levels, but certainly in concurrent transactions. What you refer to as "governance system" I would be tempted to call a concurrent transaction. Thanks again for reigning me in. rl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CooperationCommons" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CooperationCommons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
