I have spent most of my life moving between worlds. Between countries, languages, religions, political systems, social codes and radically different ideas of what is true.
This position made me realize that we spend an extraordinary amount of time arguing over narratives, identities, beliefs and opinions while ignoring the system that determines what a person notices, what they dismiss, what they accept as evidence, whom they trust, what they experience as threatening, and which actions remain imaginable.
I call it a frame of reference.
My article "Naming Is Not Knowing" has been published in Small Wars Journal. I examine how the proliferation of the term cognitive warfare may be creating more conceptual confusion than clarity and why terminology shapes what institutions prepare for and fail to see.
I also joined Brian Rivera for a one-hour conversation on grey-zone operations, influence and the cognitive domain. I rarely accept podcast invitations, but Brian's approach was intelligent, direct and refreshingly free of clickbait.
Now, to frames of reference.
A frame of reference is a way of being positioned in relation to the world, a way of inhabiting the world.
I describe it as a lens: a pair of glasses through which reality comes into focus. But unlike ordinary glasses, we usually forget that we are wearing them.
We do not think: "this is how reality appears through my lens".
We think: "this is reality".
This produces the problem explored in this brief:
If no one encounters reality without a frame, how can we recognize the frames shaping our perception, enter those of other people, and move between them without becoming trapped inside any of them?
To answer that question, I will make three arguments.
- First, frames of reference operate beneath identity, narrative and worldview.
- Second, recognizing frames requires a particular cognitive position: the insider-outsider.
- Finally, I will explain how to move between frames.
Don't get it wrong. This is not an argument for relativism.
Not all frames explain reality equally well. Not all survive contradiction. And understanding the internal logic of a frame does not require submitting to it.
The consequences of failing to recognize frames have consequences in the real world.
You will speak and wonder why you are not understood. You will present facts that the other person cannot metabolize. You will answer questions they were never asking. And you will mistake disagreement for stupidity, irrationality or evil.
The clearest way to understand this is to observe what happens when several frames encounter the same reality. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is where I first saw this phenomenon at scale: multiple communities inhabiting different relationships to the same territory, history and events.
One conflict, multiple frames
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually presented from the outside as a confrontation between two sides. Anyone who has lived close enough to it knows that even the word sides is inadequate.