Social & Critical Psychology · Simplified
Nine Things She Said
Five frameworks, one person, and a question each of them is not equipped to hear.
Five questions, not five verdicts
These frameworks are not rivals competing to say what Nadia is really like. They ask different questions, and a question can only be answered with evidence that counts as evidence for it. That is why the same nine statements light up differently under each one, and it is why nothing here announces which framework is correct. There is no correct framework and no hidden fact about Nadia to find. Nadia is invented, nothing is asked about you, and no score is produced for anybody. When a framework is said to background something, that never means its users deny it: the claim is about what the framework's concepts can represent.
The material
What Nadia said
Nadia is a fictional first-year engineering student who came to the course from a trade. These nine statements are from one conversation, and they do not change at any point on this page.
Step 1 of 3
First, a judgement
Five well-established frameworks for studying the self are applied to those nine statements. What is the main thing that will differ between them?
Step 2 of 3
One at a time
Choose a framework. The nine statements stay exactly where they are; what changes is which of them the framework has concepts for.
Key terms
- Central
- The framework's concepts apply directly, and this is the kind of thing it was built to explain.
- Usable
- The framework can do something with it, indirectly.
- No concept for it
- The framework has nothing that represents this at all. That is not the same as denying it happened.
| Statement | Under this framework |
|---|
Step 3 of 3
All five at once
Every statement, and what each of the five frameworks can do with it. Read down the last column.
What this shows
A framework's blind spot is not an oversight
Key idea: Each of the five frameworks treats exactly two of the nine statements as its own business and has no concept whatever for two or more others. That is not a fault in any of them. A framework is a set of concepts, and having concepts for some things means not having them for others; a framework that could represent everything would predict nothing. What is worth noticing is the pattern. Eight of the nine statements are central to at least one framework on the board. The ninth is the one where the fees went up and the hours were cut, and no framework here treats it as the kind of thing it explains. One can reach it, and only by turning it into a belief about her own future. So a literature made of these five would produce a rich account of Nadia in which the material change that happened to her in September is not visible as a cause of anything, and that absence would not look like a gap. It would look like the subject matter.
The codings are authored judgements made for teaching and a good argument for a different coding should be credited. Five frameworks is not a map of the literature: narrative, dialogical, psychodynamic, cultural and neurocognitive accounts are all absent, and so are two further frameworks in the longer version, one of which does slightly better with the September statement. Two cautions about the argument. Backgrounding is not denial, and nothing here suggests that researchers who work in these traditions think fees do not matter; the claim is about what a framework's concepts represent, which is a claim about tools rather than about people. And the point is not that a framework with more coverage would be better. It would almost certainly be vaguer.
The longer version offers seven frameworks, asks you to match each to the account it generated before revealing which, and lets you compare any two frameworks side by side. It is at The Self Through Different Lenses in the main collection.