#I mean I am probably signaling similar things implicitly

[autogeneity]

[related]

anyway I think someone advertising themselves as "neurodivergent, poly, queer" etc makes a great deal of sense. and certainly the reality of those traits do appeal to me perhaps even to a critical extent. likely they want similar. yet it feels like the fact of naming them is intended to appeal to someone who is not me. even when I am in theory those things. I probably am not in The Right Way

but with linked post in mind I am perhaps just being insecure about it?

[bluewatsons]

Mark Liberman, Memes, tropes, and frames, Language Log (March 13, 2017)

In a workshop over the weekend at the Annenberg Public Policy Center,  one of the presentations was based on a paper by Dan Kahan et al., "Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test", Journal of Risk Research 2017. The abstract starts this way [emphasis added]:

This paper examines a remedy for a defect in existing accounts of public risk perceptions. The accounts in question feature two dynamics: the affect heuristic, which emphasizes the impact of visceral feelings on information processing; and the cultural cognition thesis, which describes the tendency of individuals to form beliefs that reflect and reinforce their group commitments. The defect is the failure of these two dynamics, when combined, to explain the peculiar selectivity of public risk controversies: despite their intensity and disruptiveness, such controversies occur less frequently than the affect heuristic and the cultural cognition thesis seem to predict. To account for this aspect of public risk perceptions, the paper describes a model that adds the phenomenon of culturally antagonistic memes – argumentative tropes that fuse positions on risk with contested visions of the best life. Arising adventitiously, antagonistic memes transform affect and cultural cognition from consensus-generating, truth-convergent influences on information processing into conflictual, identity-protective ones.

During the discussion, someone remarked in passing that these things are properly not memes or tropes but rather frames.  What follows is a bit of idle lexicographic investigation into this terminological tangle.

The OED on meme:

1976   R. Dawkins Selfish Gene xi. 206   The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme… It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

The OED on trope:

Etymology: Probably partly < (i) classical Latin tropus figure of speech, in post-classical Latin also chant, melody (6th cent.), phrase, sentence, or verse, usually sung, used as an embellishment to mass or divine office (frequently from 11th cent. in British and continental sources),

I.1.a. Rhetoric. A figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it. Hence (more generally): a figure of speech; (an instance of) figurative or metaphorical language.

The OED gives 22-odd senses for frame, but none of them directly reference the specific sense developed in Gregory Bateson's 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Erving Goffman's 1974 book Frame Analysis.

From Bateson 1972:

(a) Psychological frames are exclusive, i.e., by including certain messages (or meaningful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded. (b) Psychological frames are inclusive, i.e., by excluding certain messages certain others are included. […] (c) Psychological frames are related to what we have called "premises." The picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside the frame. […] (d) In the sense of the previous paragraph, a frame is metacommunicative. Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame. (e) The converse of (d) is also true. Every meta-communicative or metalinguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set of messages about which it communicates, i.e., every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological frame.

From Goffman 1974:

And of course much use will be made of Bateson's use of the term "frame." I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events — at least social ones — and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. That is my definition of frame. My phrase "frame analysis" is a slogan to refer to the examination in these terms of the organization of experience.

Meme and trope have migrated out of the realm of academia into popular culture, as signaled by sites like TV tropes and Know your meme. This hasn't happened to the same extent with frame, perhaps because there are so many vaguely similar ordinary-language meanings.

What did Kahan et al. mean by meme? From the paper:

[A] general sample of US subjects, whose cultural orientations were measured with the Cultural Cognition Worldview Scales, formed polarized affective reactions when exposed to information that was pervaded with antagonistic memes linking Zika to global warming; when exposed to comparable information linking Zika to unlawful immigration, the opposing affective stances of the subjects flipped in direction.

So the idea is that there are argument patterns of the form "Global warming causes bad thing X" or "Illegal immigration causes bad thing X", each of which ties the evaluation of X's risk to a complex of issues associated with group identity, thereby engaging the process of "cultural cognition".

So are these argument patterns tropes, memes, or frames?

They're not really tropes in the sense of "figures of speech", since this seems tied to figurative interpretations of specific words and phrases.  Liddell & Scott give a sense "in Logic, mode or mood of a syllogism […]: more generally, method of instruction or explanation, […] ; mode of inference" for the Greek word τρόπος (whose basis meaning is "turn, direction, way, manner, fashion, guise") — but this seems more general and abstract than patterns like "Global warming causes bad thing X". Still, maybe it's fair to extend trope figuratively to cover argument templates of that kind.

Such argument patterns fit pretty well into Dawkins list of meme examples: "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches". Then again, there's not much that's thereby excluded.

Are these argument patterns frames? Well, some of Bateson's description seems to fit: "Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame." But again, this doesn't exclude much either.

So it seems to me that all of the three words fit to some extent. But Kahan's goal is to find a new technical term for a new concept; and "antagonistic meme" seems as likely go viral as any of the obvious alternatives.