Frameworks All the Way Down

A couple months ago, Ezra Klein had Ross Douthat on his April 25, 2025 podcast to discuss Douthat’s 2025 book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I have not read the book, but one line of conversation piqued my interest. Douthat was arguing that we should go beyond Klein’s ‘California mystical seeker’ stance and join one of the world’s great religions. What Douthat said that stood out to me was that people can’t go wrong choosing a large, long-lasting religion like Roman Catholicism or Buddhism because of their ability to stand the test of time. He said, “You can’t go wrong with any of them, as long as they’re big enough and old enough.” Klein pushed back that their success over the long time scale might very well have diluted whatever spiritual truth they might have had at the beginning. But Douthat replied that, as long as you think that they “have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways,” you should just join one already.

So I interpret the claim to be that religions should be judged or assessed on their ability to solve human problems about what is to be done and how to live as both individuals and society. Good. This point here generalizes well beyond religions to what I am going to call frameworks. Religions like Catholicism or Buddhism offer a framework for operating in the world. But so do science, metaphysics, and psychology. Relativistic physics and Darwinian evolution, Materialism and Idealism, Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are all frameworks. We even have our psychological frameworks for going about the world, recognizing friends vs. foes, discriminating things that can help us vs. hinder us vs. are to be ignored, and maybe even our personality itself. We might think it is frameworks all the way up and down. At least this is one way to look at it, a framework for looking at how it all hangs together, we might say.

My claim then is: frameworks are neither true nor false, not truth-apt, but are rather more or less successful at enabling humans to achieve our ends. Many have argued about whether Christianity or evolution is true, but the question itself commits a category mistake. These frameworks are not truth-apt and inquiring into their truth or falsity is a category mistake. Common claims like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12), or that mammals and bacteria share a common ancestor (Darwin), are true or false and we can argue about them. But when we jump up a level of abstraction and ask about the framework within which these claims are being made, “Is Christianity true?” and “Is evolution true?”, I want to tempt you into thinking that we are no longer asking the same kind of truth-apt question. These questions rather concern the usefulness of the framework itself. Frameworks must prove themselves in the course of experience through their continual adoption, adaptation, and survival. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

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You might be thinking this is a reasonable view religion and even metaphysics, but not science. Science, after all, corrects its mistakes. But the case for science working this way is actually the best articulated of all. Thomas Kuhn gave it in his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the best and most cited books of the 20th century.

Structure is a book about how scientists make scientific knowledge and how knowledge changes over time. Kuhn argues paradigms are the basic units of understanding scientific development—where “paradigm” is a more technical and specifically scientific version of what I am calling a framework. As he puts it,

“Because [the paradigm] provides rules that tell the practitioner of a mature specialty what both the world and his science are like, he can concentrate with assurance upon the esoteric problems that these rules and existing knowledge define for him” (Kuhn 1962, 42).

Paradigms enable scientists to do science. They are the interface between the scientists and the world. Paradigms primarily provide an example of solving a problem, an exemplary problem solution. This exemplar will be adopted and adapted to fit as many future scientific problems as humans can wring out of it. Derivatively, paradigms mark the set of phenomena to be explained, give statements of scientific laws and introduce scientific concepts, endorse certain methodologies and scientific instruments, and can provide a metaphysical model of the universe.

Take Newtonian Mechanics. Isaac Newton provided several exemplars for rational mechanics when he published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, showing that, among many other things, the planets’ motion around the sun follow the inverse square law of gravitation and that the rise and fall of ocean tides results from the gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth. Newton abandoned the Cartesian search for an efficient, mechanical cause of gravitation when he introduced his law of gravitation, introducing what many saw as spooky action at a distance between all bodies. The Newtonian universe was now a dynamical universe to be filled with forces.

Paradigms then are not truth-apt. They do contain true statements-scientific laws and empirical generalizations-but they themselves cannot be true or false. A set of phenomena and a model are not true or false after all and so neither are things that contain them. They are rather better or worse at solving scientific problems. A scientific revolution such as the shift between Newtonian and Relativistic paradigms is then not a shift from false to true or even from less to more true. Kuhn’s central insight was that scientific paradigms structure what counts as a meaningful question, appropriate methodology, and acceptable solution. There are no extra-paradigm judgments. So, appropriately interpreted, “the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter” was false according to the Newtonian paradigm and true according to the Relativistic paradigm. Relativistic mechanics won out because of its increase in problem-solving power.

Perhaps though you think that at the end of history the fittest paradigm will be crowned the one true paradigm. Whether such a evolutionary stable paradigm will emerge is speculation but the thought experiment is informative. For Kuhn, there is no reason to expect that the current paradigm for any area of inquiry will not also undergo a revolution in the future. The world is too unruly to fit perfectly into any possible paradigm for Kuhn. But even should such a winning paradigm emerge, we still should not call it true because a paradigm is not the kind of thing that can be true or false.

This is a specific instance of a general claim about frameworks. But you may well resist and wonder whether the point should be limited to science? Kuhn acknowledged that the concept of a paradigm is suggestive beyond science, even while, as a historian of science, he did not press the analogy. Still, I will resist to generalize. Science, too, proceeds through frameworks—though its frameworks, unlike those of metaphysics or religion, show a kind of progress. But even that progress, on Kuhn’s account, can be understood as increasing problem-solving ability across the shifting structures through which humans make sense of the world.

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A few months ago (my preferred length of time for remembering things), I was talking to my psychotherapist about my struggles of family life. He gave me some advice and perspective using an evolutionary psychology argument—something along the lines of men behave this way because of how they evolved in this selective environment. Later I stepped back and asked him how he decides which kind of explanation to use with a given patient. He said it depends on the expertise of the analyst and the background of the patient. He used evolutionary psychology because he is familiar with it and because he knows my background in the philosophy of biology. But with others he expresses himself using a Christian framing and he could make the same point using it. He said it is not altogether unlike choosing to express himself in English or German. This exchange stayed with me. If one thinks that science and religion compete as rival accounts of truth, the idea that the same insight could be cast in either evolutionary or Christian terms is hard to understand. But my therapist didn’t see a conflict. But for him, both evolutionary psychology and Christianity are expressive enough frameworks to work within. I told him he sounded like Carnap.

Rudolf Carnap introduced a distinction in 1950 that Kuhn might have helped himself to. Carnap was a member of the Vienna Circle and a Logical Empiricist. He was one of editors who published the first edition of Kuhn’s Structure in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. At the time, Kuhn saw himself offering a radically new vision of science, even though Carnap disagreed. Only much later would Kuhn resolve this tension.

Carnap advocated what he called ontologically neutrality. As he put it in his Intellectual Biography,

“With one friend I might talk in a language that could be characterized as realistic or even as materialistic; here we looked at the world as consisting of bodies, bodies as consisting of atoms; sensations, thoughts, emotions, and the like were conceived as physiological processes in the nervous system and ultimately as physical processes. Not that the friend maintained or even considered the thesis of materialism; we just used a way of speaking which might be called materialistic. In a talk with another friend, I might adapt myself to his idealistic kind of language. We would consider the question of how things are to be constituted on the basis of the given. …

I was surprised to find that this variety in my way of speaking appeared to some as objectionable and even inconsistent. I had acquired insights valuable for my own thinking from philosophers and scientists of a great variety of philosophical creeds. When asked which philosophical positions I myself held, I was unable to answer. …

Only gradually, in the course of years, did I recognize clearly that my way of thinking was neutral with respect to the traditional controversies, e.g., realism vs. idealism, nominalism vs. Platonism (realism of universals), materialism vs. spiritualism, and so on” (Schlipp 1963, 16-17).

Not only does talking like a materialist not commit one to materialism, according to Carnap one cannot be committed to materialism in the sense that we believe it to be true. Such a claim is nonsense. In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”, Carnap addresses himself to the most abstract ontological questions of the kind, “Are there things/ numbers/ properties/ sets?”. To answer such a question, first of all we need to construct a framework (his word), or augment an existing framework, for speaking about a new kind of entity, including criteria for evidence. This is analogous to constructing a paradigm around a new scientific problem. Within that framework, we can then ask empirical and logical questions. For example: ‘According to the thing-framework, “Is there a white piece of paper on my desk?”’. This is an Internal Questions. The answer to is “Yes”.

But metaphysicians often ask questions about the framework itself. For example: ‘According to the thing framework, “Are their things?”’ As an internal question, the answer is clearly “Yes, the piece of paper is one.” But the metaphysician means to ask an External Question absent such a framework, “Are there things (as opposed to processes or ideas)?”. Umpteen many books, articles, and arguments have been made attempting to address such external questions. Carnap’s point here is that external questions understood this way are meaningless pseudo-questions; the framework they are asked within (as they must be asked within a framework to be understood) lacks any standards of justification. And if we don’t know what justification for or against a claim would be, then it is cognitively empty pseudo-language.

Carnap does not end there though. He gives an alternative pragmatic reading of external questions. Talking about things is just one way to think about things. We can meaningfully ask, “Should we adopt the thing-framework?” But this is neither an empirical nor logical question. It must be decided on criteria for how useful the framework is towards the users’ aims. As he writes,

“The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended” (Carnap 1950, 31).

As with Kuhn’s paradigms, frameworks enable truths to be stated and understood and justified. Carnap was interested in formal languages but his distinction is general: internal and external questions can be asked of all frameworks.

Q: Do electronics have negative charge?

A: According to the quantum paradigm, yes.

Q: Do electrons exist?

A: Nonsense or a question about accepting the quantum paradigm.

The first question is internal: it asks about a property of electrons within the quantum framework, so it has a well-defined answer. The second question is external: it asks about the reality of electrons outside the framework, and is therefore meaningless without specifying a framework.

We can naturally extend this line of questioning to religion:

Q: Is Jesus the son of God?

A: According to Christianity, yes.

Q: Does the Christian God exist?

A: Nonsense or a question about accepting Christianity.

Just as electrons only exist meaningfully within the quantum framework, questions about Jesus’ divinity only make sense within the Christian framework. Asking “Do electrons exist?” and “Does the Christian God exist?” are both external questions, meaningless outside their respective frameworks.

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I have tried to express the view that frameworks are human creations for solving problems. They are necessary for making true and false claims but are not themselves truth-apt. They are rather use-apt. We’ve seen from Kuhn that this view makes sense of scientific paradigms and from Carnap of metaphysical frameworks. All of human inquiry is subject to pragmatic considerations beyond truth and justification. Those matter, but do not settle the issue! Frameworks survive the struggle for adoption because they are effective in practice. It is hard to continue being used by humans as we make our way in the world. Humans are creative, continually adding to our stimulation from the world. Most frameworks do not survive for long. But a privileged few do: the useful ones. To call frameworks use-apt is not to dismiss truth but to recognize its dependence on human activity. The world does not reveal its own order; we impose one, test it, and live by it.

At this point, I hope you understand the view. I don’t expect that in this short essay I have convinced you beyond all reasonable doubt. I have covered a wide diversity of what I call frameworks without fully analyzing their similarities and differences. Nevertheless, I believe this view is the best lens for understanding debates in science, religion, and other domains of human inquiry. It is a pragmatic and humanist perspective: all meaningful questions are either empirical, logical, or practical, concerning how to act and live. We act in the world to satisfy our aims and one of those acts is inquiry. Man is the measure of all things in that there is no way of asking a question that we cannot understand.