The Overton Window 28 Jun 2009 In comments in the Accommodationism thread, read HP mentioned The Overton Window. Here’s Bill Maher with a perfect example: [brightcove vid=27017295001&exp3=6555681001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=769341148&w=300&h=225] Media Politics Social evolution
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Have to admit I’m confused as to the implication here. When I’ve heard about the overton window in the past, it was normally in one of two contexts: – The 2001-2006(ish) period where many republicans labeled their opponents as extremists, in order to move a political “center” toward the right. In this case it was bad. – What might generally be described as “ambassadors for science” like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, who were only extreme in the sense of presenting ideas previously foreign to public awareness. In these cases, the effects wouldn’t necessarily be to produce more astrophysicists, but they would promote public understanding and certainly served to soothe inflammatory sentiments and misunderstandings that lead to opposition of scientific goals. One case is good, the other is bad. One is devilishly manipulative and strategic. Which is this accommodationist debate supposed to be again?
Someone should remind Mr. Bill that comedy is all about timing and delivery, not how fixedly one stares into the Tele-Promp-Ter.
Why was that about the overton window? As I understood it, the window should widen, not narrow as Mr Maher seemed to be saying had happened. Actually, if we consider a window made of glass trying to stretch it can be dangerous, doing it slowly is OK, applying too much strain at once can result in an explosion of glass. Does such an analogy apply to attempts to alter social constructs, my guess is that it does.
As I understand it from my extensive 30 second Google, the OW slides. It doesn’t change frame so much as shifts the “mid-point” so that what was once radical or extremely conservative is now seen as the midpoint: http://www.correntewire.com/the_overton_window_illustrated
In Overton’s own account the window could change frame; this would correspond to the case in which a wider variety of options come to be regarded as at least making some sort of sense. A good example — one of Overton’s own — is the increase of school choice options in various parts of the United States, in which an originally very narrow window, outside of which all the options were at best considered weird, became very wide, allowing for ideas like charter schools, school vouchers, homeschooling, &c., to be considered as viable candidates for an education policy. That is, other options managed to get on the table as live options even where there was no shift in standing policy. Advocating for vouchers or homeschooling was no longer political suicide even where it was not the optimal political path.
Another confusion in introducing “the window” is that, if it’s intended as a criticism against anti-accomodationism for strategic reasons, the window itself actually seems like a perfect illustration of the strategic viability of speaking against accommodation. Why should being anti-accommodationist be thought of as alienating, as Mooney et al suggest, rather than as the introduction of an extreme point that nonetheless moves the window closer to the “science” side of the spectrum? None of which is to say such concerns ought to be the principal motivation for debating this. One can just as easily be moved to speak on this because they happen to find the anti-accommodation position to be right.
No, I didn’t intend for it to be about accommodationism. I merely find the notion interesting. There’s a book entitled Conceptual Spaces by Peter Gardenförs, in which metrics of semantic issues are developed. Overton’s Window is IMO about the dialectic nature of such spaces – things like burdens of proof are contextual depending on the nature of the debate at t. Also, as I like erotetic notions of concepts and the development of sciences, this plays into that, too.