Frames and definitions make all the difference

Any argument, theory or line of thought will be indelibly shaped by how you frame it and define terms. Therefore two people can cite the same idea, using the same words and mean something totally different, perhaps even opposite meanings.

A illustrative example of this is the once highly popular "behaviorism." Starting with Pavlov and his classical conditioning and through Watson and Skinner, the theory was framed to depict the subject as a passive reactor, rather than an active actor. Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to salivate when a bell was rung, the bell having been associated with giving the dogs food. Skinner went so far as to claim that linguistic acts are conditioned responses to stimuli, and his definitional ambiguity earned a critical rebuke in 1957 from linguist, Noam Chomsky.

In behaviorism, the subject simply responds to stimuli and can be conditioned to respond to secondary stimuli, such as the bell. This makes the subjects, dogs in Pavlov's case, passive agents, responding but not initiating. This theory rejected something we all are personally aware of, the inner condition of our consciousness, yet, in spite of that, many philosophers and psychologists were enamored of it for a long time.

Pavlov could have framed his experiment another way. By ringing the bell in conjunction with food, he allowed the dogs to construct a chain of expectations, where they first expected him to feed them, and then learned to expect the bell to indicate that food was shortly to follow. Then when the bell no longer was paired with food, the dogs would have started to suspect that the bell wasn't a reliable indicator of food and eventually that the bell was irrelevant. The same kinds of reframing could have been applied to Skinner's boxes, with his rats and pigeons.

At the purely observational level, both frames would look exactly the same: Man rings a bell, dog salivates, then food arrives. However, looking at the dogs as either active or passive agents creates opposite psychological scenarios. Had this been framed the other way, whatever psychological theory would have arisen, it would not be what we now think of as behaviorism.

Now substitute any political or social theory for behaviorism and you can see the foundation of much current misunderstanding.