What is temporal framing?

Temporal framing is a concept in personal epistemology: What was true in one time period may not be true in another — always note the when.

Example: A software architect recommends microservices to a startup founder in 2025 because "microservices are best practice." The founder spends eight months building a distributed system for an application that serves forty users. The recommendation was correct — in 2018, for companies at Netflix scale dealing with hundreds of engineers and millions of requests. In 2025, for a two-person team with no traffic, the same advice is an anti-pattern. The architect failed to ask: when was this best practice established, for what scale, and has the context shifted? The temporal context of the recommendation — the era of microservices hype at hypergrowth companies — was invisible to both parties. They imported a conclusion without importing the temporal conditions that made it true.

This concept is part of Phase 9 (Context Sensitivity) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.