 Of course, formal representations are not without their drawbacks. Once a formal framework is adopted, certain questions and projects become salient and others recede into the background. Some antecedently interesting questions may become impossible to express in the new formalism; insiders may be tempted to disparage these questions as senseless or uninteresting. In the worst cases, this can render formal work shallow, or evasive of important issues. These are the pitfalls of parochialism. To avoid them, it is sometimes helpful to recall what motivated the formalism in the first place. To this end, a framework's history is sometimes illuminating. It also helps to transition out of, and between, formalisms: this change of perspective combats parochialism in epistemology in the same way that immersion in a new language or culture tends to combat it more broadly. 