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George Lakoff | |
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 Lakoff, 2012 | |
| Born | George Philip Lakoff (1941-05-24)May 24, 1941 (age 84) Bayonne, New Jersey, U.S. |
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| Alma mater | |
| Doctoral advisor | Fred Householder |
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| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Website | george-lakoff |
George Philip Lakoff (/ˈleɪkɒf/LAY-kof; born May 24, 1941) is an Americancognitive linguist andphilosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by theconceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. Lakoff served as professor of linguistics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.[1]
The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his andMark Johnson's 1980 bookMetaphors We Live By has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic topolitical science. In his 1996 bookMoral Politics, Lakoff describedconservative voters as being influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as thestate, andliberal/progressive voters as being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as thefolk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon. According to him, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is influenced by beingframed inlinguistic constructions. InMetaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argues that the American involvement in thePersian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the firstBush administration to justify it.[2] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with aprogressive think tank, the now defunctRockridge Institute.[3][4]
Lakoff is a member of the scientific committee of theFundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain'sSocialist Party's think tank. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known asembodied mind. His first marriage was to linguistRobin Lakoff.[5]
Although some of Lakoff's research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists – such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable –, he has become best known for his reappraisal of the role thatmetaphors play in the socio-political activity of humans. The Western scientific tradition has seen metaphor as a purely linguistic construction.[citation needed] The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been to argue that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development ofthought.
In his words: "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level ofabstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express that abstraction. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become "dead" in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just do not "see" what is "going on". For instance, according to Lakoff, the notion that "argument is war" serves as the underlying metaphor in intellectual debate – a formulation he later revised to "argument is struggle":
According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. He also points out that the application of onedomain of knowledge to another offers new perceptions and understandings.
Lakoff began his career as a student and later as a teacher of the theory oftransformational grammar developed byMassachusetts Institute of Technology professorNoam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promotegenerative semantics[6] as an alternative to Chomsky'sgenerative syntax. In an interview he stated:
During that period, I was attempting to unify Chomsky's transformational grammar with formallogic. I had helped work out a lot of the early details of Chomsky's theory of grammar. Noam claimed then — and still does, so far as I can tell — thatsyntax is independent of meaning, context, background knowledge, memory, cognitive processing, communicative intent, and every aspect of the body...In working through the details of his early theory, I found quite a few cases wheresemantics, context, and other such factors entered into rules governing the syntactic occurrences of phrases andmorphemes. I came up with the beginnings of an alternative theory in 1963 and, along with wonderful collaborators like"Haj" Ross andJim McCawley, developed it through the sixties.[7]
Lakoff's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who expressed the following view in 1965:
A decision as to the boundary separating syntax and semantics (if there is one) is not a prerequisite for theoretical and descriptive study of syntactic and semantic rules. On the contrary, the problem of delimitation will clearly remain open until these fields are much better understood than they are today. Exactly the same can be said about the boundary separating semantic systems from systems of knowledge and belief. That these seem to interpenetrate in obscure ways has long been noted….[8]
In response to Lakoff's making the above claim about Chomsky's view, Chomsky claimed that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing".[9] This rift between Generative Grammar and Generative Semantics led to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".[10]
When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the mostabstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore, embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details". Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct arguments in favor of embodiment:
Lakoff envisages consciousness as neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept ofdisembodiment, Lakoff supports thephysicalist approach to the afterlife. If thesoul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?[citation needed] Many scientists share the belief that there are problems withfalsifiability andfoundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method ofempirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says[13] that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.
Lakoff is, with coauthorsMark Johnson andRafael E. Núñez, one of the primary proponents of theembodied mind thesis. Lakoff discussed these themes in his 2001Gifford Lectures at theUniversity of Glasgow, published asThe Nature and Limits of Human Understanding.[14] Others who have written about the embodied mind include philosopherAndy Clark (See hisBeing There), philosophers and neurobiologistsHumberto Maturana andFrancisco Varela and Varela's studentEvan Thompson,[15] roboticists such asRodney Brooks,Rolf Pfeifer andTom Ziemke, the physicistDavid Bohm (see hisThought As A System),Ray Gibbs (see hisEmbodiment and Cognitive Science),John Grinder andRichard Bandler in theirneuro-linguistic programming, andJulian Jaynes. The work of these writers can be traced back to earlier philosophical writings, most notably in thephenomenological tradition, such asMaurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) andHeidegger (1889–1976). The basic thesis of "embodied mind" is also traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition, notably toJohn Dewey in such works asArt as Experience (1934).
According to Lakoff, even mathematics is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus "any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is". By this, he is saying that there is nothing outside of the thought structures we derive from our embodied minds that we can use to "prove" that mathematics is somehow beyond biology. Lakoff andRafael E. Núñez (2000) argue at length thatmathematical andphilosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind.[16]Thephilosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as afoundation ontology, and should abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than "meat".
Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors.[citation needed] Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings.[citation needed] Although Lakoff and Núñez's book attempts a refutation of some of the most widely accepted viewpoints in the philosophy of mathematics and advice for how the field might proceed, its authors have yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics themselves.[citation needed] The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.[17][page needed]
Lakoff has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether mathematics is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe. Early in 2001 Lakoff told theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell." This is because the structures of scientific knowledge are not "out there" but rather in our brains, based on the details of our anatomy. Therefore, we cannot "tell" that mathematics is "out there" without relying on conceptual metaphors rooted in our biology. This claim bothers those who believe that there really is a way we could "tell". The falsifiability of this claim is perhaps the central problem in thecognitive science of mathematics, a field that attempts to establish afoundation ontology based on the human cognitive and scientific process.[18]
Lakoff has publicly expressed some of his political views and his ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process. He almost always discusses the former in terms of the latter.Moral Politics (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.[4]
Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through metaphors of thefamily. Conservatives would subscribe more strongly and more often to a model that he calls the "strict father model" and has a family structured around a strong, dominant "father" (government), and assumes that the "children" (citizens) need to be disciplined to be made into responsible "adults" (morality, self-financing). Once the "children" are "adults", though, the "father" should not interfere with their lives: the government should stay out of the business of those in society who have proved their responsibility. In contrast, Lakoff argues that liberals place more support in a model of the family, which he calls the "nurturant parent model", based on "nurturant values", where both "mothers" and "fathers" work to keep the essentially good "children" away from "corrupting influences" (pollution, social injustice, poverty, etc.). Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other.[19]
Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor. Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms likepartial birth abortion andtax relief because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions.Tax relief for example, implies explicitly thattaxes are an affliction, something someone would want "relief" from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it. Liberals must support linguisticthink tanks in the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.[20]
Lakoff offers advice about how to counteract politicians' lies. He maintains that the act of stating that a lie is false reinforces the lie because it repeats the way the lie is framed. Instead, he recommends what he calls a "truth sandwich":
"1.Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2.Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible.
3.Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies."[21]
Lakoff calls this a "truth sandwich" even though the baloney is in the middle. The position of the lie avoids both primacy and recency effects.[22]
Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with aprogressivethink tank, theRockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations inMoral Politics. Among his activities with the institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message fromMoral Politics. In 2008, Lakoff joinedFenton Communications, the nation's largestpublic interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant. One of his political works,Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by formerDemocratic presidential candidateHoward Dean.
In 2006Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review of Lakoff's bookWhose Freedom? inThe New Republic.[23] Pinker argued that Lakoff's propositions are unsupported, and his prescriptions are a recipe for electoral failure. He wrote that Lakoff was condescending and deplored Lakoff's "shameless caricaturing of beliefs" and his "faith in the power of euphemism." Pinker portrayed Lakoff's arguments as "cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality." Lakoff wrote a rebuttal to the review,[24] stating that his position on many matters is the exact reverse of what Pinker attributes to him. Lakoff states that he explicitly rejects cognitive relativism, arguing that he is "a realist, both about how the mind works and how the world works. Given that the mind works by frames and metaphors, the challenge is to use such a mind to accurately characterize how the world works."[24]
The most natural way to justify a war on moral grounds is to fit this fairy tale structure to a given situation. This is done by metaphorical definition, that is, by answering the questions: Who is the victim? Who is the villain? Who is the hero? What is the crime? What counts as victory? Each set of answers provides a different filled-out scenario. [...] As the Persian gulf crisis developed, President Bush tried to justify going to war by the use of such a scenario. At first, he couldn't get his story straight. What happened was that he was using two different sets of metaphorical definitions, which resulted in two different scenarios [...].
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