George Lakof

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George Lakof

Professor George Lakof

Born

May
24,
1941 (age 74)
Bayonne, New Jersey

Residence Berkeley, California, USA

Nationalit United States
y
Fields

Cognitive
Cognitive science

linguistics

Institutio
ns

University
Berkeley

California,

Alma
mater

Indiana
MIT

of

University

Known for Conceptual metaphor theory

Embodied cognition
Spouse

Robin
Kathleen

Lakof (divorced),
Frumkin (current

spouse)
Website
georgelakof.com
George P. Lakof (/lekf/, born May 24, 1941) is an Americancognitive
linguist, best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are
significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain
complex phenomena.
The metaphor thesis, introduced in his 1980 book Metaphors We Live
By has found applications in a number of academic disciplines and its
application to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led
him into territory normally considered basic topolitical science. In the
1996 book Moral Politics, Lakof describedconservative voters as being
influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a
complex phenomenon as thestate and liberal/progressive voters as
being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as the folk
psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon. According to him,
an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is
influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and
War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf, he argues
that the American involvement in the Gulf war was either obscured or
was put a spin on, by the metaphors which were used by the
first Bush administration to justify it. Between 2003 and 2008, Lakof
was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunctRockridge
Institute.[1][2] He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacin
IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank.
The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known asembodied
mind. He is a professor of linguistics at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972.
Contents
[hide]

1 Work
o

1.1 Reappraisal of metaphor

1.2 Linguistics wars

1.3 Embodied mind

1.4 Mathematics

2 Political significance and involvement

3 Disagreement with Steven Pinker

4 Works
o

4.1 Writings

4.2 Videos

5 See also

6 References

7 Further reading

8 External links
Work[edit]
Reappraisal of metaphor[edit]
Although some of Lakof's research involves questions traditionally
pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain
linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his
reappraisal of the role that metaphors play in socio-political lives of
humans.
Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely
a linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakof's work has been
the argument that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction,
and indeed are central to the development of thought.
He suggested that:
"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think
and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."
Non-metaphorical thought is for Lakof only possible when we talk
about purely physical reality. For Lakof the greater the level of
abstraction the more layers of metaphor are required to express it.
People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons. One
reason is that some metaphors become 'dead' and we no longer
recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what
is "going on".
For instance, in intellectual debate the underlying metaphor is usually
that argument is war (later revised as "argument is struggle"):

 He won the argument.

Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments.
His criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
For Lakof, the development of thought has been the process of
developing better metaphors. The application of one domain of
knowledge to another domain of knowledge ofers new perceptions
and understandings.
Linguistics wars[edit]
Lakof began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory
of transformational grammar developed byMassachusetts Institute of
Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he
joined with others to promote generative semantics[3] as an
alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. In an interview he
stated:
During that period, I was attempting to unify Chomsky's
transformational grammar with formal logic. 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
that syntax 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
where semantics, 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 and Jim McCawley, developed it
through the sixties.[4]
Lakof's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax
and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who has given
examples from within his work where he talks about the relationship
between his semantics and syntax. Chomsky goes further and claims
that Lakof has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is
discussing" (the work in question being Chomsky's). [5] His diferences
with Chomsky contributed to fierce, acrimonious debates among
linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".
Embodied mind[edit]

Further information: Embodied philosophy

When Lakof claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost
all of human cognition, up through the most abstract 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".
Lakof ofers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in
favor
of
embodiment.
First,
using
evidence[which?] from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he
argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial
relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also qualia), can be almost
entirely understood through the examination of how processes of
perception or motor control work.
Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative
language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract
topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the
reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships.
(See conceptual metaphor.)
Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some
investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few
of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white
type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be
much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.
"We are neural beings," Lakof states, "Our brains take their input
from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they
function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to
think. We cannot think just anything only what our embodied
brains permit."[6]
Lakof believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he
explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation
alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakof supports the
physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of
the properties of the body, then Lakof claims it can not feel,
perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true,
then Lakof asks what would be the point of the afterlife?[citation needed]
Many scientists share the belief that there are problems
with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe
"what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable
method of empirical validation. But Lakof 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 [7] 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.
Lakof is, with coauthors Mark Johnson and Rafael E. Nez, one of
the primary proponents of the embodied mind thesis. Lakof
discussed these themes in his 2001 Giford Lectures at the University
of Glasgow, published as The Nature and Limits of Human
Understanding.[8] Others who have written about the embodied mind
include philosopher Andy Clark (See his Being There), philosopher
and neurobiologists Humberto Maturana andFrancisco Varela and his
student Evan Thompson (See Varela, Thompson & Rosch's "The
Embodied
Mind"),
roboticists
such
as Rodney
Brooks, Rolf
Pfeifer and Tom Ziemke, the physicist David Bohm (see his Thought
As A System), Ray Gibbs (see his "Embodiment and Cognitive
Science"), John Grinder and Richard Bandler in theirneuro-linguistic
programming, and Julian Jaynes. All of these writers can be traced
back
to
earlier
philosophical
writings,
most
notably
in
the phenomenological tradition,
such
as Maurice
MerleauPonty and Heidegger. The basic thesis of "embodied mind" is also
traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition,
notablyJohn Dewey in such works as Art As Experience.
Mathematics[edit]
According to Lakof, 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. Lakof
and Rafael
E.
Nez (2000)
argue
at
length
thatmathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light
of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought
therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human
body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts
to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything
other than "meat".
Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakof and
Nez, pointing to mathematical errors[citation needed]. Lakof claims that
these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings [citation needed].
Although their book attempts a refutation of some of the most widely
accepted viewpoints in philosophy of mathematics and advice for
how the field might proceed going forward, they 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 Nez belongs, is paying attention.[9]
Lakof has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about
whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the
universe. Early in 2001 Lakof told the American 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 the cognitive science of mathematics, a field that
attempts to establish a foundation ontology based on the human
cognitive and scientific process.[10]
Political significance and involvement[edit]
Lakof has publicly expressed both ideas about the conceptual
structures that he views as central to understanding the political
process, and some of his particular political views. He almost always
discusses the latter in terms of the former.
Moral Politics (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length
consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakof sees as
present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The
book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakof
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.[2]
Lakof argues that the diferences in opinions between liberals and
conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with diferent
strength to two diferent central metaphors about the relationship of
the state to its citizens. Both, he claims, see governance through
metaphors of the family. 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, Lakof 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.).
Lakof says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied
at diferent times, and that political speech works primarily by
invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the
other.[11]
Lakof 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.
Lakof insists that liberals must cease using terms like partial birth
abortion and tax relief because they are manufactured specifically to
allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. Tax relief for
example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something
someone would want "relief" from. To use the terms of another
metaphoric worldview, Lakof insists, is to unconsciously support it.
Liberals must support linguistic think 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.[12]
Between 2003 and 2008, Lakof was involved with a progressive think
tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from
his recommendations in Moral Politics. Among his activities with the
Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and
politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakof has given
numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message
from Moral Politics.In 2008, Lakof joined Fenton Communications, the
nation's largest public 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 candidate Howard Dean.
Disagreement with Steven Pinker[edit]
In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review [13] of Lakof's
book Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important
Idea. Pinker's review was published in The New Republic. Pinker
argued that Lakof's propositions are unsupported and his
prescriptions are a recipe for electoral failure. He wrote that Lakof
was condescending and deplored Lakof's "shameless caricaturing of
beliefs" and his "faith in the power of euphemism". Pinker portrayed
Lakof'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". Lakof

wrote a rebuttal to the review [14] stating that his position on many
matters is the exact reverse of what Pinker attributes to him. Lakof
explicitly rejected, for example, the cognitive relativism and faith in
euphemism described above, arguing in favor of a deeper
understanding
of
rationality
that
discards
the modal
logicconceptualization of rationality in favor of the better
supported framing conceptualization.[14]
Works[edit]
Writings[edit]
2012 with Elisabeth Wehling. The Little Blue Book: The Essential
Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic.Free Press. ISBN 978-1476-70001-4.
2008. The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century
American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. Viking Adult. ISBN
978-0-670-01927-4.
2006. Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important
Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15828-6.
2005. "A Cognitive Scientist Looks at Daubert", American Journal
of Public Health. 95, no. 1: S114.
2005. The Brains Concept: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System
in Conceptual Knowledge-Vittorio Gallese, Universit di Parma and
George Lakof University of California, Berkeley, USA [15]
2004. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the
Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.ISBN 978-1-931498-71-5.
2003 (1980) with Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University
of Chicago Press. 2003 edition contains an 'Afterword'. ISBN 978-0226-46800-6.
2001 Edition. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.
University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46771-9.
2000 with Rafael Nez. Where Mathematics Comes From: How
the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. Basic
Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2.

 1999 with Mark Johnson). Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied

Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
1996. Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't.
University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46805-1.
1989 with Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to
Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-22646812-9.
1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories
Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-22646804-6.
1980 with Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46801-3.
1968. Adverbs and the Concept of Deep Structure. Foundations of
Language. Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1968), pp. 429.
Videos[edit]
How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George
Lakof DVD format. OCLC 315514475
See also[edit]
Code word (figure of speech)
Cognitive linguistics
Cognitive science of mathematics
Conceptual metaphor
Embodied philosophy
Framing (social sciences)
Invariance principle
Language and thought
Metaphor

 Metonymy
Nature Of Irregularities
References[edit]
1. Jump
up^ "George
Retrieved 2007-06-13.

Lakof".

Rockridge

Institute.

2. ^ Jump up to:a b Lakof, George (2002). Moral Politics: How

Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46771-6.
3. Jump
up^ http://www.dbthueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate4550/Government_and_Binding.pdf
4. Jump up^ John Brockman (03/09/99), Edge.org, "Philosophy In
The Flesh" A Talk With George Lakof [1]
5. Jump up^ The New York Review of Books, Chomsky Replies,
1973 20;12
6. Jump up^ "EDGE 3rd Culture: A TALK WITH GEORGE LAKOFF".
Edge.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29.
7. Jump up^ Lakof, G., and M. Johnson, 1999, Philosophy in the
Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western
Thought, New York: Basic Books
8. Jump up^ ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003. Summary
at gifordlectures.org by Brannon Hancock.
9. Jump up^ G. Lakof & R. Nez. (2000). Where Mathematics
Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into
Being. New York: Basic Books.
10. Jump up^ Dehaene, S. (1997) The number sense: How the
mind creates mathematics. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN = 0-19-513240-8
11. Jump up^ Lakof, George (2002). Moral Politics: How
Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press. pp. 143176. ISBN 0-226-46771-6.

12. Jump up^ Lakof, George (2002). Moral Politics: How

Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press. pp. 415418. ISBN 0-226-46771-6.
13.

Jump up^ "Block that Metaphor!", New Republic.

14. ^ Jump up to:a b "When cognitive science enters politics" at

the Wayback
Machine (archived
May
17,
2008),
rockridgeinstitute.org, 12 October 2006.
15. Jump
up^ http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/ppig/documents/brainconcepts_0
00.pdf
Further reading[edit]
Dean, John W. (2006), Conservatives without Conscience, Viking
Penguin ISBN 0-670-03774-5.
Harris, Randy Allen (1995). The Linguistics Wars. Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X. (Focuses on the disputes Lakof and
others have had with Chomsky.)
Haser, Verena (2005). Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist
Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Topics in English
Linguistics), Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018283-5 (A
critical look at the ideas behind embodiment and conceptual
metaphor.)
Kelleher, William J. (2005). Progressive Logic: Framing A Unified
Field Theory of Values For Progressives. La CaCaada Flintridge,
CA: The Empathic Science Institute. ISBN 0-9773717-1-9.
McGlone, M. S. (2001). "Concepts as Metaphors" in Sam
Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors
to Idioms. Oxford Psychology Series 36. Oxford University Press,
90107. ISBN 0-19-511109-5.
O'Reilly, Bill (2006). Culture Warrior. New York: Broadway
Books. ISBN 0-7679-2092-9. (Calls Lakof the guiding philosopher
behind the "secular progressive movement".)
Renkema, Jan (2004). Introduction to Discourse
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1-58811-529-1.

Studies.

 Rettig, Hillary (2006). The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the

World Without Losing Your Way. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 159056-090-6. (Documents strong parallels between Lakof's
nurturant parent model of progressive thought and psychologist
Abraham Maslow's model of the self-actualized individual. Also
discusses framing in the context of marketing and sales with the
aim of bolstering progressive activists' persuasive skills.)
Richardt, Susanne (2005). Metaphor in Languages for Special
Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert
Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of
Economics, Medicine and Computing. European University Studies:
Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 413. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-7381-2.
Soros, George (2006). The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the
War on Terror. ISBN 1-58648-359-5. (discusses Lakof in regard to
the application of his theories on the work of Frank Luntz and with
respect to his own theory about perception and reality)
Winter,
Steven
L.
(2003). A
Clearing
in
the
Forest.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-90222-6.
(Applies Lakof's work in cognitive science and metaphor to the
field of law and legal reasoning.)
http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/ppig/documents/brainconcepts_000.pdf
External links[edit]
Wikimedi
a
Commons
has
media
related
to Georg
e Lakof.
georgelakof.com
University of California, Berkeley department of Linguistics page
on George Lakof
Appearances on C-SPAN

 Edge bio of Lakof

"Metaphor and War" (1991)
"Metaphor and War, Again" (2003)
"Thinking of Jackasses: the grand delusions of the Democratic
Party", a critical review by Marc Cooper in Atlantic Monthly
"Empathy is the New Black" Radio interview with Dr. George Lakof
on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini an Freddie O'Connell
"The Political Mind" a talk by George Lakof recorded June 28, 2008
in Sacramento, CA
George Lakof Proposes Ballot Measure to End 2/3 Rule in State
Legislature - video report by Democracy Now!
Biography and summary of Giford Lectures (University of Glasgow,
2001) by Brannon Hancock
George Lakof Wiki

Authority
control

WorldCat
VIAF: 17225145
LCCN: n80013013
ISNI: 0000 0001 2122 2102
GND:107951169
SUDOC: 026961504
BNF: cb11910738p (data)
MusicBrainz:184269d9-2a444d42-81fb-78f410fd38ae
NDL: 00446681

Categories:
1941 births
Living people
American academics
American Jews
American linguists
American political writers
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Enactive cognition
Mathematical cognition researchers
Psycholinguists
Philosophers of mathematics
University of California, Berkeley faculty
Consciousness researchers and theorists
Metaphor theorists
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