Who Framed George Lakoff? - ChronicleReview.com
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Saved by 3 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-08-11
- Garyedwards on 2008-08-13 - Tags lakoff , cognitive-linguistics , politics
- Katieday on 2008-08-11 - Tags usa , politics , linguistics , george_lakoff , cognitive_science , metaphors
- Ontoligent on 2008-08-10 - Tags George_Lakoff , linguistics , sociolinguistics , politics
Public Sticky notes
his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain (Viking), which argues that liberals have clung to the false belief that people think in a conscious, logical, and unemotional manner and that this belief has doomed Democrats' chances with voters.
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Lakoff's foray into politics is a story marked by intellectual breakthroughs, the allure of influence, and a fall from great heights.
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Lakoff's impact has reached "across the social sciences and humanities," says John A. Goldsmith, a professor of linguistics and computer science at the University of Chicago. "He has always aimed at a larger audience." Goldsmith is co-author of a book on the Lakoff-Chomsky feud, Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates (Routledge, 1995).
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One illustrative episode, recounted in Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars (Oxford University Press, 1993), has Lakoff repeatedly interrupting Chomsky to shout, "Noam! Noam! You're wrong!" At another point, Lakoff interjects: "I have been lecturing about these things, and if you are interested, you should come to my class." As Harris, a professor of rhetoric and communication design at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, notes wryly, "the level of gall required for anyone, let alone a junior lecturer, to tell the inventor of the field to attend his classes if he wanted to stay current goes right off the chutzpah meter."
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In his new book, Lakoff takes aim at "Enlightenment reason," the belief that reason is conscious, logical, and unemotional. Harnessing together work from several fields, particularly psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, he mounts a polemical assault on the notion that people think rationally — which, he argues, is fundamentally at odds with how the brain actually functions.
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Approximately 2 percent of the millions of pieces of information the brain absorbs every minute are processed consciously. The remaining 98 percent are handled by the unconscious brain. The mind, in other words, is like a tiny island of conscious reasoning afloat in a vast sea of automatic processes. In that sea, which Lakoff calls "the cognitive unconscious," most people's ideas about morality and politics are formed.
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"Enlightenment reason," the belief that reason is conscious, logical, and unemotional. Harnessing together work from several fields, particularly psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, he mounts a polemical assault on the notion that people think rationally — which, he argues, is fundamentally at odds with how the brain actually functions.
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In that sea, which Lakoff calls "the cognitive unconscious," most people's ideas about morality and politics are formed.
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Republicans have been quick to realize that the way people think calls for placing emotional and moral appeals at the center of campaign strategy.
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Democrats, Lakoff bemoans, have persisted in an old-fashioned assumption that facts, figures, and detailed policy prescriptions win elections.
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Lakoff concluded that conservatives and liberals are divided by distinct worldviews based on the metaphor of the nation as a family. Conservatives tend to relate to a "strict father" mode, which explains why they are concerned with authority, obedience, discipline, and punishment. Liberals, on the other hand, perceive the nation as a "nurturant parent," an empathic presence dedicated to protection, empowerment, and community. Swing voters harbor both frames.
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the idea of "frame semantics" — the theory that words automatically bring to mind bundles of ideas, narratives, emotions, and images. He called those related concepts "frames," and he posited that they are strengthened when certain words and phrases are repeated. That suggested that language arises from neural circuitry linking many distinct areas of the brain. In other words, language can't be studied independently of the brain and body. Lakoff concluded that linguistics must take into account cognitive science.
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Another intellectual blow was delivered by Steven Pinker, an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University. Writing in The New Republic in 2006, Pinker chastised Lakoff for his "cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons" and declared his political efforts "a train wreck" and "jejune nonsense." Lakoff blasted back with an essay-length reply on The New Republic's Web site. He accused Pinker of misrepresenting his ideas and falling prey to his own ideological blinders, such as the view that thought is universal and disembodied rather than an emotional process that relies on frames, image-schemas, and metaphors. The spat endured for another round, a distilled version of which appeared in the journal Public Policy Research (March-May, 2007).
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What Lakoff and others have, in fact, shown are the ways in which frames and metaphors — what Fauconnier calls "backstage cognition" — affect people's thinking and behavior. Fauconnier insists that a genuine paradigm shift would occur if politicians took such unconscious processes into account. "But there is a lot of inertia against this revolution," he cautions. A lot of the social sciences, in particular, he says, were built on a belief in human rationality.
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