George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his 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 ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind". Below Lakoff discusses concepts from his book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain:
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Lakoff knows only Donkey vs Elephant and that's the only "frame" through which his "analysis" can be understood.
He's got a keen faculty spot and a list of publications to his name, but that doesn't mean he's correct, wise, well-argued, comprehensive, fair-minded, objective, detached, calm, knowing, comprehending, or useful to anyone save the university that employs him and the pundits who find his pro-Donkey pissings to be passable.
Basically he's useful for Donkey tribalists, and that's the end of it.
Karl you make a lot of declarative statements here but do you have any examples, evidence or support for your statements - thereby turning them into an argument?
I find his work quite useful - although I enjoy his work on embodiment and metaphor much more than his "politics" research. His book "Philosophy in the Flesh" is a landmark work in my opinion. And anyone calling themselves a philosopher should be called upon to at least respond.
The frame-politics stuff, however, provides food for thought - even though, as you point out, it's based on the murderous bi-partisan paradigm of Dems v. Rebs.
Mark Johnson has gone on to do wonderful work on embodiment and is now a leading figure for me in pragmatism but ask yourself how Lakoff decides/discovers what people believe and how it impacts their choices, what is the research method?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Johnson_%28philosopher%29
@Dirk? (if you don't mind please start indicating who you are because there are other anons lurking whom I mistake you for) - I think Lakoff is taking what he knows about cognition and human propensities for metaphor and framing and using it towards a kind of hermeneutics of political discourse. So I'm not sure he has a methodology except observation, hermeneutics and interpretation through the lens of cognitive science.
I have no attachment to his 'politics' work though. I simply find it thought-provoking.
His book Philosophy in the Flesh, however blew my mind and completely changed the way I think about philosophical issues.
http://vermont.academia.edu/AdrianIvakhiv/Papers/342639/From_Frames_to_Resonance_Machines_The_Neuropolitics_of_Environmental_Communication
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