George Philip Lakoff ( LAY-kawf; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. Lakoff served as professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016. The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his and Mark Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors 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 to political science. In his 1996 book Moral Politics, Lakoff described conservative voters as being influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the state, and liberal/progressive voters as being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as the folk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon. According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it. Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute. Lakoff is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. His first marriage was to linguist Robin Lakoff.
Early life and education
Work
Reappraisal of metaphor 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 that metaphors play in the socio-political activity of humans. The Western scientific tradition has seen metaphor as a purely linguistic construction. 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 of thought. 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 of abstraction, 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":
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. According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. He also points out that the application of one domain of knowledge to another offers new perceptions and understandings.
Linguistics wars
Lakoff began his career as a student and later as a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics 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 and morphemes. 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.
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…. 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". 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".
Embodied mind
When Lakoff 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". Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct arguments in favor of embodiment:
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