George Lakoff

File:George-lakoff.jpg

George Lakoff

Biography

George Philip Lakoff (b. 24 May 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1972. He began as a student of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and broke with it in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing through the "linguistics wars" that meaning cannot be separated from syntax and that language is not an autonomous formal system but an expression of general cognition.

Key Ideas

• Conceptual metaphor. The central claim of Metaphors We Live By (1980, with the philosopher Mark Johnson). Metaphor is not decorative language but the ordinary mechanism of abstract thought: we systematically understand one domain in terms of another. The examples are unglamorous and that is the argument — ARGUMENT IS WAR ("he attacked every weak point," "your claims are indefensible"), TIME IS MONEY ("spend," "waste," "budget," "invest"), UP IS GOOD, IDEAS ARE FOOD. Because the mappings are systematic, they license inferences; because they are conventional, they are invisible.
• Embodied cognition. Developed in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999, with Johnson). Conceptual metaphors are grounded in bodily experience — containment, balance, force, verticality, front and back — which means reason is not disembodied or universal but shaped by having the kind of body humans have.
• Prototype theory and categories. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) argues from Eleanor Rosch's work that categories are organised around prototypes with graded membership rather than by necessary and sufficient conditions, and that this is a fact about cognition rather than about sloppy language.
• Framing. Lakoff's most publicly influential idea, developed in Moral Politics (1996) and Don't Think of an Elephant! (2004). Political language activates conceptual frames, and accepting an opponent's terms concedes the argument before it starts — his standing example being "tax relief," which frames taxation as an affliction. He proposes that American political division rests on two competing metaphorical models of the nation as family: the Strict Father and the Nurturant Parent.

Criticism

Lakoff's linguistic work is broadly accepted as foundational to cognitive linguistics; his political work has drawn more objection, on the grounds that the two-family-models account oversimplifies political psychology, that its predictive record is mixed, and that it slides between description and advocacy. His break with generative grammar also remains contested within linguistics.

Selected Works

• Metaphors We Live By (1980), with Mark Johnson
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987)
• Moral Politics (1996)
• Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), with Mark Johnson
• Don't Think of an Elephant! (2004)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Every interface is built out of conceptual metaphors, and most of them are so thoroughly conventional that they read as descriptions rather than choices: the desktop, the file, the folder, the trash, the window, the cloud, the stream, the wall, the feed. Each licenses inferences — a file can be moved, a folder can contain, a cloud is somewhere else and not anyone's — and each conceals what is actually happening. Lakoff supplies the method for noticing this, which is the beginning of noticing that the arrangement could have been otherwise. His work on framing applies with equal force to the vocabulary of the industry itself: "sharing," "friends," "engagement," "users."

Related Reading

• Meme
• Roland Barthes
• Social dialect
• Paralanguage
• Frictional Interface