George Lakoff
| George Lakoff link Website (Academic) | |
|---|---|
| File:George Lakoff.png | |
| Born | May 24, 1941 Bayonne, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Nationality | US |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Alma mater | Indiana University, MIT |
| Mentors | Fred Householder |
| Spouses | Robin Lakoff, Kathleen Frumkin |
| Party | Democrats |
Best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena | |
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena; using this thesis to explain the difference between the Democratic Party (which he supports[1]) and the Republicans.
Education
Lakoff graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in English literature and mathematics in 1962. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1966.
Career
From 1965 to 1969 he taught linguistics at Harvard University. From 1972 until his retirement in 2016, Lakoff taught at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lakoff argues that people think in metaphors; this usually happens unconsciously, because the metaphors are not or no longer perceived. Nevertheless, it is relevant in which metaphors one thinks and which ones are used rhetorically, since metaphors are always subject to a thinking model that one supports by using one's key concepts. For example, if one uses military metaphors, then something is implicitly considered a war.
Lakoff has publicly expressed some of his (Democratic Party) political views and his ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process. He almost always discusses the former in terms of the latter. Moral Politics gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives".
Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different 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, Lakoff 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.). Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other.[2]
Covid
"Opposition to COVID-19 safety measures reveals a twisted definition of 'freedom'...The rejection of life-saving vaccines and masks has become part of the extreme conservative definition of freedom."[3]
"Some conservatives and anti-vaccine activists have framed public health efforts as an assault on freedom. They seem to define freedom as an individual's right to do whatever they wish, regardless of how it affects others. They also undermine science, sowing distrust through disinformation and misinformation...freedom doesn't mean freedom to spread deadly diseases and harm public health."[4]
"A useful debate generally needs two equal sides. The moment a medical expert agrees to debate an anti-vaccine quack, they have granted the anti-vaxxer a major victory. That's because no amount of logic or reason can outweigh the impression that an anti-vaxxer should be regarded as equal to a medical expert."[5]
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References
- ↑ https://george-lakoff.com/2017/10/30/why-are-you-a-democrat/
- ↑ Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 143–176. ISBN 0-226-46771-6.
- ↑ https://www.theframelab.org/liberty-vaccines-and-death/
- ↑ https://www.theframelab.org/about-vaccines-and-freedom-/
- ↑ https://www.theframelab.org/why-its-silly-to-debate-robert-f/