In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action. However, the term "rationality" tends to be used in the specialized discussions of economics, sociology, psychology and political science. A rational decision is one that is not just reasoned, but is also optimal for achieving a goal or solving a problem. The term "rationality" is used differently in different disciplines.

Determining optimality for rational behavior requires a quantifiable formulation of the problem, and the making of several key assumptions. When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in how much information is available (e.g. complete or incomplete knowledge). Collectively, the formulation and background assumptions are the model within which rationality applies. Illustrating the relativity of rationality: if one accepts a model in which benefiting oneself is optimal, then rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish; whereas if one accepts a model in which benefiting the group is optimal, then purely selfish behavior is deemed irrational. It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated.

Theories of rationality

The German sociologist Max Weber proposed an interpretation of social action that distinguished between four different types of rationality. The first, which he called ''Zweckrational'' or purposive/instrumental rationality, is related to the expectations about the behavior of other human beings or objects in the environment. These expectations serve as means for a particular actor to attain ends, ends which Weber noted were "rationally pursued and calculated." The second type, Weber called ''Wertrational'' or value/belief-oriented. Here the action is undertaken for what one might call reasons intrinsic to the actor: some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other motive, independent of whether it will lead to success. The third type was affectual, determined by an actor's specific affect, feeling, or emotion – to which Weber himself said that this was a kind of rationality that was on the borderline of what he considered "meaningfully oriented." The fourth was traditional, determined by ingrained habituation. Weber emphasized that it was very unusual to find only one of these orientations: combinations were the norm. His usage also makes clear that he considered the first two as more significant than the others, and it is arguable that the third and fourth are subtypes of the first two. These kinds of rationality were ideal types.

The advantage in this interpretation is that it avoids a value-laden assessment, say, that certain kinds of beliefs are irrational. Instead, Weber suggests that a ground or motive can be given – for religious or affect reasons, for example — that may meet the criterion of explanation or justification even if it is not an explanation that fits the ''Zweckrational'' orientation of means and ends. The opposite is therefore also true: some means-ends explanations will not satisfy those whose grounds for action are 'Wertrational'.

Weber's constructions of rationality have been critiqued both from a Habermasian (1984) perspective (as devoid of social context and under-theorised in terms of social power) and also from a feminist perspective (Eagleton, 2003) whereby Weber's rationality constructs are viewed as imbued with masculine values and oriented toward the maintenance of male power. An alternative position on rationality (which includes both bounded rationality (Simons and Hawkins, 1949), as well as the affective and value-based arguments of Weber) can be found in the critique of Etzioni (1988), who reframes thought on decision-making to argue for a reversal of the position put forward by Weber. Etzioni illustrates how purposive/instrumental reasoning is subordinated by normative considerations (ideas on how people 'ought' to behave) and affective considerations (as a support system for the development of human relationships).

In the psychology of reasoning, psychologists and cognitive scientists have defended different positions on human rationality. One prominent view, due to Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne among others is that humans are rational in principle but they err in practice, that is, humans have the competence to be rational but their performance is limited by various factors

Quality of rationality

It is believed by some philosophers (notably A.C. Grayling) that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts or culturally specific, moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.

It is evident from modern cognitive science and neuroscience, studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference.

Theoretical and practical rationality

Kant had distinguished theoretical from practical reason. Rationality theorist Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, although, according to him, reason and rationality are not the same: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy. Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform. Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other. Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs. Practical rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible. Practical rationality has also a formal component, that reduces to Bayesian decision theory, and a material component, rooted in human nature (lastly, in our genome).

Examples of Rationality Applied to Different Fields

Individuals or organizations are called rational if they make optimal decisions in pursuit of their goals. It is in these terms that one speaks, for example, of a rational allocation of resources, or of a rational corporate strategy. For such "rationality", the decision maker's goals are taken as part of the model, and not made subject to criticism, ethical or otherwise.

Debates arise in these four fields about whether or not people or organizations are "really" rational, as well as whether it make sense to model them as such in formal models. Some have argued that a kind of bounded rationality makes more sense for such models.

Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior; the term ''homo economicus'' (economic man: the imaginary man being assumed in economic models who is logically consistent but amoral) was coined largely in honor of this view.

Artificial Intelligence

Within artificial intelligence, a ''rational agent'' is one that maximizes its expected ''utility'', given its current knowledge. Utility is the usefulness of the consequences of its actions. The utility function is arbitrarily defined by the designer, but should be a function of ''performance'', which is the directly measurable consequences, such as winning or losing money. In order to make a safe agent that plays defensively, a nonlinear function of performance is often desired, so that the reward for winning is lower than the punishment for losing. An agent might be rational within its own problem area, but finding the rational decision for arbitrarily complex problems is not practically possible. The rationality of human thought is a key problem in the psychology of reasoning.

Rationality and power

The relationship between rationality and political power was studied by Flyvbjerg (1998). He found that in real-life decision making rationality is context-dependent and the context of rationality is power. Thus power profoundly influences rationality, and what decision makers think of and present as rationality is often a rationalization of power positions, according to Flyvbjerg. In a paraphrase of Blaise Pascal, Flyvbjerg concludes that "power has a rationality that rationality does not know."

See also

References

External links and references

What is rationality?

Reason and Rationality, by Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, Luc Faucher on the broad field of reason and rationality from descriptive, normative, and evaluative points of view

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Historicist Theories of Rationality

Legal Reasoning After Post-Modern Critiques of Reason, by Peter Suber

Spohn, W. (2002). The Many Facets of the Theory of Rationality. ''Croatian Journal of Philosophy 2'': 247–262.

Cristina Bicchieri (1993). Rationality and Coordination, New York: Cambridge University Press

Cristina Bicchieri (2007). “Rationality and Indeterminacy”, in D. Ross and H. Kinkaid (eds.) The Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, The Oxford Reference Library of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, vol. 6, n.2.

Anand, P (1993). ''Foundations of Rational Choice Under Risk'', Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Habermas, J. (1984) ''The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1; Reason and the Rationalization of Society'', Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mosterín, Jesús (2008). ''Lo mejor posible: Racionalidad y acción humana''. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 318 pp. ISBN 978-84-206-8206-8.

Nozick, Robert (1993). ''The Nature of Rationality.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Eagleton, M. (ed) (2003) ''A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory'', Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Simons, H. and Hawkins, D. (1949), “Some Conditions in Macro-Economic Stability”, Econometrica, 1949.

Johnson-Laird, P.N. & Byrne, R.M.J. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

Garcés M. (2009) ''Emotional Theory of Rationality'', ''"Entertainment = Emotion" workshop, C.C Benasque, Spain'' –

Category:Autonomy Category:Concepts in epistemology Category:Philosophical logic Category:Philosophy of mind Category:Underlying principles of microeconomic behavior

zh-min-nan:Ha̍p-lí-sèng cs:Racionalita da:Rationalitet de:Rationalität es:Racionalidad fr:Rationalité it:Razionalità lv:Racionalitāte lt:Racionalumas nl:Rationaliteit no:Rasjonalitet ro:Raționalitate ru:Рациональность simple:Rationality sk:Racionalita ckb:ئاوەزمەندی fi:Rationaalisuus zh:理性

:''"Lakoff" and "Professor Lakoff" redirect here. For the sociolinguist, see Robin Lakoff.''

Coordinates	6°51′0″N79°57′0″N
Name	George Lakoff
Birth date	May 24, 1941
Birth place	Bayonne, New Jersey
Residence	Berkeley, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Cognitive linguistics Cognitive science
Workplaces	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Indiana University
Known for	Conceptual metaphor theory Embodied cognition }}

George P. Lakoff (, born May 24, 1941) 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", which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. He was the founder of the now defunct progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute. His website is www.georgelakoff.com.

Reappraisal of metaphor

Lakoff began his career as a student and later 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:

{{bquote|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 has given examples from within his work where he talks about the relationship between his semantics and syntax. Chomsky goes further and claims that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing" (the work in question being Chomsky's). His differences with Chomsky contributed to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".

Lakoff's original thesis on conceptual metaphor was expressed in his book with Mark Johnson entitled ''Metaphors We Live By'' in 1980.

Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction, and indeed are central to the development of thought. He says, "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Non-metaphorical thought is for Lakoff only possible when we talk about purely physical reality. For Lakoff the greater the level of abstraction the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons. One reason is that some metaphors become 'dead' and we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".

For instance, in intellectual debate the underlying metaphor is usually that argument is war (later revised as "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''.

For Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. The application of one domain of knowledge to another domain of knowledge offers new perceptions and understandings.

Lakoff's theory has applications throughout all academic disciplines and much of human social interaction. Lakoff has explored some of the implications of the embodied mind thesis in a number of books, most written with coauthors.

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 sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment. First, using evidence from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also ''qualia''), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.

Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor.)

Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.

"We are neural beings," Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."

Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?

Many scientists share the belief that there are problems with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method of empirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says, in "The Embodied Mind", that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.

Lakoff is, with coauthors Mark Johnson and Rafael E. Núñez, one of the primary proponents of the embodied mind thesis. Lakoff discussed these themes in his 2001 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, published as ''The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding''. Others who have written about the embodied mind include philosopher Andy Clark (See his Being There), philosopher and neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and his student Evan Thompson (See Varela, Thompson & Rosch's "The Embodied Mind"), roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, Rolf Pfeifer and Tom Ziemke, the physicist David Bohm (see his ''Thought As A System''), Ray Gibbs (see his "Embodiment and Cognitive Science"), John Grinder and Richard Bandler in their neuro-linguistic programming, and Julian Jaynes. All of these writers can be traced back to earlier philosophical writings, most notably in the phenomenological tradition, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. The basic thesis of "embodied mind" is also traceable to the American contextualist or pragmatist tradition, notably John Dewey in such works as Art As Experience.

Mathematics

According to Lakoff, even mathematics is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus "any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is." By this, he is saying that there is nothing outside of the thought structures we derive from our embodied minds that we can use to "prove" that mathematics is somehow beyond biology. Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than "meat".

Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors. (Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings.) Their book has yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics, although the book can be read as making strong claims about how that philosophy should proceed. The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.

Lakoff has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe. Early in 2001 Lakoff told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell." This is because the structures of scientific knowledge are not "out there" but rather in our brains, based on the details of our anatomy. Therefore, we cannot "tell" that mathematics is "out there" without relying on conceptual metaphors rooted in our biology. This claim bothers those who believe that there really is a way we could "tell". The falsifiability of this claim is perhaps the central problem in the cognitive science of mathematics, a field that attempts to establish a foundation ontology based on the human cognitive and scientific process.

Political significance and involvement

Lakoff's application of cognitive linguistics to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led him into territory normally considered basic to political science.

Lakoff has publicly expressed both ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process, and some of his particular political views. He almost always discusses the latter in terms of the former.

''Moral Politics'' (1996, revisited in 2001) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.

Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different 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.

Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor. Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms like ''partial birth abortion'' and ''tax relief'' because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions. ''Tax relief'' for example, implies explicitly that taxes are an affliction, something someone would want "relief" from. To use the terms of another metaphoric worldview, Lakoff insists, is to unconsciously support it. Liberals must support linguistic think tanks in the same way that conservatives do if they are going to succeed in appealing to those in the country who share their metaphors.

Lakoff has distributed some much briefer political analyses via the Internet. One article distributed this way is "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf", in which Lakoff argues that the particular conceptual metaphors used by the first Bush administration to justify American involvement in the Gulf ended up either obscuring reality, or putting a spin on the facts that was accommodating to the administration's case for military action.

Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in ''Moral Politics''. Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message from ''Moral Politics.'' In 2008, Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.

One of his political works, ''Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate'', self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Disagreement with Steven Pinker

In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review of Lakoff's book ''Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Idea''. Pinker's review was published in ''The New Republic''. Pinker argued that Lakoff's propositions are unsupported and his prescriptions a recipe for electoral failure. He wrote that Lakoff was condescending and deplored Lakoff's "shameless caricaturing of beliefs" and his "faith in the power of euphemism". Pinker portrayed Lakoff's arguments as "cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality". Lakoff wrote a rebuttal to the review stating that his position on many matters is the exact reverse of what Pinker attributes to him. Lakoff explicitly rejected, for example, the cognitive relativism and faith in euphemism described above, arguing in favor of a deeper understanding of rationality that discards the modal logic conceptualization of rational thought in favor of the better supported frame interpretation.

==Works==

1987. ''Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind'' University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.

1989 with Mark Turner. ''More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor''. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226468129

1996. ''Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't'', University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226468051

*2001 Edition. ''Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think'', University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226467719

1999 (with Mark Johnson). ''Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought''. Basic Books.

2000 (with Rafael Núñez). ''Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being''. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03771-2.

2003 (1980) with Mark Johnson. ''Metaphors We Live By.'' University of Chicago Press. 2003 edition contains an 'Afterword'. ISBN 978-0226468006

2004. ''Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.'' Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1931498715

2005, "A Cognitive Scientist Looks at Daubert", ''American Journal of Public Health''. 95, no. 1: S114.

2006. ''Whose Freedom? : The Battle over America's Most Important Idea''. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15828-6

2008. ''The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain'', ISBN 978-0670019274

Videos

''How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff'' DVD format.

C-Span program online, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain

See also

Code word (figure of speech)

Cognitive linguistics

Cognitive science of mathematics

Conceptual metaphor

Embodied philosophy

Framing (social sciences)

Invariance principle

Language and thought

Metaphor

Metonymy

References

Further reading

Harris, Randy Allen (1995). ''The Linguistics Wars''. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X. (Focuses on the disputes Lakoff and others have had with Chomsky.)

Haser, Verena (2005). ''Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Topics in English Linguistics)'', Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110182835 (A critical look at the ideas behind embodiment and conceptual metaphor.)

Kelleher, William J. (2005). ''Progressive Logic: Framing A Unified Field Theory of Values For Progressives''. La CaCañada Flintridge, CA: The Empathic Science Institute. ISBN 0-9773717-1-9.

McGlone, M. S. (2001). "Concepts as Metaphors" in Sam Glucksberg, ''Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms''. Oxford Psychology Series 36. Oxford University Press, 90–107. ISBN 0195111095.

O'Reilly, Bill (2006). ''Culture Warrior''. New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-2092-9. (Calls Lakoff the guiding philosopher behind the "secular progressive movement".)

Renkema, Jan (2004). ''Introduction to Discourse Studies''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1588115291.

Rettig, Hillary (2006). ''The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way''. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 1590560906. (Documents strong parallels between Lakoff's nurturant parent model of progressive thought and psychologist Abraham Maslow's model of the self-actualized individual. Also discusses framing in the context of marketing and sales with the aim of bolstering progressive activists' persuasive skills.)

Richardt, Susanne (2005). ''Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine and Computing''. European University Studies: Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, 413. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ISBN 0820473812.

Soros, George (2006). ''The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror''. ISBN 1586483595. (discusses Lakoff in regard to the application of his theories on the work of Frank Luntz and with respect to his own theory about perception and reality)

Winter, Steven L. (2003). ''A Clearing in the Forest''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-90222-6. (Applies Lakoff's work in cognitive science and metaphor to the field of law and legal reasoning.)

Dean, John W. (2006), ''Conservatives without Conscience'', Viking Penguin ISBN 0-670-03774-5.

External links

University of California, Berkeley department of Linguistics page on George Lakoff

Edge bio of Lakoff

"Metaphor and War" (1991)

"Metaphor and War, Again" (2003)

"Thinking of Jackasses: the grand delusions of the Democratic Party", a critical review by Marc Cooper in Atlantic Monthly

"Politics and Cognitive Science" Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

"Empathy is the New Black" Radio interview with Dr. George Lakoff on Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini an Freddie O'Connell

"The Political Mind" a talk by George Lakoff recorded June 28, 2008 in Sacramento, CA

George Lakoff Proposes Ballot Measure to End 2/3 Rule in State Legislature - video report by ''Democracy Now!''

Biography and summary of Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, 2001) by Brannon Hancock

Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:American academics Category:American Jews Category:American linguists Category:American political writers Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Mathematical cognition researchers Category:Psycholinguists Category:Philosophers of mathematics Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Metaphor theorists Category:Framing theorists

bn:জর্জ লেকফ bg:Джордж Лакоф ca:George Lakoff da:George Lakoff de:George Lakoff es:George Lakoff eo:George Lakoff fr:George Lakoff gl:George Lakoff ko:조지 레이코프 it:George Lakoff he:ג'ורג' לאקוף hu:George Lakoff ja:ジョージ・レイコフ pl:George Lakoff pt:George Lakoff ru:Лакофф, Джордж fi:George Lakoff sv:George Lakoff tr:George Lakoff

Coordinates	6°51′0″N79°57′0″N
birth name	Matthew White Ridley
birth date	February 07, 1958
birth place	Northumberland
occupation	Author, journalist
nationality	British }}

Matthew White Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland) is an English journalist, writer, and businessman.

Career

Ridley was educated at Eton College from 1970–1975 and then went on to Magdalen College of the University of Oxford and completed a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in zoology and then a Doctor of Philosophy in zoology in 1983.

Ridley worked as the science editor of ''The Economist'' from 1984 to 1987 and was then its Washington correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and American editor from 1990 to 1992.

Ridley was non-executive chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, in the period leading up to the bank's near-collapse.

He was the first chairman of the International Centre for Life, a science park devoted to life sciences in Newcastle, and he served in this position for seven years. He formerly had been a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences at its stately home in Oxfordshire. He is a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Books

He is the author of several works of popular science:

1993 ''The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature''

In Lewis Carroll’s ''Through the Looking-Glass'', Alice meets the Red Queen who runs everywhere but stays in the same place. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it was invented to keep changing the genetic locks so as to remain one step ahead of constantly mutating parasites. The Red Queen also addresses dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture – including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and why the human brain may be like the peacock’s tail – a seduction device.

1996 ''The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation''

In ''The Origins of Virtue'', Ridley argues that the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange that enables us to reap the benefits of co-operation, ostracise those who break the social contract and avoid the trap of being 'rational fools'. It traces the evolution of society first among genes, then among cells, then in ants, vampire bats, apes and dolphins, and finally among human beings. Along the way, it plays games with computers, traces the psychological roots of football riots, finds trade to be ten times as old as economists believe, compares dead mammoths to lighthouses, explains the evolution of human emotions and shows how to save the rain forest. In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, former US President Bill Clinton named this book as one which had influenced his thinking.

1999 ''Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters''

The human genome, the complete set of genes in 23 pairs of chromosomes, is an 'autobiography' of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been edited, abridged, altered and added to as it has been handed down, generation to generation, over more than three billion years. This generation is the first to read this book, and to gain hitherto unimaginable insights into what it means to be alive, to be human, to be conscious or to be ill. By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes, and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, described the book as "lucid and exhilarating".

2003 ''Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human'', also later released under the title ''The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture'' in 2004

This book chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes, recounting the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. The emerging truth is far more interesting than a stale antithesis between heredity and environment. Nurture depends on genes, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; through the pattern of their turning on and off they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.

2006 ''Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code''

Ridley's biography of Francis Crick won the Davis Prize for the history of science from the US History of Science Society.

Ridley also edited ''The Best American Science Writing 2002'', one of a series of annual science writing anthologies edited by Jesse Cohen, and contributed a chapter to ''Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think'', a collection of essays in honour of his friend Richard Dawkins (edited by his near-namesake Mark Ridley).

2010 ''The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves'', HarperCollins. Reviewed in ''Nature'' 465, 294–295 (20 May 2010)

Ridley creates a wide-ranging history of human society from early Hunter-gatherer groups into the early 21st century. He argues that human beings have an often underestimated capacity for change and social progress. From early on in human evolution, Ridley writes, trade and other kinds of exchanges between groups "gave the Species an external, collective intelligence". He continues with histories of socio-economic progress under free market capitalism and democratic civil institutions. He then dismisses what he sees as overly pessimistic views of global climate change and Western birthrate decline. The book contains numerous graphs depicting social changes, such as how world GDP per person grew from about $1,000 in 1900 to $6,000 in 2000.

Publications and articles

Ridley writes the weekly "Mind and Matter" column for the Wall Street Journal, which "explores the science of human nature and its implications". Recent writings include "Connecting the Pieces of the Alzheimer's Puzzle" and "Does a Different Nuclear Power Lie Ahead?".

"Where Progress Comes From: Africa Needs Growth, Not Pity and Big Plans", ''The Wall Street Journal'' (27 November 2010)

"Humans: Why They Triumphed", ''The Wall Street Journal'' (22 May 2010)

"Why ban genetic modification?", ''Wired'' (UK) (20 January 2010)

"Will history condemn Al Gore?", ''Wired'' (UK) (4 December 2009)

"When Ideas Have Sex: The Role of Exchange in Cultural Evolution", Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology (23 September 2009)

"Why are we all getting cleverer?", ''Wired'' (UK) (9 June 2009)

"Robber barons got rich by making things cheaper", ''Wired'' (UK) (21 April 2009)

"Darwin's Legacy", ''National Geographic'' (February 2009)

"Bjorn Lomborg", ''Time Magazine'' (April 26, 2004)

"What Makes You Who You Are", ''Time Magazine'' (May 25, 2003)

"Will We Clone a Dinosaur?", ''Time Magazine'' (April 10, 2000)

"Life's Twisted Plot Line", ''Time Magazine'' (February 28, 2000)

"Will We Still Need to Have Sex?", ''Time Magazine'' (November 8, 1999)

''Down to Earth: A Contrarian View of Environmental Problems'' (collection of columns from the Sunday Telegraph), ''Institute of Economic Affairs'' (February 1995)

''Down to Earth II: Combating Environmental Myths'' (collection of columns from the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and others), ''Institute of Economic Affairs'' (August 1997)

"Can Selfishness Save the Environment?" (co-author), ''The Atlantic'' (September 2003)

Personal

He is the son and heir of Viscount Ridley, whose family estate is Blagdon Hall, near Cramlington, Northumberland. Ridley is married to the neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert and lives in northern England; he has a son and a daughter. He is a great grandson of Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Northern Rock

Ridley was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, earning £300,000 a year, having joined the board in 1994. His father had been chairman from 1987 to 1992 and sat on the board for 30 years.

In September 2007 Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances at the start of the credit crunch. It was forced to apply to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding, following problems caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis. Matt Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007, having been blamed in parliamentary committee hearings for not recognizing the risks of the bank's financial strategy and thereby "harming the reputation of the British banking industry."

Debate over Ridley's political philosophy

In a 2006 edition of the on-line magazine Edge published by the Edge foundation, Ridley wrote a response to the question "What's your dangerous idea?" which was entitled "Government is the problem not the solution", in which he describes his attitude to government regulation:

In 2007 the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote an article in 'The Guardian' connecting Ridley's libertarian economic philosophy and the £27 billion failure of Northern Rock. In the same newspaper Terence Kealey defended libertarianism, arguing that the performance of the government's regulatory agencies confirmed scepticism about state intervention, because the government had crowded out the market's own regulatory mechanisms.

On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's latest book 'The Rational Optimist'. Ridley has responded to Monbiot on his website, stating "George Monbiot’s recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply." On 19 June 2010 Monbiot countered with another article on the Guardian website, further questioning Ridley's claims and his response.

In November 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy exchange between Ridley and Microsoft founder Bill Gates on topics discussed in Ridley's book ''The Rational Optimist''.

Gates wrote: Those two ideas, said Gates, are that "the key to rising prosperity over the course of human history has been the exchange of goods" and "rational optimism...there have been constant predictions of a bleak future throughout human history, but they haven't come true."

Gates went on to conclude

Ridley replied:

Ridley then summarized his own views in response to Gates:

References

External links

Matt Ridley's website

Treasury - Minutes of Evidence: Examination of Witnesses: Dr Matt Ridley, Chairman, Northern Rock

Ridley interviewed for Massive Change Radio in January 2004

Biography page on Edge.org

Matt Ridley, "We've never had it so good - and it's all thanks to science," ''The Guardian'', 3 April 2003. Article in newspaper.

Matt Ridley, "What's your dangerous idea?"The Edge On-line magazine 2006

Matt Ridley, "Darwin's Legacy", National Geographic, February 2009.

Matt Ridley, "Putting Darwin in Genes", Thinking Digital, May 2009.

Matt Ridley, 'When Ideas Have Sex', a video of his TED talk

Category:Science journalists Category:English journalists Category:English science writers Category:Human evolution theorists Category:People from Newcastle upon Tyne Category:Deputy Lieutenants of Northumberland Category:Old Etonians Category:Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford Category:English atheists Category:English libertarians Category:1958 births Category:Living people Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:English bankers Category:Northern Rock

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