A political cartoon from an 1894 Puck magazine by illustrator S.D. Ehrhart, shows a farm woman labeled "Democratic Party" sheltering from a tornado of political change.

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and simile.

Example[link]

One of the most prominent examples of a metaphor in English literature is the All the world's a stage monologue from As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances; — William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7^[1]

This quote is a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By figuratively asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses the points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about how the world works and the lives of the people within it.

Structure[link]

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), by I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed. In the previous example, "the world" is compared to a stage, describing it with the attributes of “the stage”; "the world" is the tenor, and "a stage" is the vehicle; "men and women" is a secondary tenor, "players" is the secondary vehicle.

Other writers employ the general terms ground and figure to denote tenor and the vehicle. In cognitive linguistics, the terms target and source are used respectively.

Etymology[link]

The English metaphor derives from the 16th c. Old French métaphore, from the Latin metaphora “carrying over”, Greek (μεταφορά) metaphorá “transfer”, ^[2] from (μεταφέρω) metaphero “to carry over”, “to transfer” ^[3] and from (μετά) meta “between” ^[4] + (φέρω) phero, “to bear”, “to carry”.^[5]

Comparison with other types of analogy[link]

Metaphors are most frequently compared with similes. The Colombia Encyclopedia, 6th edition, explains the difference as:

a simile states that A is like B, a metaphor states that A is B or substitutes B for A.

Where a metaphor asserts the two objects in the comparison are identical on the point of comparison, a simile merely asserts a similarity. For this reason a metaphor is generally considered more forceful than a simile.

The metaphor category also contains these specialised types:

• allegory: An extended metaphor wherein a story illustrates an important attribute of the subject.
• catachresis: A mixed metaphor used by design and accident (a rhetorical fault).
• parable: An extended metaphor narrated as an anecdote illustrating and teaching a moral lesson, such as Aesop's fables.

Metaphor, like other types of analogy, can usefully be distinguished from metonymy as one of two fundamental modes of thought. Metaphor and analogy both work by bringing together two concepts from different conceptual domains, whereas metonymy works by using one element from a given domain to refer to another closely related element. Thus, metaphor creates new links between otherwise distinct conceptual domains where metonymy rely on existing links within them.

Common types[link]

• A dead metaphor is one in which the sense of a transferred image is absent. Examples: "to grasp a concept" and "to gather what you've understood" use physical action as a metaphor for understanding. Most people do not visualize the action — dead metaphors normally go unnoticed. Some people distinguish between a dead metaphor and a cliché. Others use "dead metaphor" to denote both.
• A mixed metaphor is one that leaps from one identification to a second identification inconsistent with the first. "I smell a rat [...] but I'll nip him in the bud" -- Irish politician Boyle Roche. This form is often used as a parody of metaphor itself: "If we can hit that bullseye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate." -- Futurama character Zapp Brannigan.^[6]

Use outside rhetoric[link]

The term metaphor is also used for the following terms that are not a part of rhetoric:

• A cognitive metaphor is the association of object to an experience outside the object's environment.
• A conceptual metaphor is an underlying association that is systematic in both language and thought.
• A root metaphor is the underlying worldview that shapes an individual's understanding of a situation.
• A therapeutic metaphor is an experience that allows one to learn about more than just that experience.
• A nonlinguistic metaphor is an association between two nonlinguistic realms of experience.
• A visual metaphor provides a frame or window on experience.

Metaphors can also be implied and extended throughout pieces of literature.

Conceptual metaphor[link]

Some theorists have suggested that metaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well. In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. A common definition of a metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way. They explain how a metaphor is simply understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The authors call this concept a ‘conduit metaphor.’ By this they meant that a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it. In other words, communication is something that ideas go into. The container is separate from the ideas themselves. Lakoff and Johnson give several examples of daily metaphors we use, such as “argument is war” and “time is money.” Metaphors are widely used in context to describe personal meaning. The authors also suggest that communication can be viewed as a machine: “Communication is not what one does with the machine, but is the machine itself.” (Johnson, Lakoff, 1980).^[7]

Nonlinguistic metaphor[link]

Metaphors can also map experience between two nonlinguistic realms. In The Dream Frontier, Mark Blechner describes musical metaphors, in which a piece of music can "map" to the personality and emotional life of a person.^[8] Musicologist Leonard Meyer demonstrated how purely rhythmic and harmonic events can express human emotions.^[9] There can also be a metaphoric mapping between other art forms and human experience. The art theorist Robert Vischer argued that when we look at a painting, we "feel ourselves into it" by imagining our body in the posture of a nonhuman or inanimate object in the painting. For example, the painting "The Solitary Tree" by Caspar David Friedrich shows a tree with contorted, barren limbs.^[10][11] In looking at that painting, we imagine our limbs in a similarly contorted and barren shape, and that creates a feeling in us of strain and distress. Nonlinguistic metaphors may be the foundation of our experience of visual, musical,^[12] dance,^[13] and other art forms.

In historical linguistics[link]

In historical onomasiology or, more generally, in historical linguistics, metaphor is defined as semantic change based on similarity, i.e. a similarity in form or function between the original concept named by a word and the target concept named by this word.^[14]

ex. mouse: small, gray rodent → small, gray, mouse-shaped computer device.

Some recent linguistic theories view language as by its nature all metaphorical; or that language in essence is metaphorical.^[15]

Historical theories of metaphor[link]

Metaphor as style in speech and writing[link]

Tombstone of a jewish woman depicted by broken candles a metaphor of the end of life.

Viewed as an aspect of speech and writing, metaphor qualifies as style, in particular, style characterized by a type of analogy. An expression (word, phrase) that by implication suggests the likeness of one entity to another entity gives style to an item of speech or writing, whether the entities consist of objects, events, ideas, activities, attributes, or almost anything expressible in language. For example, in the first sentence of this paragraph, the word "viewed" serves as a metaphor for "thought of", implying analogy of the process of seeing and the thought process. The phrase, "viewed as an aspect of", projects the properties of seeing (vision) something from a particular perspective onto thinking about something from a particular perspective, that "something" in this case referring to "metaphor" and that "perspective" in this case referring to the characteristics of speech and writing.

As a characteristic of speech and writing, metaphors can serve the poetic imagination, Sylvia Plath, in her poem "Cut", to compare the blood issuing from her cut thumb to the running of a million soldiers, "redcoats, every one";^[16][17] and, enabling Robert Frost, in "The Road Not Taken", to compare one's life to a journey.^[18]

Viewed also as an aspect of speech, metaphor can serve as a device for persuading the listener or reader of the speaker or writer's argument or thesis, the so-called rhetorical metaphor.

Metaphor as foundational to our conceptual system[link]

Cognitive linguists emphasize that metaphors serve to facilitate the understanding of one conceptual domain, typically an abstract one like 'life' or 'theories' or 'ideas', through expressions that relate to another, more familiar conceptual domain, typically a more concrete one like 'journey' or 'buildings' or 'food'.^[19][20] Food for thought: we devour a book of raw facts, try to digest them, stew over them, let them simmer on the back-burner, regurgitate them in discussions, cook up explanations, hoping they do not seem half-baked. Theories as buildings: we establish a foundation for them, a framework, support them with strong arguments, buttressing them with facts, hoping they will stand. Life as journey: some of us travel hopefully, others seem to have no direction, many lose their way.

It was Lakoff & Johnson (1980, 1999) who greatly contributed to establishing the importance of conceptual metaphor as a framework for thinking in language. In recent years many scholars have investigated the original ways in which writers use novel metaphors and question the fundamental frameworks of thinking implicit in conceptual metaphors.

When considering the role conceptual metaphor plays in the worldview of the community, the problem becomes twofold. From a sociological, cultural or philosophical perspective, the question becomes, to what extent ideologies maintain and impose conceptual patterns of thought by introducing, supporting, and adapting fundamental patterns of thinking metaphorically. To what extent does the ideology fashion and refashion the idea of the nation as a container with borders? How are enemies and outsiders represented? As diseases? As attackers? How are the metaphoric paths of fate, destiny, history and progress represented? As the opening of an eternal monumental moment (German fascism)? Or as the path to communism (in Russian or Czech for example)?

Though cognitive scholars have made some attempts to take on board the idea that different languages have evolved radically different concepts and conceptual metaphors, they have on the whole remained tied up in the somewhat reductive concept of worldview which derives from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The true source of ethnolinguistics and the thinker who contributed most to the debate on the relationship between culture, language and linguistic communities was the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt remains, however, little known in English-speaking nations. Andrew Goatly, in his 'Washing the Brain' (John Benjaminns 2007)does take on board the dual problem of conceptual metaphor as a framework implicit in the language as a system, and the way individuals and ideologies negotiate conceptual metaphors.

James W. Underhill, in 'Creating Worldviews: ideology, metaphor & language' (Edinburgh UP), considers the way individual speech adopts and reinforces certain metaphoric paradigms. This involves a critique of both communist and fascist discourse. But Underhill's studies are situated in Czech and German, which allows him to demonstrate the ways individuals are both thinking 'within', and resisting the modes by which ideologies seek to appropriate key concepts such as 'the people', 'the state', 'history' and 'struggle'.

Though metaphors can be considered to be 'in' language, Underhill's chapter on French, English and ethnolinguistics demonstrates that we cannot conceive of language or languages in anything other than metaphoric terms. French is a treasure, for example. English is a 'tool' for liberating minorities engaging in debate in the global world. Underhill continues his investigation of the relationship between worldview and lanuage in 'Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: truth, love, hate & war' (Cambridge UP 2012).

See also[link]

A metaphorical visualization of the word anger.

Notes[link]

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2008)

• This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Metaphor", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.
• Stefano Arduini (2007). (ed.) Metaphors, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
• Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. I. Bywater. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. (1984). 2 Vols. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
• I. A. Richards. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Max Black (1954). Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 55, pp. 273–294.
• Max Black (1962). Models and metaphors: Studies in language and philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Max Black (1979). More about Metaphor, in A. Ortony (ed) Metaphor & Thought.
• Clive Cazeaux (2007). Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida. New York: Routledge.
• L. J. Cohen (1979). The Semantics of Metaphor, in A. Ortony (ed) Metaphor & Thought
• Donald Davidson. (1978). "What Metaphors Mean." Reprinted in Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation. (1984), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Jacques Derrida (1982). "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
• David Punter (2007). Metaphor, London, Routledge.
• Paul Ricoeur (1975). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1977)
• John Searle (1979). “Metaphor,” in A. Ortony (ed) Metaphor & Thought
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Chapters 1–3. (pp. 3–13).
• Underhill, James W., Creating Worldviews: metaphor, ideology & language, Ediburgh UP, 2011.
• Fass, Dan (1988). "Metonymy and metaphor: what's the difference?". Proceedings of the 12th conference on Computational linguistics. 1. pp. 177–81. DOI:10.3115/991635.991671. ISBN 963-8431-56-3. 
• René Dirvens & Ralf Pörings, ed. (2002). Metaphor and Metonymy in Contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 
• Lakoff, George (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46801-1 .
• Low, Graham. "An Essay is a Person". In Cameron, Lynne; Low, Graham. Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 221–48. ISBN 978-0-521-64964-3. 
• Jakobson, Roman (1995 (originally published in 1956)). "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Disturbances". In Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. On Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-63536-1 
• Metonymy as a cross-lingual phenomenon [Peters 2003] ()
• Peters, Wim (2003). "Metonymy as a cross-lingual phenomenon". Proceedings of the ACL 2003 workshop on Lexicon and figurative language. 14. pp. 1–9. DOI:10.3115/1118975.1118976. 

External links[link]

Look up metaphor in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Metaphors

• History of metaphor on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
• A short history of metaphor
• Audio illustrations of metaphor as figure of speech
• Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online
• Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1978) Special Issue: On Metaphors
• Top Ten Metaphors of 2008
• Shakespeare's Metaphors
• Metaphor Examples (categorized)
• Metaphor's Algebra
• List of ancient Greek words starting with μετα-, on Perseus

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

George Lakoff
Professor George Lakoff
Born	(1941-05-24) May 24, 1941 (age 71) Bayonne, New Jersey
Residence	Berkeley, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Cognitive linguistics Cognitive science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	Indiana University MIT
Known for	Conceptual metaphor theory Embodied cognition
Spouse	Robin Lakoff (divorced)
Website
georgelakoff.com

George P. Lakoff ( /ˈleɪkɒf/, 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.^[1][2]

Reappraisal of metaphor[link]

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:

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.^[3]

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).^[4] 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[link]

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^[which?] 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."^[5]

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.^[6] 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[link]

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[link]

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 2002) 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.^[2]

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.^[7]

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.^[8]

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[link]

In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review ^[9] 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 ^[10] 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.^[10]

Works[link]

• 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 978-0-226-46812-9.
• 1996. Moral politics : What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46805-1.
  • 2001 Edition. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-46771-9.
• 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 978-0-226-46800-6.
• 2004. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1-931498-71-5.
• 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. Viking Adult. ISBN 978-0-670-01927-4.

Videos[link]

• How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff DVD format. OCLC 315514475
• C-Span program online, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain

See also[link]

• 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[link]

1. ^ "George Lakoff". Rockridge Institute. http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff. Retrieved 2007-06-13. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
3. ^ John Brockman (03/09/99), Edge.org, "Philosophy In The Flesh" A Talk With George Lakoff [1]
4. ^ The New York Review of Books, Chomsky Replies, 1973 20;12
5. ^ http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html
6. ^ ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003. Summary at giffordlectures.org by Brannon Hancock.
7. ^ Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 143–176. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
8. ^ Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 415–418. ISBN 0-226-46771-6. 
9. ^ "Block that Metaphor!", New Republic.
10. ^ ^{a b} "When cognitive science enters politics", rockridgeinstitute.org, 12 October 2006.

Further reading[link]

• 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 978-3-11-018283-5 (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 0-19-511109-5.
• 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 1-58811-529-1.
• Rettig, Hillary (2006). The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way. New York: Lantern Books. ISBN 1-59056-090-6. (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 0-8204-7381-2.
• Soros, George (2006). The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror. ISBN 1-58648-359-5. (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[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Lakoff

• georgelakoff.com
• 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
• "The Extended Mind" 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