Lakoff, George - Language Communicating Society - 11.02.25

"Metaphors We Live By", "Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values". Thought & language: the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior & society. Continuing the discussion

George Lakoff is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the Univ, of California at Berkeley,  Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior & society. He is well known for his concept of the "embodied mind", first written about in relation to mathematics, subsequently applied to politics as well. "Moral Politics" demonstrated that worldview differences arose from the application of the Nation-as-Family metaphor to two different idealized views of the  family- a strict father family for conservatism, a nurturant parent family for liberalism.  As a result, one could predict not only which policies conservatives & liberals would tend to support, what language would be used, but also the logic of apparently “irrational” positions, such as how conservatives could be pro-life & for the death penalty. “The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain”    www.georgelakoff.com