Concept

George Lakoff

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George Philip Lakoff ( LAY-kawf; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. Lakoff served as professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.

The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his and Mark Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors We Live By has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic to political science. In his 1996 book Moral Politics, Lakoff described conservative voters as being influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the state, and liberal/progressive voters as being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as the folk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon.

According to Lakoff, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues are influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Persian Gulf (1991), he argued that the American involvement in the Persian Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it. Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.

Lakoff is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. His first marriage was to linguist Robin Lakoff.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It is first asserted (or assumed) that all experiences of good are modes of knowing: that good is a term of a proposition. Then when experience forces home the immense difference between evaluation as a critical process (a process of inquiry for the determination of a good precisely similar to that which is undertaken in science in the determination of the nature of an event) and ordinary experience of good and…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
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Thus they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted, the more the latter was depreciated.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
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Their constructions are less ambitious, their arguments more detailed, and their methods more empirical; in all these respects they show more kinship with the modern scientific outlook. On the other hand, Locke and Hume, if not Berkeley, approach philosophy too exclusively from the side of psychology, and are concerned to study Man rather than the universe.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
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George Lakoff

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