Gene Expression

I don't remember her exact words, but one of my linguistics profs once referred to Lakoff "before he went into outer space." In the late '60s he was part of the Generative Semantics movement, which though not entirely mainstream (i.e., they had a set of circumscribed objections to some ideas of Chomsky), was still not wackjobful.

Posted by: Agnostic | October 2, 2006 10:38 PM

a man-whore sent me a copy :)

Posted by: razib | October 3, 2006 12:02 AM

Douthat objects to telling people what they really think, too for example "Pro-lifers say they want to save the unborn, but really want to punish women for having sex."

I call this "watching their hands". If you want to know what people really think, look at what they do and not at what they say. If there's a discrepancy, what they do is real and what they say is not. There have been a lot of cases where abortion-reduction measures have been squashed because they required accepting that young women are going to be having sex outside marriage. For another example, many right-to-lifers want to restrict access to contraception too, even though contraception reduces abortion.

Douthat is right that this kind of analysis makes a mutually-respectful dialogue less likely, but it's because it's hard to argue with someone whose actions contradict their words.

("I'll do anything for love, but I won't Douthat". no one else thinks it's funny, I know).

Posted by: John Emerson | October 3, 2006 10:27 AM

In partial defense of Lakoff, my bet is that even then Razib was a far outlier among conservatives, whether he knew it or not.

to be honest, i recall my issue was that lakoff tried really hard to simply slot libertarians with conservatives, and thought that was stupid. i actually believed that foundationally libertarians were a form of liberal with modern tactical commonalities with the Right. instead i recall mumbo-jumbo about how we were really conservatives after all.

I think of Lakoff now as a rhetorician

and on that level's good. ye shall know them by their fruits, and the chunkmeister is making big bank.

Posted by: razib | October 3, 2006 11:28 AM

The point of public discourse is not necessarily to persuade the person you're arguing with, but to persuade others. For this reason "telling someone what they really think," is often unproductive. It shuts down discourse and thus reduces the chances that a reader or listener whose own beliefs are sincere but uncertain might be persuaded.

Posted by: henry evans | October 3, 2006 5:47 PM

i should post the whole pinker piece since i have a copy, but the key issue with lakoff is that he makes the gross errors about conservatives which a garden-variety liberal whose never been around conservatives makes. pinker points out several areas where lakoff obviously is totally ignorant about conservative intellectual history and sees no reason to bone up or have someone who knows this area read his manuscripts. i wasn't annoyed because he told me that conservatives were evil or whatever (he is condescending, but whatever), it was because he was being ignorant, but here he was attempting to be faux-pedantic. it's obnoxious.

Posted by: razib | October 3, 2006 6:27 PM

In what I've read, Lakoff does tend to be tone deaf. I was mostly responding to Douthat.

John

Posted by: John Emerson | October 3, 2006 8:28 PM

I meant to say that the fact that he's ignorant of things that his market niche doesn't care about isn't important to him.

Posted by: henry evans | October 3, 2006 9:31 PM

I personally think it is hilarious that Democrats feel they need advise on linguistic trickery.

1) "Affirmative action" for racial redistribution -- needs no introduction. a pair of nonsense words with a positive sound.

2) "Underprivileged or Underrepresented" for B/H vs. W/A (implying strongly that there is a "just" level that the "privileged" others have attained w/o effort)

3) "Social Justice" for socialism, as if it was "just" to use government force to take money from a hard worker and give it to a shiftless malcontent

4) "Sustainable Development" for environmental regulation, implying that there are actually *economic* reasons (re: finite or exhaustible resources) for allowing the Gaia people to have power over us. Note that this is *not* as honest as "I like trees in the abstract more than people in the concrete", but is instead framed as if we are eating our seed corn and will exhaust our resources unless we are regulated. (Note also that this is usually *not* in reference to reasonable environmental legislation for clean air/clean water, as the justification is not in terms of quality of *human* life).

5) "Undocumented Immigrant" for illegal alien

6) "Progressive" for communist (usually actually defends Che Guevara, says the USSR was well meaning, etc.)

7) "Orwellian" for *conservative* takeover, when Orwell himself was talking about IngSoc = "English Socialism".

...and so on and so forth. Leftist redefinition of vocabulary is nothing less than newspeak. Insofar as the right has recently adopted some of these tactics, it is entirely due to the influx of neocons and their penchnat for wordplay. One can see the transmogrification by comparing issues of, say, National Review over the years.

Posted by: gc | October 4, 2006 8:27 AM

I think that Lakoff is correct that Republican linguistic trickery has been more effective than Democratic linguistic trickery. Not that I'm saying that GC is either a trickster or a trick.

Posted by: John Emerson | October 4, 2006 11:59 AM

John, yes, Lakoff has become a rhetorician. It's worth noting that one of his students, Mark Turner, counts himself as a founder of something he calls cognitive rhetoric. Turner is a literarcy critic by training and a co-founder (with Gilles Fauconnier) of something called "cognitive blending," which is akin to Lakoff's cognitive metaphor.

Lakoff studied with Chomskey at MIT back in the 1960s. That gives him a hard-core linguistics background. He's been doing the metaphor stuff for about a quarter of a century. His first book on the subject, co-authored with Mark Johnson, was and elegant little piece of work, a good first draft. Unfortunately, rather than going deeper, Lakoff elected to go wide and a gather in example after example after example after example, without analyzing any of them more deeply. The end result is his current fame as a rhetorician, giving advice that would be easily understood 50 or 100 years ago provided one changed the terminology a bit. The basic conceptualization is rather old in style.

Posted by: Bill Benzon | October 8, 2006 9:24 PM