At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to be pulling the strings for many elections to come. In the new TNR (subscription only), Pinker takes his intellectual axe to Lakoff's theory of "conceptual metaphor," which advises Democrats to package their policies into Orwellian sounding soundbites, so that stupid voters might be tricked into voting for higher taxes. There are so many choice quotes in the review, it's hard to pick just a few.
There is much to admire in Lakoff's work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics. Its use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field, and its analysis of political ideologies is skewed by the author's own politics and limited by his disregard of centuries of prior thinking on the subject. And Lakoff's cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds.
And that was a nice paragraph. Pinker goes on:
Lakoff's way with brain science is even more dubious. It is true that "the frames that define common sense are instantiated physically in the brain," but only in the sense that every thought we think--permanent or transient, rational or irrational--is instantiated physically in the brain. The implication that frames, by being "physically fixed" in the brain, are especially insidious or hard to change, is gratuitous. Also, cognitive psychology has not shown that people absorb frames through sheer repetition. On the contrary, information is retained when it fits into a person's greater understanding of the subject matter. Nor is the claim that people are locked into a single frame anywhere to be found in cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that people can nimbly switch among the many framings made available by their language. When Becky shouts across a room to Liz, an onlooker can construe the event as affecting Liz, creating a message, making noise, sending a message across the room, or just Becky moving her muscles in a certain way.
Lakoff's advice doesn't pass the giggle test. One can imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff's Orwellian advice to rebrand taxes as "membership fees." Surely no one has to hear the metaphor "tax relief" to think of taxes as an affliction; that sentiment has been around as long as taxes have been around. (Even Canadians, who tolerate a far more expansive government, grumble about their taxes.) Also, "taxes" and "membership fees" are not just two ways of framing the same thing. If you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will stop providing you with its services. But if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. And even if taxes were like membership fees, aren't lower membership fees better than higher ones, all else being equal?
To be fair, I have yet to read Lakoff's latest, although I was sorely disappointed by his first attempt. My main problem with this approach, apart from all the scientific inaccuracies, is that it makes intelligent political debate impossible. Instead of talking about the issues, we get lost in a kind of double-speak, in which "cognitive frames" trump the facts. Of course, framing is important, but I have to believe that if Democrats had a better candidate in 2004, then we wouldn't be so obsessed with figuring out alternative ways to describe taxes. Voters can be dumb, but they have a sensitive ear for condescension, and they hate being talked down to. Pinker ends his review on a suitably dismissive note:
"The latest polls have come out," the political philosopher Jay Leno said last week, "and President Bush's approval ratings have dropped another 3 percent. In fact, he's so unpopular that the Democrats are going to have to work really, really hard to screw up this election." If they take the ideas of George Lakoff seriously, they just might succeed.
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Lakoff as 30 Names for Snow
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Or, That Same Guy as Imperfect Messenger
Or, That Same Guy as Missed Opportunity
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My understanding of Lakoff, fortunately without reading his longer treatments, is different than I've seen discussed in various places. I say fortunately because his point is simple and people are overthinking Lakoff in ways that don't apply to the ground game. Some points:
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⢠Lakoff is operating outside his domain of expertise, which is linguistics and some deeper material behind his analysis. [I am also and I'm conscious of similar issues.] I see [don't know about inside lefty politics] no, absolutely none, zilch, domain experts participating in the left's public conversation. That would be people who make their living designing brands and molding and activating consumer choices via mass media channels. NOT political consultants, et. al. [Part of the problem is the Democrats can't move beyond them.] He's an imperfect messenger for his message.
⢠So he's using the tools he has, his brains and background, to try to help. No one is speaking to the fact that, of course, Lakoff should not be a good source of practical ideas for actually doing concrete things. So don't listen to him. Get some domain experts in. This isn't Lakoff's fault, he's trying to help. So I advocate any critique of Lakoff's insights into politics that is based on his suggestions for counter strategies is irrelevant and should be ignored. Lakoff is an amateur at this! He's an academic for crying out loud. Such amateurism is a big problem in the environmental movement, in the left generally, and in the science community.
⢠Lakoff's approach has a core, or gist, that's simple, commonsensical, and most would agree with. But he brings in with his field, linguistics, with all it's baggage. I advocate any critique of Lakoff's insights into politics that is based on linguistics is irrelevant and should be ignored.
Here's why. If all our media was visual, without sound at all, forever, Lakoff's [in the political sphere] approach would still work, but with visual vocabulary, not words. It's the same idea, same concept. His domain is spoken language and meaning, so the channel he see's is language content.
⢠His analysis of the right's message content is right on, exactly the type of approach needed and the brains behind them, like Luntz, would generally agree with his analysis. No one else on the left has an analysis that's not same old same old.
⢠I've looked at roughly 100 thoughtful pieces [i.e., not comments, like this one] from the left on Lakoff/"framing approach" in the last year. I was, still am, struck by two things. First, around 80% of these, pro and con, overtly or implicitly, exhibit a critical misunderstanding, almost always unconscious, of his thesis. Second, the out-and-out critics never offer a counter-explanation for the phenomenon he's accounting for. The example I flog, for it's simplicity, is The Death Tax. Lakoff can offer an analysis the explains why it worked, why the Democrat's response failed, and why the left still doesn't understand what happened. This is a 1 + 1 = 2 question that the left still doesn't comprehend. Lakoff does.
⢠Lakoff's political analysis, separated from his scholarly work, should not be approached abstractly, as one would typically do academic work. Why? Because invariably, so far at least, such intellectual critique and always overlooks Lakoff's reference -- what's happened and is happening on the ground. For example. There's no deep understanding of the 30-year-long tsunami that's altered America's political landscape and even less discussion of workable counter measures. To argue Lakoff is fundamentally wrong implies alternative approaches and those should be investigated in detail. This is a big problem on the left, a focus on cerebral discussion rather than collecting, analyzing and then discussing DATA and developing technology therefrom.
⢠The rise of the right is not due to the politics and worldview of Americans grossly shifting over a 15-20 year period naturally in reaction to events. That's the BS that's promulgated. There's absolutely zero social antecendant for that. It's been done with an unfortunately brilliantly conceived and executed 100% artificial campaign.
Something different has appeared that's armored against every weapon in the left's arsenal. The left's response is debating which of these failures to commit again next. ]This may account for the increasing temerity of the Congressional Democrats -- it's dawning on them nothing they do works.] There's no current in the left advocating this failure is symptomatic something basic in politics has changed, and whatever it is, old approaches have miserably failed. I'd be happy to be shown I'm wrong about this, but I've looked and so far not found that discussion, let alone the activity that should follow from it.
Lakoff's approach, one of that nature, is more useful than anything else going on. It may be flawed, or even incorrect. But proving him wrong, or misunderstanding his points, or even listening to his advice too closely is really, really a bad approach. It's highly distractive. Even stipulating that Lakoffian Democrats will crash and burn is irrelevant. They'll crash and burn with any other approach under consideration. A more useful approach that need not accept his ideas, or at least is simply receptive, uses them as a platform to jump further, is an obvious tool to get to analyzing what's created the current political situation -- the smartest thing to do is to assume you don't know. And that ain't happenin'. And there's no way to get there by focusing on attacking or defending Lakoff.
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We all, all, all, all, perceive a reality that's actually a mediated reality. Mediated by evolution, filtered through a brain that operates in ways accessible to no one on the planet without an fMRI machine. There are many ways, angles, metaphors, areas, slants to this and to expressing it, but that's it most basically. That's what Lakoff's point is.
I'll close with the well known, albeit erroneous, meme that Eskimo's have 30 names for snow, or however many names. The idea being expressed is true. That is, snow knowledge is life and death knowledge in their environment. If you brought a few to a Colorado ski resort, they would literally see all sorts of characteristics and potential behavior in the snow no one else in Colorado could.
Try this fantasy.
I kidnap you and drop you off in a hut, completely provisioned, etc on the remotest island in the Canadian Arctic at the end of winter. Then I say, "I'll be back in two months," and leave.
When I return in two months I say "Tell me eveything you've learned/know about snow. If there's enough knowledge, you're going home. If not, you don't go home for another 3 months."
Version two, same scenario. The only difference is, before I leave you the first time I say, "I'll be back in two months. At that time I will ask you to tell me eveything you've learned/know about snow. If there's enough knowledge, you're going home. If not, you don't go home for another 3 months."
That slight change will have a very big effect on your two-month residency and on what you see and how you perceive and how you interact with your environment. And, for many years hence when you hear the word "snow", your frame will be very, very different than before your Arctic vacation.
This is Lakoff's point. Human beings are not fully rational creatures and what we think is reality is actually a perception of reality. This perception is modulated by numerous factors, including the manner in which we speak and think about it. And I would add, if Lakoff doesn't, the new reality of mass communications in politics is the perception of reality is all that counts.
Americans are too media mediated to have exposure to anything in any other way. Cut out work and home, and Americans know everything else only as viewmaster disks seen in The Viewmaster.
HOW WE THINK WE THINK AIN'T HOW WE THINK. It's science, guys, just science. But don't listen to me, seriously. I'm just an imperfect messenger. Go investigate for yourself. And someone, please, find some smart branding expertise and persuasion industry people and get them educating the left on how the world actually works. The current conversation borders on delusional.
And, use Lakoff's practical political applications as teaching examples. Use them as actual real-world approaches with a grain of salt. A dollop of salt. Lakoff as a scientist and academic? I'm not interested.
And Jason, something I'm adamant about. It's not about intelligent political debate and issues, etc. I've coined a name for that, the propopo approach [PROrograms, POlicies, and POsitions]. It's a miserable electoral failure and by necessity will remain so, but that's a different topic.
One quick example. The right is manufacturing entire issues, pre-seeded with their own "framing" concepts, getting these on the agenda, and the left is blundering along, unconsciously broadcasting the rights preplanned strategies. The type case is school vouchers.
And, this propopo approach leads to an extremely short-sighted focus on what's currently in public discourse. The right now is actively working at, through a diverse number of means, setting up the nation's political agenda decades in advance. This leads to such absurdities like the Democrats still operating on two- and four-year election cycles. This means the Dems agenda-setting options, key to such elections, are very limited because the right has spent 20 years molding the environment to favor their issues.
It's not that propopo isn't important. It's that it's no longer possible to win elections with them because the mass communication environment has changed and because that's all the left is focused on. The election-cycle stupidity above is, well it's moronic it's so obvious. Show me the progressive groundswell demanding their leaders adapt to what's happened. A couple voices here and there. That's an indication no one gets it. Whatever might be the appropriate counter to the rise of the right, it's absolutely, without any doubt, not simply more of the same thing. Extrapolate.
In turn environmentalism, the evo/ID debate, global warming all mirror this same dynamic, an insistence on proceeding as before and resistance to analysis despite dwindling prospects.
The "Lakoff/framing approach" is the only thing different out there. I'd argue the left already is shifting baselines without knowing it, which will only further keep them from changing perspective. The various factors in this election -- most unpopular government, all three parts, off-year election, lame duck president, unpopular war, etc., should lead to superhigh expectations of a huge out-of-power victory. I haven't heard anybody talking that way. We'll see. But even if the Democrats take the house, likely very narrowly, it should stand as one of the worst showings in my lifetime under such favorable conditions. My intuition says few are likely to see it that way. It almost makes me want the Democrats to do worse than expected. It might shake things up.
Given I've thought about this a bit and had a few spare hours, thank you for the topic. Once more your timing is perfect!
The bullets showed up in preview, and have gone through on other scienceblog posts. Sorry, folks. Guess I should stick to asterisks.
It is amazing how much the Left misunderstands Lakoff and I have written many times about it. Misatking framing for branding is just one of those mistakes. I think it stems from the fact that most people had read the atrocous "Elephant" pamphlet instead of his "Moral Politics" book which explains wha it really is. Also, I agree that his explanation of how and why it works is much better than his own attempts at doing something about it - for that we need professionals.
Skookum gets it right, though.
Courtnix is one of the 20% I've read that don't misunderstand Lakoff in some major way.
One possible source of that misunderstanding is the alieness of what he proposes. The left, but I suspect everyone, hasn't viewed reality from this perspective before, and it's either too different or too threatening to fully integrate, especially the view it provides of our own thinking processes.
Go to a library or bookstore for the general public.
Go to the Business section.
Pick up any book on techniques of salesmanship.
Odds are extremely high that this book will provide more, and more useful, information on Lakoff's chosen topic than Lakoff does, and in a more readable style (unless of course you like vague know-it-all moralizing).
Lakoff has a reply to pinker here. He claims Pinker has grossly misrepresented his book, which seems true. I haven't read Lakoff's latest, but in general I find his work contains a core of good ideas which tend to be both undersupported and overextended.
The interesting thing is the links between the political argument and the cognitive science argument:
I love a good heavyweight intellectual catfight. Keep on slugging, both of you!