Pinker on Lakoff

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.

you need a copy?

a man-whore sent me a copy :)

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

I think of Lakoff now as a rhetorician, even if he does have a linguistics or cog sci background (I don't actually know). My big point against him is that "The first rule about framing is that you don't talk about framing". That's exactly the kind of meta-discourse that academics do all the time, and it kills them.

For example, new, unauthorized releases ofinformation about the Iraq war can be framed as "endangering the troops by releasing information" or as "a whistleblower telling us what's really happening".

When you do the framing, though, you don't say "I'm framing this as endangering the troops". What you do is make an outraged speech about how the release of information endangers the troops. Same for the other POV.

The folk term for framing is "spin", and in the same way, you never say you're spinning. You just present your spin as effectively as you can. Republicans are masters of spin, but their presentations are straightforward and as sincere as they can make them.

Framing and spin are universals and not variables. They're not to be deplored. Some spin is fake, dishonest, and misleading, and some doesn't pass the laugh test, but if you lose the spin war you lose.

The "spin" question isn't a factual one. It's prioritizing facts: "What's the important issue here?" There cabn be an enormous spin war over agreed-upon facts.

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).

Chris's discussion of framing is pretty good.

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.

No, no, a student of rhetoric. Not a rhetorician, as in orator or spokesman. He's too meta. Democrats die by the meta.

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.

The purpose of any particular discourse can be any of various things. "Telling someone what they really think" can be a way of putting them on the spot and forcing themselves to justify themselves.

I doubt that a different approach by Lakoff would have changed Razib's views in any way. He might have been less annoyed then, but making conservatives annoyed can be a good thing.

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.

it was because he was being ignorant, but here he was attempting to be faux-pedantic

I loved the bit about labelling "activist judges" as "freedom judges" -- despite the inability of the layperson to affect what goes on in the judiciary compared to the legislature. In fact, returning to Lakoff's ignorance of history, most of the legal support for corporate tyrrany came from juryless court decisions and/or injunctions from the bench (e.g., against striking). Very little was passed into law by legislators, who are at least partially accountable to their constituents.

Morton Horowitz at Harvard Law wrote a two-volume set on this called The Transformation of American Law. The gist is that corporate tyrrany was so unpalatable to commoners that juries and constituents of legislators were unwilling to help incipient corporations grab as much as they could. So the process went on where commoners wouldn't catch word of it or be able to do much about it, that is, through the courts.

True, you could use this essentially unaccountable tactic to ram through progressive programs, but here Lakoff's playing with fire -- once society-shaping plans come from the courts, whose interests do you think they'll reflect? The poor and needy? Or some lawyer from Boston, Manhattan, or Georgetown with a bloated wallet?

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

John

Lakoff tells people what they want to hear. The fact that he's ignorant of things that the market niche he's selling into isn't all that important to him.

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.

I think that Democrats are really harmed by their reliance on academic expertise. Karl Rove had about two undergrad years but he understands American politics better than anyone. the fact that Lakoff talked mostly to academics for 10-20 years made it very hard for him to talk to non-academics.

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.

need advise

should be "advice"

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.

Here is Lakoff responding to Pinker:

http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/whencognitivesciencee…

Having read through many of the Lakoff books and not just negative reviews of them, I find that many critics are deeply misinterpreting his work.

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.