George Lakoff and Me

For a while now, I've been writing more about politics and political discourse, and for a wider audience. The question was bound to turn up eventually, and it did: Where am I, vis-à-vis George Lakoff, Berkeley professor of cognitive psychology and newly emergent theorist for the progressives?

The short answer is, Lakoff and I are headed in much the same direction on many issues. That shouldn't be surprising; I first read his Metaphors We Live By and began publishing articles, chapters, and books drawing on some of the same ideas, about 20 years ago.

Taking one step back though, I'm not drawing from him so much as he and I are both drawing from some of the same theoretical/philosophical traditions. Although he's at pains to bill himself as a cognitive psychologist, we're tapping into ideas that gained currency in the early-to-mid 20th century, putting out roots into the modern disciplines of rhetoric, communication, composition, philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, political science, and linguistics, but really stretching back some 2000 years, in a fairly clear but winding path. Very little of what Lakoff builds on strikes me as original; his distinction is that he's written a lot, he's written some things that aim to be the cyclopedic study of their area, he's associated with one of the few progressive think tanks, and he's been able to make a highly visible turn into political discourse.

This take is based on my reading of his quick-and-dirty-for-the-election Don't Think of an Elephant, as well as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, on which Elephant relies.

Here's where we see eye to eye:

I agree with the emphasis Lakoff puts on the strategic importance of language and its ability not merely to persuade in a given situation, but to create and sustain one's worldview. Shared reality and shared language go hand-in-hand. Or, to put it in the words of a 1970s textbook I worked with, 'the choice of words is a choice of worlds.'

Like Lakoff, I watched with professional interest and political dismay throughout the 1990s as Newt Gingrich and his creation GOPAC, and Frank Luntz, somewhat later, and others less visible, have marshaled the basic principles about language and metaphor to advance a right-wing political agenda. I share with Lakoff a strong desire to find a way to harness these principles in the service of left/democratic/progressive politics.

Here's where we part ways:

Lakoff is at pains to remind us he's a cognitive psychologist. My sense is that several things are going on there. First, as Lakoff's surely aware, the opinions of almost any brand of 'scientist' are harder to argue with. Second, he's got a turf-staking agenda, grounded in academic politics, requiring him to position what he's doing in the principles and language--in the worldview, really--of the academic discipline of cognitive psychology. That's partly the result of his professional habits of thought, and partly a symptom of the realpolitik of academic life. I don't have that kind of agenda; I just want what works.

So when Lakoff has to explain what he means by "frame," one of the key concepts in his recent writings, he moves quickly to ground it in 'the cognitive unconscious,' and to define it very broadly--so broadly it starts to become everything (and nothing):

A frame is "an image or other kinds of knowledge."

Words are defined "relative to" frames.

"Frames are mental structures that shape how we see the world."

"You can't see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the 'cognitive unconscious'--structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access: the way we reason and what counts as common sense."

"Framing is about getting language that fits your world view."

If you keep it vague, I don't have much objection to most of that; but when you read it more carefully you realize that everything comes back not to language and behavior, which we can observe, but to cognitive unconscious structures, which we can't. I don't find that useful or convincing. That's his professional neurosis; this is mine.

Lakoff believes he's got the question of how liberals and conservatives think sorted out (and again, notice that he's grounding it in how they 'think'--what's inside the black box--not on how they talk or behave). Conservatives tend to orient themselves in terms of a cognitive structure he calls 'the strict father." Liberals tend to work within a cognitive structure he calls 'the nurturing parent.' (Everyone has the capacity to process using both structures, but conservatives rely more heavily on one, liberals on the other.) Both are worldviews--we might also call them master metaphors or archetypes --that play themselves out in our language and action, specifically political policy.

I don't dispute the existence of these master metaphors, although I'm not interested in locating them in the structure of the brain. But I do insist that it's not really that simple--I don't accept that there are only those two, that they're the two (and only) all-encompassing worldviews. I think we draw from a range of worldviews (or whatever), built with the materials our culture gives us (shaped, yes, by the limitations and preferences of cognitive structures), and we assemble them into something workable as we live our lives. Because I don't think the ideological landscape is as cut-and-dried as he paints it, I don't have as much confidence in the strategies Lakoff recommends for leftists, and I'm not alone in thinking that he's not there yet, although his ideas are not without possibilities.

And as a cognitive scientist, Lakoff's more concerned about explaining the mechanisms by which all this works, and less concerned about the ethics of this or that linguistic/political outcome. If he's troubled by the ethical problem of using the techniques of Gingrich, et al, without stooping to their level, I haven't seen much evidence of it. For me, that's a serious problem because I begin by placing high value on democratic processes and free expression per se. So I'm not interested in creating strategies that end up offering high-voltage language as a substitute for thinking, however well grounded scientifically those strategies may be, and even if they're used to advance "my" side of political issues. Strategies that cut off the possibility of discussion (as many of Gingrich, Luntz, et alia, aim to do) are not what I'm looking for.