The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece about George Lakoff, a left-wing linguist whose ideas about political messaging and have recently become influential (and a bit controversial) within the Democratic Party. "Who Framed George Lakoff" is an interesting article. Lakoff's ideas about the formation and glaciation of cognitive frames strike me as being worth further examination; contrary to his belief, the GOP have become weak in this area and must renew their understanding if they wish to communicate their beliefs successfully.
This is not say that Lakoff is without flaws. From my limited reading of the article, I might suggest that no linguistic tricks can wipe out the political problem of personal experience, which always interposes itself between political messengers and their targets - and may undo messaging. I'd also suggest that for a guy deep inside the left-lib camp, he seems to display a pretty stunning blindness re: how its cognitive framing transmission belts work. But perhaps his books remedy these defects... it's been a long time since I felt prepared to trust the press as the sole source of an opinion on anybody.
Any thoughts re: Lakoff? Any reader reviews on these?
He was in the news two years ago or so but I don't remember much about it except that he came across as a guy who mixed actual thought with left wing twaddle. Might be worth reading.
I might add that he, and some of the book reviewers, seem to suffer from a common progressive mental affliction, namely that the progressive message is sound and rational, it is just that the tools of persuasion are lacking. I think of this as putting technique over content, the same fundamental mistake has poisoned elementary education and degraded progressive thought as a whole.
When you work in a field where Noam Chomsky represents the "ultimate of the Old Enlightenment", anything has got to be an improvement, right?
No, Lakoff has got a great plan to make things worse, and maybe the Heritage Foundation should give him a big fat grant.
So human beings are cognitively aware of only 2% of the information their brains receive. Does this mean that the public understands only 2% of the "information" they hear during a campaign? Maybe Lakoff does not stoop to that statement, but his thinking definitely runs in that direction.
If the article is at all accurate, I can't see why people take Lakoff seriously. To diverge from chuck, I don't read it as "the progressive message is sound and rational", but that it doesn't matter if it is or not. There is only power and framing.
For instance, look at the discussion of taxation, in which it is claimed that Lakoff believes aversion to taxation is created by clever GOP framing via terms such as "tax relief" as opposed to, say, that people like to keep their money.
I'm willing to read a book about how to do propaganda, but not one that is propaganda,
and certainly not one where the author can't seem to tell the difference. The title "The Essential Guide for Progressives" gives this all away. No one who is really interested in honestly communicating uses a deliberately obfuscatory term like "progressive" in a non-ironic way.
Lakoff just gives Linguistics a bad name. Another aspect in which he resembles Chomsky.
But really, from Talmy Givon to John McWhorter, there's quite a few folks in the field who don't think their expertise is enough to launch a Grand New Unified Theory of Human Behavior, so they come across as experts in their field, rather than cranks. More power to them! And less, much less, to Lakoff and those like him, please...
Haidt has established that conservatives understand more than liberals, (not to mention progressives!) Conservatives can readily and accurately model liberals' thinking and responses, but liberals are entirely unable to do the same for conservatives. The imbalance in understanding is inherent. Go through Haidt's yourmorals.org site to see why:
Liberals have ONE rule: "Do no harm to anyone." Conservatives have about 5 equally balanced priorities. To the liberal, this makes them EVIL, since it permits harming opponents to protect other values at times.
The difference is visceral, as much a matter of temperament as anything else.
The upshot is that conservatives can "mentally model" the attitudes of liberals by using a sub-set of their own morality, while liberals cannot perceive or apply most of the conservatives' ethic.
A classic example of the condescending liberal mind at work is exampled by a conversation I had a decade ago with a college co-ed from Tulane with whom I used to argue politics with at a local watering-hole here in New Orleans. At the end of our conversation she (the undergraduate) said to me (the retired PhD) as if to compliment me: "I don't know why you are a conservative, you're fairly intelligent, the first intelligent conservative I've ever met." Says it all, really....
I, am, however, only a "fairly" good student of grammar. Strike the second "with" after politics.
A sentence with which you are displeased with? :)
Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things had more than one good thing going for it as a prod to thought.
Seems he's been drinking his own [elided] for too long.
The Lakoff of WFaDT would have known better than to gin up an absurd PC polarity between "Stern Father" and "Nurturant Parent" (emphasis mine) -- and might even have been able to acknowledge that Libertarians and folks of that ilk had been calling the Dems and Reps the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party since at least the early 1970s.
The present-day Lakoff? Apparently not so.