George Lakoff and the linguistics wars

[Harold Schiffman]

Who Framed George Lakoff?
A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics

Related materials
Article: A New Direction in Psychology and Politics

Article tools

Printer
friendly
E-mail
article
Subscribe
Order
reprints

 Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines
Academic Centers for Athletes Draw Donors

More than a dozen university athletics programs have added lavish new
facilities in recent years, and academic-services budgets are soaring,
a Chronicle survey finds.

Slide Show: Photographs of Several New Centers
Table: Growth in Academic Support
Transplants Using Stopped Hearts Prompt Ethics Debate

A Professor Is in the Hot Seat After Mooning Debate Judges

Tech Therapy: Dandelions and Decentralization

Hospitality Students Take On an Olympic Feat

By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN

San Francisco

George P. Lakoff is falling asleep. It is a bright summer afternoon in
San Francisco, and Lakoff is nursing a latte at a small table near the
entrance of a bustling, sun-dappled cafe. "This is what happens when
you are 67," he explains sheepishly after dozing off midsentence. A
stocky man with a wide smile and a well-trimmed white beard, Lakoff
doesn't seem tired so much as beleaguered.

For years he's been at the center of some of the biggest intellectual
disagreements in linguistics (most famously with Noam Chomsky) and has
helped create an important interdisciplinary field of study, cognitive
linguistics, that is reshaping our understanding of the complex
relationship between language and thought. More recently he has been
vying for respect among people notoriously hard to persuade about
anything — politicians and their financial backers. So this summer he
has been on the road promoting his new book, The Political Mind: Why
You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an
18th-Century Brain (Viking), which argues that liberals have clung to
the false belief that people think in a conscious, logical, and
unemotional manner and that this belief has doomed Democrats' chances
with voters.

But transferring scholarly ideas into political practice can be
tricky. After a heady few years when he seemed the person Democratic
policy makers wanted on the other end of the telephone, Lakoff is
finding that what they're asking for — and are willing to put money
behind — is not always what he can provide. Lakoff's foray into
politics is a story marked by intellectual breakthroughs, the allure
of influence, and a fall from great heights. Yet his lifetime work
permeates several disciplines and continues to spur cognitive
researchers to go off in new directions.

Lakoff's impact has reached "across the social sciences and
humanities," says John A. Goldsmith, a professor of linguistics and
computer science at the University of Chicago. "He has always aimed at
a larger audience." Goldsmith is co-author of a book on the
Lakoff-Chomsky feud, Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and
the Deep Structure Debates (Routledge, 1995). Says Gilles Fauconnier,
an emeritus professor of cognitive science at the University of
California at San Diego and another founder of cognitive linguistics:
"Lakoff has shown more curiosity and more initiative than many other
social scientists or linguists of his generation in being willing to
go against the mainstream."

That tendency to go against the tide has been a feature of Lakoff's
career since the beginning. In the late 1960s, Lakoff joined company
with some of Chomsky's students and colleagues and began pushing the
noted scholar's landmark theory of generative grammar in more
expansive directions, in particular toward the study of meaning.
Chomsky maintained that linguistics methodology required that a line
be drawn between the meaning of language and the function of language
(syntax). Lakoff and his fellow dissidents, who became known as
generative semanticists, considered such a distinction arbitrary and
wrong-headed. One generative semanticist equated it to a theory of the
stomach that ignores digestion. Around the same time, Lakoff began a
career-long habit of making incursions into other fields — philosophy
and psychology in particular — and incorporating some of those
findings into his linguistics scholarship.

The tension between the two camps was palpable during a series of
famous lectures that Chomsky gave at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology beginning in 1967, in which Chomsky began to challenge the
work Lakoff and his colleagues were doing. Chomsky felt the generative
semanticists were leading linguistics into areas so tangentially
related to language that he questioned whether they were doing
linguistics at all. With Lakoff and other dissident linguists often in
the audience, Chomsky's lecture hall became a scene of intense,
acid-tongued intellectual combat.

One illustrative episode, recounted in Randy Allen Harris's The
Linguistics Wars (Oxford University Press, 1993), has Lakoff
repeatedly interrupting Chomsky to shout, "Noam! Noam! You're wrong!"
At another point, Lakoff interjects: "I have been lecturing about
these things, and if you are interested, you should come to my class."
As Harris, a professor of rhetoric and communication design at the
University of Waterloo, Ontario, notes wryly, "the level of gall
required for anyone, let alone a junior lecturer, to tell the inventor
of the field to attend his classes if he wanted to stay current goes
right off the chutzpah meter."

Though there remains some debate about how the linguistics wars ended,
Chomsky is widely regarded as having retained his place at the center
of the discipline. It's his theories that you'll find today in most
linguistics textbooks. "When the intellectual history of this age is
written, Chomsky is the only linguist whom anybody will remember,"
says Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor at the School of
Information at the University of California at Berkeley and a
consulting professor of linguistics at Stanford University.

While the scars have not healed for Lakoff — "It was a nasty period,
and it has remained nasty," he says — he nevertheless emerged as a
major force within the discipline. Deciding to get "as far away from
Chomsky as possible," he went first to the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor and then to the University of California at Berkeley, where
he is still a professor of cognitive science and linguistics. There he
helped make the West Coast the epicenter of cognitive linguistics,
which extends far beyond linguistics' traditional focus on overt and
observable linguistic structures into the broader realm of cognition.
"Language is only the tip of the iceberg of very elaborate mental
processes that are going on when we talk and when we think," says
Fauconnier. "And those mental processes, those cognitive operations,
define the human species and play a role not just for language but in
many forms of thought and action that humans have."

In his new book, Lakoff takes aim at "Enlightenment reason," the
belief that reason is conscious, logical, and unemotional. Harnessing
together work from several fields, particularly psychology,
neuroscience, and linguistics, he mounts a polemical assault on the
notion that people think rationally — which, he argues, is
fundamentally at odds with how the brain actually functions.

Approximately 2 percent of the millions of pieces of information the
brain absorbs every minute are processed consciously. The remaining 98
percent are handled by the unconscious brain. The mind, in other
words, is like a tiny island of conscious reasoning afloat in a vast
sea of automatic processes. In that sea, which Lakoff calls "the
cognitive unconscious," most people's ideas about morality and
politics are formed. We are all, in many respects, strangers to
ourselves. Lakoff's book grandly describes what he believes are the
revolutionary implications of his findings: "a new understanding of
what it means to be a human being; of what morality is and where it
comes from; of economics, religion, politics, and nature itself; and
even of what science, philosophy, and mathematics really are." (He
singles Chomsky out as "the ultimate figure of the Old
Enlightenment.")

It is the political ramifications of Lakoff's theory that preoccupy
him these days. An unabashed liberal (he insists on the label
"progressive"), he says that Republicans have been quick to realize
that the way people think calls for placing emotional and moral
appeals at the center of campaign strategy. (He suspects that they
gleaned their knowledge from marketing, where some of the most
innovative work on the science of persuasion is taking place.)
Democrats, Lakoff bemoans, have persisted in an old-fashioned
assumption that facts, figures, and detailed policy prescriptions win
elections. Small wonder that in recent years the cognitive linguist
has emerged as one of the most prominent figures demanding that
Democrats take heed of the cognitive sciences and abandon their faith
in voters' capacity to reason.

The roots of the cognitive revolution in the social sciences are
numerous and wide-ranging, but Lakoff traces his own story to Berkeley
in 1975, when he attended a series of lectures that prompted him to
embrace a theory of the mind that is fully embodied. Lakoff came to
believe that reason is shaped by the sensory-motor system of the brain
and the body. That idea ran counter to the longstanding belief —
Lakoff traces it back 2,500 years to Plato — that reason is
disembodied and that one can make a meaningful distinction between
mind and body.

One of the most influential lectures Lakoff heard that summer was
delivered by Charles J. Fillmore, now an emeritus professor of
linguistics at the university, who was developing the idea of "frame
semantics" — the theory that words automatically bring to mind bundles
of ideas, narratives, emotions, and images. He called those related
concepts "frames," and he posited that they are strengthened when
certain words and phrases are repeated. That suggested that language
arises from neural circuitry linking many distinct areas of the brain.
In other words, language can't be studied independently of the brain
and body. Lakoff concluded that linguistics must take into account
cognitive science.

The field of cognitive linguistics was born, and Lakoff became one of
its most prominent champions. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that
he began thinking through some of the political implications of
framing. Startled by the Republican takeover of the House of
Representatives in 1994, Lakoff set about looking for conceptual
coherence in what he saw as the seemingly arbitrary positions that
defined modern conservatism. What thread connected a pro-life stance
with opposition to many social programs, or a hostility toward taxes
with support of the death penalty? Lakoff concluded that conservatives
and liberals are divided by distinct worldviews based on the metaphor
of the nation as a family. Conservatives tend to relate to a "strict
father" mode, which explains why they are concerned with authority,
obedience, discipline, and punishment. Liberals, on the other hand,
perceive the nation as a "nurturant parent," an empathic presence
dedicated to protection, empowerment, and community. Swing voters
harbor both frames.

That schema is at the center of Lakoff's seminal 1996 book (reissued
by the University of Chicago Press in 2002), Moral Politics: How
Liberals and Conservatives Think. In working out his theory, Lakoff
found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for
the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the
right "frames." Consider the phrase "tax relief," an effective staple
of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word "relief"
elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every
time the phrase "tax relief" is heard or read by people, the relevant
neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the
synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation
as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.

Moreover, Lakoff believes, policy can be crafted to change the
neurological landscape of peoples' brains — what he calls "cognitive
policy making." For example, he is particularly enthused about Sky
Trust, a proposal to reduce carbon emissions developed by Peter
Barnes, a founder of the Working Assets Funding Service. The policy is
constructed on a foundation of two frames. The first is that oil,
coal, and gas companies have polluted the environment and stymied the
development of clean and renewable energy alternatives. The second
frame is that the air over the United States is owned by the people of
the United States. Why should private companies be allowed to dump
pollutants into the public's air at no cost?

If Sky Trust were law, all carbon-based fuel companies would
participate in an annual auction to buy "pollution permits," which
would determine how much energy they could sell. The proceeds would go
into a trust, with an equal share of the money going to every American
— around $1,000 per person the first year. Just as important, Lakoff
explains, Sky Trust would reinforce the frame that Americans own the
air, while also creating a new frame that the air is more valuable
clean than polluted.

In May 2003, Lakoff got his chance to directly influence politics.
Invited to address a gathering of Democratic senators at their annual
retreat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he encountered a scene
filled with despair. President Bush was enjoying record-high approval
ratings, which he had parlayed into historic gains for the Republicans
in the 2002 midterm elections. Karl Rove, Bush's chief political
strategist, was speaking plausibly of building a durable Republican
majority.

The beleaguered senators were primed for a solution. Lakoff offered
one: Learn the art of framing, and you can turn the electoral tide.
The idea carried the allure of a quick fix. And Lakoff — who exudes
unflagging self-confidence — became a political player.

He had been allotted 20 minutes to make his pitch. "As it turned out,
they gave me 35," he recalls. "The senators were blown away." True
enough. Tom Daschle, then-leader of the Senate Democrats, asked Lakoff
to extend his stay on the East Coast and return with him to
Washington. On Capitol Hill a few days later, the scholar joined a
meeting of other Democratic senators. "When I entered the room, these
senators got up and hugged me," Lakoff says. "It was an awesome
situation."

Bush's re-election the following November put more pressure on
Democrats. As their stock plummeted, Lakoff's skyrocketed. Shortly
before the 2004 midterms, a small environmental press in Vermont,
Chelsea Green, published his Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your
Values and Frame the Debate — The Essential Guide for Progressives, a
hastily assembled primer for liberal activists. The slender paperback
sold an improbable 250,000 copies and was distributed to every
Democrat in the House of Representatives.

Inundated with invitations to brief lawmakers, strategists, and
advocacy organizations, Lakoff began a life of perpetual motion,
dashing to engagements around the country. Howard Dean, at that time
mounting a surprisingly successful insurgent bid for the Democratic
presidential nomination, predicted that Lakoff would be "one of the
most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement when
the history of this century is written." The conservative National
Review joked, "If the American Left believed in sainthood, they would
have resolved to beatify George Lakoff by now." There was even a DVD,
How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions From George Lakoff.

Over the next four years, Lakoff brought out three more books:
Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006); Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's
Most Important Idea (Farrar, 2006) — about the right's largely
successful attempt to redefine freedom as relief from government
intervention — and, most recently, The Political Mind. All the while,
Lakoff continued to teach at Berkeley and churn out white papers from
his office at the Rockridge Institute, a think tank that he helped
start in 2000 to promote the use of framing by progressive candidates
and issues. (It closed in April because of lack of funds.)

Just as quickly as lakoff's star rose, a backlash began. For a few
years, "he was the man of the hour from top to bottom and bottom to
top on the part of floundering Democrats," says Todd Gitlin, a
professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and
author, most recently, of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind
Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals (John
Wiley & Sons, 2007). "He was more than the flavor of the week. He was
the messianic flavor, the flavor to end all flavors."

Gitlin recalls running into Lakoff at a progressive-policy conference
in Washington in 2005, after not seeing him since their time as
colleagues at Berkeley in the early 1990s. "He'd changed," Gitlin
recalls. "He was very tense and embattled."

Shortly before the meeting, The Atlantic had run an article by Marc
Cooper, a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the
University of Southern California. Titled "Thinking of Jackasses," the
essay dismissed Lakoff's work as "psychobabble as electoral strategy."
Next the magazine published an essay by Joshua Green, a senior editor,
"It Isn't the Message, Stupid." Green derided Lakoff for offering no
new ideas and questioned whether the Democratic Party could bring
about its own reversal of fortune merely with "snazzier packaging and
a new sales pitch."

Lakoff was particularly stung when Rahm Emanuel, an influential
Democratic representative from Illinois, devoted an entire chapter of
a book to attacking him. In The Plan: Big Ideas for America
(PublicAffairs, 2006), Emanuel and his co-author Bruce Reed, president
of the Democratic Leadership Council, rejected the view that the
Democrats' problems stemmed from an inability to get their message
out; the problem was the substance of that message. Framing, the
authors said, amounted to little more than slapping a new coat of
paint on failed old ideas. Most cutting to Lakoff, they called him one
of the "highbrows" who harbored the "fallacy that we can game history
to our advantage." Although The Plan might not have been read much
beyond the insulated world of political strategists and consultants,
it made Lakoff a persona non grata on Capitol Hill. "All of a sudden I
was controversial," Lakoff says.

Another intellectual blow was delivered by Steven Pinker, an
evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University. Writing
in The New Republic in 2006, Pinker chastised Lakoff for his
"cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and
conservatives as evil morons" and declared his political efforts "a
train wreck" and "jejune nonsense." Lakoff blasted back with an
essay-length reply on The New Republic's Web site. He accused Pinker
of misrepresenting his ideas and falling prey to his own ideological
blinders, such as the view that thought is universal and disembodied
rather than an emotional process that relies on frames, image-schemas,
and metaphors. The spat endured for another round, a distilled version
of which appeared in the journal Public Policy Research (March-May,
2007).

It is sometimes difficult when reading Lakoff to know where his
political advocacy ends and his cognitive-linguistics scholarship
begins. When I ask him about that, he acknowledges that his political
celebrity has put a strain on his scholarly work, but he insists that
he has not abandoned linguistics for politics: "The work I do in
politics is linguistics, it is linguistics about political subjects —
it is advocacy linguistics." That means, he says, "I do a simple
linguistic analysis, and then I say based on that analysis you should
do this, this, and that. But it all rests on doing the linguistics."

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even
more skeptical than Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the
"neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate
the implications of their research, and the journalists who
breathlessly hype their findings. According to Flanagan, brain science
is only helpful to the extent that it tells us something we don't
already know. To illustrate his point, he offers an analogy: When
children learn how to ride a bike, something changes in their brains.
If a scientist offers parents a detailed description of that
neurological transformation, it might be interesting, but it won't
help children learn to ride a bike.

Similarly, Flanagan sees Lakoff's insight — that successful
politicians know how to use emotionally appealing narratives to rally
support — as "one of the main topics in ancient political philosophy."
Understanding it has nothing to do with neuroscience, he says. "But as
soon as you put 'neuro' in front of an idea, especially an old idea,
it sounds interesting to people in a way that it wouldn't if you just
said, Hey, I have an idea. It is a way of credentializing yourself."

Lakoff himself says that the politicians and news media who courted
him had only a superficial understanding of his work. He knew things
had gone wrong when he was invited to a meeting in 2006 with Bill
Clinton and a team of political strategists. Lakoff says that he
delivered a short presentation emphasizing how the Democrats' strategy
for the midterm elections should highlight progressive morals, ideas,
and principles but that Clinton kept bringing the conversation back to
slogans, phrasing, and marketing. "It became clear to me that I was
brought there as a spinmeister," Lakoff says. "Finally I gave up."

Most of the politicians never got "the metaphor stuff" — how people's
political perspectives are unconsciously shaped by their understanding
of the nation as a family. I ask him whether anyone in Washington got
it. He pauses for a long moment, finally offering up Howard Dean, who
wrote the foreword to Don't Think of an Elephant! Gitlin says that it
should come as no surprise to any academic that "people involved in
professional politics are not interested in intellectual revolutions."

Lakoff is often compared with Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and
rhetorical strategist who created such phrases as "The Clear Skies
Initiative" (for President Bush's plan to cut power-plant emissions)
and "the death tax" (as opposed to the less ominous "estate tax").
Lakoff bristles at the comparison. "I'm not the Democratic Frank
Luntz," he says flatly. But even Dean was quoted in The Atlantic
vowing to "make George Lakoff the Democrats' Frank Luntz."

"In a way, George fell victim to the expectations established by
Luntz," says Nunberg. "I think Pelosi and the Democrats wanted a Luntz
of their own. And though Luntz is no theorist, he is better with
language." (As evidence of Lakoff's "tin ear," he cites Lakoff's
proposals to call taxes "membership fees" and trial lawyers
"public-protection attorneys.")

Lakoff is plainly tired of his political reputation. "Someone calls
you a guru, you hate it, but you can't stop it," he says. But even
some of his friends and supporters say that he undermined his own
credibility. Peter Teague, a program director at the Nathan Cummings
Foundation, was one of Lakoff's first major political patrons in 2002,
providing two grants totaling $195,000 to the Rockridge Institute for
Lakoff to serve as a resource to other progressive organizations.
Teague was initially drawn to Lakoff's framing work because it was not
about spin. "I loved that he said if you are just doing message you
are going to continue to do it wrong, and that if we are going to give
birth to a new kind of politics, we have to do it in a way that
challenges old assumptions and old ways of doing business," he says.
"The communications piece has to be the expression of a coherent
whole."

But Teague quickly became disillusioned. "If Teddy Kennedy or Nancy
Pelosi or Harry Reid got on the phone and said, 'George, we need new
words, we need to reframe our response on national security,' George
would give an immediate answer, he would provide a set of better
words," he says. "George became the guy he criticized. He became a
spinmeister." Teague recalled numerous conversations during which
Lakoff agreed that he had made a mistake. "And the next thing you
know, he would do the exact same thing again."

Teague continues to consider Lakoff a friend. The tragedy, he says, is
that at the very moment when people were intensely interested in his
work, Lakoff's actions diminished his influence.

According to Gilles Fauconnier, the enormous expectations that
surrounded Lakoff's ideas were fed by the public's lack of
understanding about brain science. "There is a pervasive folk theory
in the media that scientists can look at an fMRI or a brain scan and
link specific brain activity to specific behaviors, but that is
completely exaggerated," he says. What Lakoff and others have, in
fact, shown are the ways in which frames and metaphors — what
Fauconnier calls "backstage cognition" — affect people's thinking and
behavior. Fauconnier insists that a genuine paradigm shift would occur
if politicians took such unconscious processes into account. "But
there is a lot of inertia against this revolution," he cautions. A lot
of the social sciences, in particular, he says, were built on a belief
in human rationality.

Will the revolution succeed? Fauconnier says it is too early to tell.
"It is still a minority view in academe. But thanks to people like
George, who has shown incredible energy, we have made strides."

Lakoff acknowledges that both academic and political cultures are slow
to change. But he is optimistic, pointing to the way in which the
growth of cognitive psychology has undermined the rational-actor model
that long dominated economics. In his own field, Lakoff predicts that
"brain-based linguistics" will soon become the new standard — indeed,
eclipsing Chomsky.

And despite his setbacks, Lakoff is not giving up on politics. He is
still confidant that his ideas can make a difference to Democrats.
When he wrote Thinking Points, his handbook for progressive activism,
he sent the first copy to Barack Obama. "I don't know if he read it,"
Lakoff says, as a wide grin flashes across his face, "but a number of
people have observed that if you look through Thinking Points, it is
the Obama campaign."

Evan R. Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle Review.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 49, Page B6

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone: (215) 898-7475
Fax: (215) 573-2138

Email: haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

-------------------------------------------------