22 Facts About George Lakoff

1.

George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.

2.

Between 2003 and 2008, George Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.

3.

George Lakoff is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank.

4.

George Lakoff served as a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.

5.

The essential thrust of George Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.

6.

In intellectual debate, for instance, the underlying metaphor according to George Lakoff is usually that argument is war :.

7.

George Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment.

8.

George Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone.

9.

George Lakoff discussed these themes in his 2001 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, published as The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding.

10.

George Lakoff has claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe.

11.

George Lakoff has publicly expressed some of his political views and his ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process.

12.

Moral Politics gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that George Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives".

13.

George Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.

14.

George Lakoff argues that the differences in opinions between liberals and conservatives follow from the fact that they subscribe with different strength to two different central metaphors about the relationship of the state to its citizens.

15.

George Lakoff says that most people have a blend of both metaphors applied at different times, and that political speech works primarily by invoking these metaphors and urging the subscription of one over the other.

16.

George Lakoff further argues that one of the reasons liberals have had difficulty since the 1980s is that they have not been as aware of their own guiding metaphors, and have too often accepted conservative terminology framed in a way to promote the strict father metaphor.

17.

George Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using terms like partial birth abortion and tax relief because they are manufactured specifically to allow the possibilities of only certain types of opinions.

18.

George Lakoff maintains that the act of stating that a lie is false reinforces the lie because it repeats the way the lie is framed.

19.

George Lakoff calls this a "truth sandwich" even though the baloney is in the middle.

20.

Between 2003 and 2008, George Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in Moral Politics.

21.

In 2008, George Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.

22.

Pinker argued that George Lakoff's propositions are unsupported, and his prescriptions are a recipe for electoral failure.