Conclusion
Lakoff, Johnson, and Pinker are among the
many cognitive scientists
that devote a significant amount of time to current events and political theory,
suggesting that respected linguists and theorists of conceptual metaphor may
tend to channel their theories into political realms.
Critics of this ethics-driven approach to language tend to accept
that idioms reflect underlying conceptual metaphors, but that actual grammar,
and
the
more
basic
cross-cultural
concepts
of scientific
method and mathematical practice tend to minimize the impact of metaphors.
Such critics tend to see Lakoff and Jacobs as 'left-wing figures,' and would
not accept their politics as any kind of crusade against an ontology embedded
in language and culture, but rather, as an idiosyncratic pastime, not
part of the
science of linguistics nor of much use. And others further, such
as Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault and,
more recently, Manuel de
Landa would criticize both of these two positions for mutually constituting
the same old ontological ideology that would try
to separate two parts of a
whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Lakoff's 1987 work,
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things,
answered
some of these criticisms before they were even made: he explores the effects
of cognitive metaphors (both culturally specific and human-universal) on the
grammar
per se of several languages, and the evidence of the limitations of
the classical logical-positivist or Anglo-American
School philosophical
concept of the category usually used to explain or describe the scientific
method.
References
1.
Johnson, Mark (1995) Moral Imagination. Chicago:
University of
Chicago Press.
2.
Johnson, Mark (1987) The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
3.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh. New
York: Basic Books.
4.
Lakoff, George (1995) Moral Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. (2nd ed. 2001)
5.
Lakoff, George & Mark Turner (1989) More than Cool Reason: A
Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
6.
Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
7.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
8.
Dahl, Christoph D. & Adachi, Ikuma (2013) Conceptual
metaphorical
mapping
in
chimpanzees
(Pan
troglodytes),
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