DISQUS

TJIC · 3 years ago

Excellent rebuttal. I'm not good at that sort of thing, as the leftist argument that historically conceived, negative freedoms are not freedoms at all, and massive state regulating and structuring of every private moment is the only way to achieve "real" freedoms always just sets off my 1984-doublespeak button, and I turn as twitchy and incoherent as if someone punched me in the face and told me that by doing so they were expressing friendship.

It's good to see that someone else can remain calm and point out crisply just details of how the argument is defective.

Chris · 3 years ago

I'll be looking forward to the piece on Haidt's work. I've actually been developing some experiments on moral psychology that were influenced by Haidt's work (and that of others doing similar stuff), so I've been really into the literature lately. It's nice to see people outside of the field taking it seriously.

Eric Barnhill · 3 years ago

I've often wondered whether the rise of Lakoff had more to do with his 'tactics' or just the desperate need of the Democratic Party establishment to glom on to a strategy that doesn't involve facing the reality that so many of their ideas are dated, tired, and wrong in the eyes of a critical mass of the American electorate, with their only hopes of power coming from the Republicans behaving so badly that the vital center feels obliged to vote contra.

In Pinker's review he sounds less like a libertarian to me and more like a Clintoninte Democrat, reflecting the usual exasperation of Democratic centrists with a graying establishment that can't see past their own 60s nostalgia and accept the empirical results of the last 30 years.

Lakoff's original set of theories are awfully good, and supported heavily by those who advocate a selectionist view of neuroembrology, neurodevelopment, and consciousness. In fact, if one were to take Gerald Edelman's TNGS and ask, what would our concepts be like in practice if his and, to pick one other, Esther Thelen's ideas were true, one would basically bump into Lakoff and Johnson's theories. In my opinion the smart money for the neurological future is on the selectionists -- I've certainly based my on method of therapy on it, as well as presentations I give on the subject.

Unfortunately Lakoff has taken a hazy, armchair approach to applying these ideas to political theory and made a "run for the end zone" of glory that sells his original insights short and will probably ultimately discredit him. On the other hand, I'm sure Paul Krugman, who pulled the same trick, still gets to go to all the best cocktail parties.

Casey Barwell · 3 years ago

At first glance of your commentary, I was solidly impressed with your rebuttal. However, after reviewing Lakoff's rebuttal to Pinker's criticisms, I find myself less impressed with your commentary.

Let's dissect what you have to say:
"Lakoff’s argument builds on yet another exposition of his intriguingly comprehensive armchair theory of a metaphor-saturated mind"

I do believe that what you say hear rings a bit shrill at best. Lakoff's arguments stand on atleast well respected premises in terms of the two schools of thought of cognitive science theory. He mentions this in his rebuttal about classifying the old school of thought like Descartes' 17th Century rationalism to the newer school, ..."The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames, image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms."

Certainly there is disagreement in the cognitive science school of thought, but it doesn't necessarily weaken his premise, nor does it make it "empirically ill-supported". This is a theoretical discussion that atleast merits a bit more cogent criticism.

Later in your criticism, you compare Lakoff and Nunberg to "low-octane liberal versions of communist philosophers Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci".

Again, this seems pretty shrill. I would argue that your criticism hear is a better example of "empirically ill-supported" logic than is Lakoff's extrapolation of his own theories.

Not very impressive.

Poster · 2 years ago

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