George Philip Lakoff (/ˈleɪkɒf/; born May 24, 1941) 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.
The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his and Mark Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors We Live By has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic to political science. In his 1996 book Moral Politics, Lakoff described conservative voters as being influenced by the "strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the state, and liberal/progressive voters as being influenced by the "nurturant parent model" as the folk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon. According to him, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. In Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf (1991), he argues that the American involvement in the Gulf War was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it.[1] Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute.[2][3]
Lakoff is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. Lakoff served as a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.[4] He was married to linguist Robin Lakoff.[5]
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Lakoff, George (1991). "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf". The Sixties Project. Retrieved October 4, 2018. The most natural way to justify a war on moral grounds is to fit this fairy tale structure to a given situation. This is done by metaphorical definition, that is, by answering the questions: Who is the victim? Who is the villain? Who is the hero? What is the crime? What counts as victory? Each set of answers provides a different filled-out scenario. [...] As the gulf crisis developed, President Bush tried to justify going to war by the use of such a scenario. At first, he couldn't get his story straight. What happened was that he was using two different sets of metaphorical definitions, which resulted in two different scenarios [...].
^"George Lakoff". Rockridge Institute. Archived from the original on June 11, 2007. Retrieved June 13, 2007.
^Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46771-6.
George Philip Lakoff (/ˈleɪkɒf/; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are...
achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in Metaphors We Live By as the rejection...
The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, philosophers GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson wrote about fascism, in the chapter about morality:...
Metaphors We Live By is a book by GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson published in 1980. The book suggests metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what...
Lakoff is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: GeorgeLakoff (born 1941), American linguist and cognitive scientist Robin Lakoff (born...
Robin Tolmach Lakoff (/ˈleɪkɒf/; born November 27, 1942) is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book...
world which is external to human thought. It was first developed by GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Experientialism is especially...
Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (hereinafter WMCF) is a book by GeorgeLakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Rafael E. Núñez, a psychologist. Published...
reality. It has been proposed by scholars such as GeorgeLakoff and Gilles Fauconnier. GeorgeLakoff (1987) Cognitive models and prototype theory, published...
introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of GeorgeLakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley...
lesser evidence of conscience. The strict father model is discussed by GeorgeLakoff in his books, including Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant,...
such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and GeorgeLakoff, in order to analyze idioms and fixed expressions. Lakoff's 1977 paper "Linguistic Gestalts" put forward...
linguistic wars, GeorgeLakoff united in the early 1980s with Ronald Langacker and other advocates of neo-Darwinian linguistics in a so-called "Lakoff–Langacker...
Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that, as GeorgeLakoff put it, "make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not...
has been taken up further in the cognitive sciences, particularly by GeorgeLakoff. Metaphoric criticism focuses on analysis of texts that use metaphors...
The idea was developed by linguist GeorgeLakoff, and the name was coined in June 2018 by Brian Stelter of CNN. Lakoff observed media organizations spreading...
on an unbounded board are called infinite chess. Cognitive scientist GeorgeLakoff considers the concept of infinity in mathematics and the sciences as...
prominent cognitive linguist GeorgeLakoff, the Rockridge Institute sought to examine the way that frames—which Lakoff describes as "the mental structures...
Horsemen of the Apocalypse in linguistics, Paul Postal, John R. Ross, GeorgeLakoff, and James McCawley, initiated and did early work with generative semantics...
typically used in lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, GeorgeLakoff and Dirk Geeraerts. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that...
Kenny Jaegwon Kim Martha Klein Jiddu Krishnamurti Stephen Laurence GeorgeLakoff Timothy Leary Gottfried Leibniz Ernest Lepore David Kellogg Lewis Béatrice...
The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, GeorgeLakoff, and James D. McCawley—self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"[not...
developed in the field of cognitive linguistics. American linguist GeorgeLakoff presented Neural Theory of Language (NTL) as a computational basis for...
represents reality and affects human thought. The contributions of GeorgeLakoff (1941–present) and Ronald Langacker (1942–present) provided the foundation...
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