Freeman, Jeremy. "Mind Games." THE NATIONAL July 3, 2008.

Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking, 2008. Last November, a group of neuroscientists published an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “This is your brain on politics”. To investigate the neuro-biological basis of political decision making, the authors had measured the brain activity of voters who were looking at pictures of the American presidential candidates. From those data, the neuro-pundits made some startling conclusions, such as “emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed”, and “Mitt Romney shows potential”. This “research” was produced by a marketing firm that sells neuro-imaging data to Fortune 500 companies. This work, which was not subject to any peer review or published in a scientific journal, was rife with fallacious inferences; the data hardly justified the conclusions. As the neuroscientist Martha Farah responded, the research was more akin to reading tea leaves than to doing science. But however misguided, this turn to neuroscience is not surprising: political science, like the other social sciences, is eager to ground itself in hard scientific data. When it comes to the mysteries of political decision making, the brain might seem a better source of deep truths than opinion polls. Although he is not one of the aforementioned neuro-pundits, the famed linguist George Lakoff has now jumped on their bandwagon. Lakoff is rightly respected for his work explaining how human thought and language are structured by conceptual frames and metaphors. His earlier writing sought to overturn an Enlightenment model of language and rationality, one in which people are seen as unemotional actors who make conscious decisions based on facts and use language literally. Instead, Lakoff suggested that people reason using metaphors and emotions, often without conscious knowledge of doing so. Words are not understood literally but through their connection to particular “frames” – narratives that structure concepts. Metaphors allow us to link these frames together. For example, we might use road metaphors to argue about romantic love: “the relationship has hit a dead end; we’re going in different directions; we’ve come a long way.” Frames influence decisions, and can be subconsciously activated by the strategic use of language. In a series of recent books, Lakoff has applied these linguistic insights to highlight the role that metaphor and emotion play in political reasoning. But he now seems to be veering into his own brand of neuro-punditry. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080703/REVIEW/206981881/1008/rss.

Pilotti, Maura. "Review of George Lakoff's THE POLITICAL MIND." MOR August 5, 2008.

Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking, 2008. George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who, for quite some time, has applied to politics his knowledge of how the human brain/mind processes information. The enlightening results of this undertaking are evident in his latest book: The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st –Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. In it, Lakoff examines the functioning of the human brain/mind with the purpose of identifying the relationship between the format in which ideas, mostly involving public policy, are presented and their reception by the different constituencies of public opinion (i.e., us). He focuses on frames, pre-existing knowledge structures that absorb, transform, and attribute value to incoming information. The influence of frames on information processing is also prominently featured in his earlier work devoted to the American political process (e.g., Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think; Don't Think of an Elephant). Yet, in The Political Mind, Lakoff's treatment of the role that frames play in the functioning of the human brain/mind and thus of their impact on the political process is more complete, although no less insightful and direct. Lakoff's examination of the political process is well-argued because it not only relies on evidence collected by means of the scientific method but also is guided by the scientific method in his applications of the evidence to politics. In his exploration of the functioning of the brain/mind, Lakoff starts with two key premises: First, he reminds readers that rational thoughts and emotions are inextricably linked in the cognitive frames upon which voters rely to understand politics and to guide their behavior when in the voting booth. Second, he emphasizes that most of the information processing that human beings conduct is unconscious and that even its outcomes (e.g., the understanding of specific issues) are not entirely comprehended by those who engaged in such processing. The latter premise, he recognizes, leads to an apparently unsolvable conundrum. Namely, how can individuals be in command of processes and outcomes that are beyond their awareness? Are human beings destined to be the victims of their own frames as if they were vessels, which, during a tempest, become unable to determine the direction of their travel? Lakoff forcefully argues that the first and most crucial step for controlling cognitive operations and their outcomes is knowledge of how these operations are performed in relation to existing cognitive frames. He reminds us that the adult brain/mind is not an empty container but rather a collection of receptacles (i.e., frames) filled and shaped by early experiences. Thus, he recommends that the information that one has processed be deconstructed in relation to the frames that have been unconsciously applied to the information when it was first encountered. The goal, moral and commendable, is to ensure that the issues are fairly understood and that rational and equitable solutions are adopted. But what does one do if an issue is novel and there does not appear to be a pre-existing frame for it? Lakoff argues that a frame should be created for it so that the above-mentioned goal can be reached. An example of this possibility is provided by the section devoted to "privateering", the ongoing, widespread practice of privatizing the essential functions of government, which, by blending "privatization" and "profiteering", renders government powerless, unable to perform even the most basic function of protecting its citizens (See the American government's response in the aftermath of Katrina and the role of private contractors in foreign wars). . . . Read the whole review here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4393.

Goldstein, Evan R. "Who Framed George Lakoff?" CHRONICLE REVIEW August 15, 2008.

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. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i49/49b00601.htm.