George Lakoff

Mark Johnson

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Metaphors We Live By

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

What Categories Reveal about the Mind

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal-that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body-not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.

Philosophy In The Flesh

In this classic text, Lakoff analyses the unconscious and rhetorical worldviews of liberals and conservatives, discovering radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality.

How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition

Moral Politics

Rafael Nuñez

How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

Where Mathematics Comes From

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!

In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.

why you can't understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain

The political mind

Rafael E. Nunez

Provides an in-depth analysis of the cognitive science of mathematical ideas that argues that conceptual metaphor plays a definitive role in mathematical ideas, exploring such concepts as arithmetic, algebra, sets, logic, and infinity. 20,000 first printing.

Where Mathematics Come From How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being

A groundbreaking scientific examination of the way our brains understand politics from a New York Times bestselling author One of the world 's best-known linguists and cognitive scientists, George Lakoff has a knack for making science make sense for general readers. In his new book, Lakoff spells out what cognitive science has discovered about reason, and reveals that human reason is far more interesting than we thought it was. Reason is physical, mostly unconscious, metaphorical, emotion-laden, and tied to empathy-and there are biological explanations behind our moral and political thought processes. His call for a New Enlightenment is a bold and striking challenge to the cherished beliefs not only of philosophers, but of pundits, pollsters, and political leaders. The Political Mind is a passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book that will appeal to anyone interested in how the mind works and how we function socially and politically.

A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics

The Political Mind

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word "freedom." Al-Qaeda attacked us because "they hate our freedom." The U.S. can strike preemptively because "freedom is on the march." Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. The 2005 presidential inaugural speech was a kind of crescendo: the words "freedom," "free," and "liberty," were used forty-nine times in President Bush's twenty-minute speech. In Whose Freedom?, Lakoff surveys the political landscape and offers an essential map of the Republican battle plan that has captured the hearts and minds of Americans--and shows how progressives can fight to reinvigorate this most beloved of American political ideas.

The Battle over America's Most Important Idea

Whose Freedom?

Don't Think of An Elephant is the antidote to decades of conservative strategising and the right's stranglehold on political dialogue. More specifically, it is the definitive handbook for understanding and communicating effectively about key social and political issues. George Lakoff explains in detail exactly how the right has managed to co-opt traditional values in order to popularise its political agenda. He also provides examples of how the centre-left can address the community's core values and re-frame political debate to establish a civil discourse that reinforces progressive positions. Don't Think of An Elephant provides a compelling linguistic analysis of political campaigning. But, more importantly, it demonstrates that real political values and ideas must provide the foundation for political progress by the centre-left.

Don't Think of an Elephant!

Elisabeth Wehling

Provides guidelines for United States Democrats to connect moral values to important policies, using practical tactics to guide political discourse away from extreme positions.

The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

The Little Blue Book

Metaforas de la vida cotidiana / Metaphors We Live By (Teorema / Theorem)

Non pensare all'elefante!

الاستعارات التي نحيا بها

Lingüista y analista político, George Lakoff es una de las figuras más relevantes del pensamiento actual. Este libro se ha convertido en un fenómeno entre todos aquellos interesados en la política, ofreciendo ideas y propuestas para articular el discurso de la izquierda moderna, y explicaciones de la aceptación sobre todo en Estados Unidos, de la ideología conservadora.

No pienses en un elefante. Lenguaje y debate político

At first glance, issues like economic inequality, healthcare, climate change, and abortion seem unrelated. However, when thinking and talking about them, people reliably fall into two camps: conservative and liberal. What explains this divide? Why do conservatives and liberals hold the positions they do? And what is the conceptual nature of those who decide elections, commonly called the "political middle"? The answers are profound. They have to do with how our minds and brains work. Political attitudes are the product of what cognitive scientists call Embodied Cognition — the grounding of abstract thought in everyday world experience. Clashing beliefs about how to run nations largely arise from conflicting beliefs about family life: conservatives endorse a strict father and liberals a nurturant parent model. So-called "middle" voters are not in the middle at all. They are morally biconceptual, divided between both models, and as a result highly susceptible to moral political persuasion. In this brief introduction, Lakoff and Wehling reveal how cognitive science research has advanced our understanding of political thought and language, forcing us to revise common folk theories about the rational voter.

How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide

Your Brain's Politics

Denkmodelle bewusst erfassen: Leichtfüssig, in Dialogform, kommen die Gedanken von George Lakoff und Elisabeth Wehling daher und sind doch von weit reichender, ja umwälzender Bedeutung. Als Professor für kognitive Wissenschaft verbindet Lakoff grundlegende Erkenntnisse der Gehirnforschung mit Linguistik und legt dabei die physische Bedingtheit unseres Denkens sowie die Unmöglichkeit, wertfrei zu denken und zu sprechen, dar. Das Anliegen der beiden Autoren ist es, diese wissenschaftlich erhärteten Tatsachen am Beispiel der amerikanischen sowie der europäischen medialen Berichterstattung aufzuzeigen. Im Zentrum ihrer Untersuchung steht der weltweit bekannte Satz der Bush-Administration: Seit dem 11. September 2001 führten die USA einen "Krieg gegen den Terror". Auch sechs Jahre (2007) nach dem Anschlag hängt in der US-Botschaft in Berlin ein Poster mit den Bildern von 9/11 und dem Titel: "Work of Evil." Die Mehrheit (80%) der US-amerikanischen Bürger steht hinter dem Strenger-Vater-Frame (d.h. Denkmuster), das George W. Bush verkörpert. Das konservative Denkmodell beherrscht die mediale Berichterstattung, ohne dass dieses selbst kritischen Journalisten bewusst ist. Lakoffs Vorschlag zu Handen eines "bewussten Journalismus", ist der Wechsel in das Fürsorglich-Eltern-Frame. Die Progressiven (viele Demokraten) müssten lernen, die konservativen Denkmuster (der Republikaner) sprachlich aufzubrechen. Eine Wende in der Berichterstattung würde folgende Formulierung bedeuten: "Der 'Krieg gegen den Terror' ist eine von der konservativen US-Regierung gezielt gewählte Metapher, mit der noch sieben Jahre nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 die US-amerikanische Innen- und Aussenpolitik gerechtfertigt werden soll." (S.177). Der aktuelle Wahlkampf ändert nichts an der scharfsinnigen Analyse der Bush-Politik und ihrer Folgen, könnte aber neue Ziele setzen. Paula Küng-Hefti.

George Lakoff

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