I find all of Lakoff's writing difficult and most of it equally rewarding.
Lakoff's work in politics does not impress me nearly so much as his other work. I actually agree with his basic tenet of nurturant parent vs authoritarian parent but only as a first order approximation. I think he beats the dead horse beyond recognition much less utility. I disagree that Lakoff's publisher was responsible for the problems with Moral Politics.... Complicit, yes! But the responsibility lies with Lakoff and I suspect the shadow of Chomsky that he must live in. Most of the subtleties of the war between generative syntax (Chomsky) and generative semantics (Lakoff) are over my head.
I sympathise with Nick in his question of "where else would it come from?", referring to "embodied cognition". That said, I have to say that Lakoff and Nunez kicked my ass pretty well with their "Where Mathematics Comes From". Before reading them, I had, somehow imagined that cognition *did* come from somewhere else... though I don't believe I'd ever really considered where.
Perhaps this was a hazard of coming to linguistics and psychology with a strong CS and Math background and with the ever present overlay of "emergence" on the tip of every apparently complex phenomenon. I admit to having accepted Mathematics as a Platonic Truth to be discovered, not invented (or contrived/devised?).
I now realize how anthropocentric even mathematics is... the duality of invented/discovered is still open for me, but it has a new flavor. If we had 4 rather than 5 digits on each appendage, surely we would prefer an octal over decimal number system (to start with the simpler concepts of mathematics).
I'm a deep proponent of Lakoff's idea of our conceptual systems as being fundamentally metaphorical, and am in fact seeking (very lazily) to relate semantic networks to layered metaphor complexes and to perhaps find examples of autocatalytic networks therein. Meme complexes if you will that maintain their own coherence. Big Ideas within religion, politics, even art and science would seem to fit that pattern.
I *like* the idea that all thinking ultimately grounds out in experience, even if we have false ground-planes based in various inherited memes, paradigms, etc.
- Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
