Steven Pinker is one of my favourite science writers right now, and he has been mentioned in the blog before, for example:
A Natural History of Jewish Intelligence
Top Public Intellectuals
and
Labour's Authoritarianism
I just read about a debate, encompassing the political, philosophical and the scientific, between Pinker and George Lakoff, a rival linguistics professor, who wrote an anti-Republican book Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, which Pinker castigated in a review. Lakoff fought back, and you can follow the intellectual ding-dong in the links below.
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Pinker's actual review (scroll down a bit)
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Lakoff's response: Defending Freedom
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Some blog comments:
Pinker v. Lakoff
ScienceBlogs.com
October 7, 2006
George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. Steven Pinker's review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and a debate is born.
I don't really know where to start on this. Lakoff's reply is one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces of writing I've seen from a cognitive scientist, and if anyone other than Lakoff had written it, I'd probably just ignore it. But Lakoff is not only famous, he's influential, and more than a few liberal bloggers take him seriously. So I feel compelled to say something. I guess the best way to go about this is to detail their disagreements, and show where Lakoff sinks to all new lows in defense of his position.
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Fight! Fight! Pinker vs. Lakoff
1 comment:
In the original web page there's a whole buncha links that haven't replicated here....
Angels and Demons
A Response to George Lakoff by Steven Pinker
TNR Online
19/10/06
George Lakoff's reply is a perfect illustration of the problems I pointed out in my review: He divides the world into blocs of angels and devils, based on his own fantasies of what the devil believes. Here he tries to deflect my criticisms by placing me in a Chomskyan faction that is implacably hostile to his theories and worldview. Not true. For almost two decades, I have defended Lakoff's theories of metaphor and cognitive linguistics, both in scholarly and in popular books, and I have vehemently argued against some of Chomsky's major positions on language. Lakoff cannot use a clash of ideologies as an escape hatch.
He does it again with his accusation that "Pinker interprets Darwin in a way reminiscent of social Darwinists"--hoping that the taint of this unsavory and long-discredited political movement might rub off. But, contrary to Lakoff's pronouncement that competition in evolutionary science is merely an obsolete metaphor, it is inherent to the very idea of natural selection, where advantageous variants are preserved at the expense of less advantageous ones. This has nothing to do with Social Darwinism, which tried to rationalize the station of the poor as part of the wisdom of nature.
Lakoff's misses my point about the state of evidence in cognitive science. I don't disagree that metaphor can be a matter of thought and not just language. The question is when and how often. Lakoff takes all conceptual metaphors at face value, as a direct reflection of thought, ignoring the possibility that many or most conceptual metaphors are dead in the minds of current speakers. Though he correctly notes that some metaphors are thought of in terms of their concrete sources, he fails to consider the possibility that many or most are not. He ignores research by a number of cognitive psychologists showing that many metaphors are accessed directly in terms of their intended meaning, skipping the metaphorical sources, especially when a metaphor is conventional rather than fresh. (Incidentally, Lera Boroditsky's major experiment aiming to show that people automatically use space as a metaphor for time has failed to replicate).
Likewise, Lakoff cannot wave off my criticisms by identifying me with some antiquated dogma in which people are always rational, disembodied, abstract calculators. Of course they're not. Lakoff repeatedly blurs two different ideas: (1) "universal disembodied reason" is not a good theory of how individual people instinctively think, and (2) universal disembodied reason is not a normative ideal that we should collectively strive for in grounding our beliefs and decisions, especially in arenas--like politics and science--that are designed to get at the truth. One can accept that the unaided human mind is not a perfect logician while rejecting Lakoff's messianic claim that "More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over" (from the opening lines of Philosophy in the Flesh).
As for the claims in Whose Freedom?: Lakoff writes that "most thought uses conceptual metaphors" (page 13), that "repetition of language has the power to change brains" (page 10), that "frames trump facts" (page 13), and that "since metaphors and frames may vary from person to person, not all forms of reason are universal" (page 13). It is hard to see how these statements, together with Lakoff's repeated claims that universal disembodied reason is obsolete, is not a form of relativism. As for systemic causation being a talent possessed only by people like himself, he writes, "I am using systemic causation to study the difference between systemic and direct causation. It makes me wonder whether such a book could be written only by a progressive" (page 130).
At the end of his reply, Lakoff offers a number of ad hominem speculations about what is wrong with me such that I could possibly disagree with him. Missing from his list is the possibility that, when someone claims to have overturned two thousand years of Western thought (and advises Democratic leaders that they can regain power by rebranding "taxes" as "membership fees"), there could be legitimate grounds for disagreement.
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