Cognitive Metaphor

Steven Pinker (TNR, October 9) has a field day demolishing George Lakoff’s recent Whose Freedom? Lakoff attacks conservatives’ use of freedom to justify their political agenda and argues that liberals can regain political power by reframing political debate using new metaphors. Along the way, Pinker also scores some points against Lakoff’s more technical work in linguistics.

He points out, for instance, that Lakoff to the contrary “the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not imply that all thinking is concrete.” In fact, using metaphor requires a degree of abstraction: “People cannot use a metaphor to reason with unless they have a deeper grasp of which aspects of the metaphors should be taken seriously and which should be ignored.”

Love is like a journey, but not altogether like a journey, and “someone would be seriously deranged if he wondered whether he had time to pack [for his love journey], or whether the next gas station has clean restrooms.” Rather than thinking directly in metaphors, we “use a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic . . . while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.”

Further, metaphors do not get lodged in the brain through repetition, as Lakoff claims; at least, Pinker says that there is no proof for such a theory in cognitive psychology, on which Lakoff relies. We are not locked into a single conceptual frame but “can nimbly switch among the many framings made available by their language.” We can, in short, examine and judge our metaphors, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, they ways they do and do not capture the world.

Pinker also assaults what he calls “Lakoff’s cognitive relativism,” arguing that whatever the limits of individual intelligence, we have hope for something more “from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science.”

Pinker’s evaluation of Lakoff’s book is pointed: “Probably not since The Greening of America has there been a manifesto with as much faith that the country’s problems can be solved by the purity of the moral vision of the 1960s.”