George Lakoff, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, addressed Comparative Media Studies at an event organised by the ICE Lab on Tuesday (11th September). Molly, Sasha and I liveblogged his talk and the Q&A – as usual, please let us know if you have any additions or corrections.
Lakoff begins by telling the story of a student at Berkeley who came to class one day crying. When asked what was wrong, she explained that her boyfriend had told her that their relationship was “on a dead end street.” “What does that mean?”, she asked. So, it being Berkeley in the 1970s, they set up an instant support group and started deciphering what he had said.
Lakoff said he noticed that we often talk about love in terms of transport metaphors: Love is a journey of a certain kind, the wheels are spinning, our relationship is on the rocks, we’ll have to go our separate ways. Are there any generalization we can make about this list? Lovers are travelers, a relationship is a vehicle, and in each case difficulties are impediments to travel, and lovers are trying to get to a common destination. Every expression is a problem with getting there.
The young woman said, “I don’t care. My boyfriend is thinking in terms of this metaphor, and he’s going to break up with me.” Lakoff thought, “that’s interesting – how do you think in terms of a metaphor?”
A metaphor is in your head – not in the world – but that’s not what philosophy teaches. Metaphor is the mapping of one domain of experience to another – that’s something that neither Aristotle, Anglo-American or European postmodern philosophical thought really accounted for.
Entailed metaphors
Many metaphors about love related to transport are also related to the body. Why? Love is a journey could be decomposed into other metaphors that had to do with embodiment. Why are journeys understood as reaching a destination? To get something you have to move. “Every day in your life, there’s a correlation between achieving a purpose and reaching a destination.”
Why are relationships vehicles? Relationships are containers. You’re in them, leave them. As a kid, you live with your relatives. Intimacy is closeness. Vehicles are used to take you places. There’s a reason a relationship is a vehicle “and it has to do with embodied experience.” Love as a journey is not universal. Life is a journey, but a very different kind.
The point is, in order to understand a simple metaphor like a “rocky relationship” you have to understand a long string of metaphors, relationships, mappings, and inferences. You begin with knowledge in one domain, apply general mapping, and taken together, you’ll gain an understanding of what the metaphor means. Lakoff emphasizes that each metaphor is specific, with different entailments. You apply the mapping of one to understand the next one.
Primary metaphors
Composite metaphors
Culture norms
Each metaphor produces different entailments, depending on how it maps. The language then fits the image. To know a culture, you understand all of these.
Within neural theory of language and thought, this is called a cascade. Cascades are circuits that control what’s going on in the brain. In a brain-based theory of metaphor, you’ll need complex cascades. How many cascades will there be? A lot. How does the brain do this? With the 100 billion neurons you’re born with, each of which has ? thousand connections to the others. You end up with half a quadrillion connections even in old age.
Where Mathematics Comes From
Lakoff refers to his book Where Mathematics Comes From. Advanced math is a cascade of metaphors – arithmetic, geometry, calculus, etc – that build upon one another. Scientific theories use conceptual metaphors in their content. For example, think of “spacetime.” That’s a standard metaphor we use to understand the world.
The problem with metaphor is that it contradicts the theory of rationality and reason. Lakoff characterizes Descartes’ theory of reason:
Enlightenment Theory of Reason
Thought is conscious
Thought is abstract not physical
Emotion blocks reason
Reason uses math
Reason fits the world
Reason makes us human
Reason should serve our interests
Words are linked with objects in the world.
Lakoff argues that every single one of these statements is false.
The problem is, according to Lakoff, that your brain only allows you to understand things based on how it is wired. Emotion not only doesn’t block reason, it’s required for reason to function. Lakoff describes work by another researcher who studies those who suffer from brain lesions. They have certain areas of their brain damanged, and can’t set goals, pursue goals. So, they act semi-randomly and screw up a lot of aspects of their lives. You can’t be rational without emotions.
Next, reason uses lots of metaphors. Reason presumably makes us human, so we all have the same reason? Not true. Just think of the RNC and DNC. We have different neural circuitry for reasoning.
Reason serves our interests
False. In the 90s, in Parma, Italy, researchers discovered mirror neuron circuitry. Lakoff worked with them to analyze their data, which began with probes in a cat brain so that they could see the premotor cortex. When they trained a monkey to peel bananas, crush peanuts, and so on, they observed various neurons firing. They tracked neural firing by computer, which indicated firings with audible clicks. One day, a monkey observing a researcher peel a banana triggered the audio response. They found that the same part of the brain that is used for acting, is actually activated when you observe another person performing the same action.
This is the simple version of the story. Actually, only 30% of the mirror neurons fire based on the link of seeing and doing. Many other kinds of activity are taking place. This circuitry, in the premotor cortex, is connected to the emotional regions. We know from Paul Ekman’s work that there’s a physiology of emotions, it’s been studied in detail. The premotor cortex is the basis of empathy. It lets you know, when someone picks up a bottle, they’re about to drink.
(Lakoff drinks from a bottle)
“You feel like having a drink, right?”, Lakoff asserts.
We are constructed to have brains that connect us to other people. By the way, the mirror neurons fire more when we’re doing things together with others.
We’re environmentally linked to objects in the world by what we canonically do with those objects in the world. So reason isn’t just about carrying out our goals, wihich is also important, but it’s about linking ourselves to our bodies and objects in the world.
You have to be able to connect to your body, and connect your brain, but your brain only allows you to understand partially.
Words fit these neural structures. They don’t directly connect to things in the world. And that’s pretty cool.
Lakoff’s theory of “Real Reason”
We think with our brains
all thought is physical
most thought is unconscious
Lakoff runs through basic mechanisms of thought according to the theory of Real Reason. Key concepts include: embodied conceptual primitives, neural binding, fame-circuits, metonymic mappings, metahor-mappings, primary-metaphors, composite metaphors.
Srini Narayanan, a student at Berkeley, decided to work in the domain of international economics. He started with The Economist, Wall St Journal, and others. Began with metaphors like “India is stumbling towards economic liberalization,” and asked: could we create a computational theory of metpahor to mirror wihat the body does, to give us all the inferences? He did this in 1997 as his doctoral dissertation, and it worked: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~snarayan/thesis.pdf
The more you activate a neural circuit, the stronger it gets. It’s not one neuron at a time, it’s a neuronal group of several hundred neurons. It gets stronger each time, since neurons that fire together wire together. Spike time-dependent plasticity adjusts the circuits and strengthens connections in the direction of ore spiking and weakens connections in the direction of less spiking. What determines spiking vs not spiking? Lakoff follows the metaphor of warmth in a relationship.
Metaphors are asymmetric.
His team has checked several hundred metaphors and they all check out. They can predict spike direction in the neural circuits based on metaphor.
This leads us into Cascade Theory.
A Cascade is a functional pathway for circuitry that controls the flow of activation in the brain. Flows along a cascade can originate externally or internally, and activation can flow upstream, downstream, and sideways.
He gives an example of “Flying Pigs.” We all know, from the metaphor, that the pig’s wings are on the back, the direction of motion is in the direction of the snout, and so on. We all know the answers to these questions because our brains do “best fit” mapping.
Best fit results from the fact that we are energy conserving systems and we use the least overall energy: the neural clusters with the strongest connections.
Charles Filmore in 1975 observed that language is defined ed relative to frames. Frames are neural structures in teh brain that have various rolesRoger Shanks, the restaurant frame. A frame lets you definse various instances and roles, e.g.
Interestingly, negating a frame activates the frame neurally. That’s why I wrote “Don’t Think of an Elephant.” Nixon said “I am not a crook!”
The more the frame is activated the stronger the frame gets.
So how does this apply to politics?
All politics is moral. This is the crucial point, according to Lakoff. Every political leader gets up and says “This is what you should do, because it’s right.”
No one says “do this because it’s evil!” There are different moralities, but all politicians appeal to them.
What that means is that there’s a frame hierarchy and the highest part of that frame in politics is moral, and everything in that system needs to fit the moral system. He describes this in his Moral Politics (1996). The moral systems are general, and the policies that fit them are specific. Some people are both progressive and conservative. How do they contradict these things? Mutual inhibition. The activation of one turns the other one off. There are many cases where people have two opposing systems and they don’t even realise when they switch one off. Think Saturday night, Sunday morning. They’re usually applying them to differnet things. They’re called moderates, swing voters. Moderates are conservative about some things, and progressive about others. And they are progressive about some things and conservative about others.
How do you influence a moderate / independent / swing voter? You use your language to activate your moral system and inhibit the other. Conservatives are taught this in institutes that train conservatives by the tens of thousands of people every year. They’re taught how to think and talk conservative.
Why do progressives make that mistake? Because they believe in enlightenment reason. If you want to influence someone, speak their language. No. Language is not neutral, it fits frames that fit models in politics. Why do democrats miss that? “Because they went to college,” says Lakoff.
[laughter]Conservatives have no problem marketing their idea using all of that stuff. Liberals who want to go into politics study economics, political science, etc. – the rational actor theory, which is a false theory of reason. That leads them to not understand how brains work. It means that they don’t understand that they have to set up a system of communication. Progressive learn a false theory of reason, which leads them to believe they shouldn’t use their own language, they should use the other guy’s language (in order to persuade him).
Even if traditional reason were correct, since it’s physical, that means changing reason means changing brains. Conservatives have been doing this consistently since the 1960s. Mind change is brain change.
Lakoff provides an example from Bill Clinton’s speech [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5knEXDsrL4]. Clinton corrected false claims, gave us ‘the facts.’ But how manu of us remember the facts? One person in the class, who remembered three facts. By contrast, everybody remembered the Republican claims that Clinton was arguing against. Everybody. Fox news analysts picked up on this – they said it doesn’t matter how good Clinton’s argument was, said no one will remember the facts he negated. His speech did have some effect, getting across the message “you can’t trust them.” But it didn’t have the effect that people and most liberals thought it would.
If you turn on NBC, you’ll see lots of people (liberal pundits) engaging with the opposition’s frame.
Moral Concepts are Metaphorical
This is registered chemically in the brain. Positive, negative (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and so on). Metaphors for morality activate pathways for positive and negative emtions associated with other things in the world.
Which is better? Eating pure food or rotten food? “That was a rotten thing to do” is a common moral metaphor that draws on our early experience about food. In a similar way, morality is light, immorality is darkness. Metaphors of light and dark are active across cultures. It has nothing to do with skin color, it’s about light and darkness as embodied experience. Morality is beauty, immorality is uglyness. You’re better off if you’re good looking than if you’re not. Wellbeing is wealth: you’re better off if you have the things you need than if you don’t. Moral action is accumulating credit and morality is balancing the books.
In 1994, when the conservaties took over Congress, Lakoff says he wondered about their positions. What do the wide range of conservative positions have to do with each other? As a cognitive scientist, Lakoff was embarrassed he didn’t know. He argues that Conservative positions are reduceable to athey are all reduceable to Conservatism, under a certain metaphor of the family – The Strict Father Family model.
The Strict Father Family model:
Father knows right from wrong
Father is the ultimate authority
Authority must be maintained
Father protects and supports financially
Children learn morality by being punished for dispobedience. Punishment is morally require and must be painful
Morality requires discipline. If you are undisciplined, you cannot be moral
All responsibility is personal responsibility
Every adult is responsible for satisfying their own interests
One-way communication
Father determines reproduction
This explains why you can be pro-life and pro the death penalty. Conservative values activate this entire value system. They’re not stupid to have this combination of beliefs, it fits into the model.
Meanwhile, Progressives have their own model of the family, the Nurturant Parent Family.
The Nurturant Parent Family model (abbreviated):
Parents have equal responsibility
Parents emphathise with children
Parents respect their children’s autonomy and support their goals
Parents teach their children not by instruction but by communicating values and ideas they believe will guide their actions
Lakoff then suggests how these models apply to two conceptions of democracy.
Progressive view:
- Democracy in America is based on a moral principle” citizens care about one another and act responsibly on that care – both individual and social responsibility.
- The role of government is to empower and protect all citizens equally
- This requires a robust public that provides: infraastructure, eudcation, health protection, safety nets, fovernmt research, market oversight, economc stability.
- A vibrant private requires a robust public. Nobosy makes it on their own. Freedom requires a robust public.
Conservative view:
- Democracy is based on a moral principle: the freedom of citizens to seek their own interest regardless of the interests of others.
- Those who succeed deserve to, those who don’t succeed don’t deserve to.
If the Ryan Budget goes through, it will defund almost all public provisions. To progressives, that means destroying the moral basis of democracy.
Q&A
Chris Peterson, CMS: Regarding your article, “What Orwell didn’t know”, can you talk a bit more about how metaphors structure not only what we think, but what we are capable of thinking.
Lakoff: Orwell thought you could tell people the facts and they would reason to the right conclusion. And he was wrong. Every time you learn something, you’re doing brain change. Using circuitry that isn’t already used. With extreme conservatives, this is reflected by ‘in one ear, out the other.’
Daniel Lewis, Psychology: You wrote The Political Mind, Drew Westren wrote The Political Brain. What do you see as the distinctions between what each of you say? Is there anything that you disagree on?
Lakoff: There are a couple of major disagreements. First, he isn’t a neuroscientist, although he was involved in this. He’s a clinical psychologist. He believes in enlightened reason, and everything he suggests to the Democrats reflect that. He correctly believes that you need to use narratives and stories. But he misses bi-conceptualism. His suggestions are often to move to the right, to the ‘active center’ (although he has written extensively against Obama’s centrist positions). Otherwise he’s a very smart, very articulate person, and we have those disagreements.
Heather Hendershot: how do you account for differences between conservative positions, for example libertarians, hard conservatives, varying positions on abortion. Are there various strains of conservativism within the Right?
George Lakoff: There is conservatism among certain libertarians but not others. In Moral Politics, you’ll see that I’ve oversimplified the Strict Father Family model. There are other mapp[ings. For libertarians, there are the mappings on to the market. For Christians, there are the mappings onto God. God as a strict father. For libertarians, the idea of democracy is becoming your own strict father. They have two differnet metaphorical mappings of the same system. You become theultimate authority on everything.
Questioner: One of the things I found most compelling in your original work was the location of metaphors relative to the body. You had a system of body centrism. In the later work on political thought, is there a body centric metaphor that explains these narratives?
George Lakoff: Remember the metaphor is for morality. Your’e better off if you listen to your parents than if you don’t, you’re better if you’re nurtured by your parents than if you’re not. Those are body-based understandings. It’s still there, but not in as obvious a form.
Question: Why is the military the sole exception to the public village for conservatives? They want everything else to be private, why not a privately funded army?
George Lakoff: We do have one. It’s called Blackwater (not anymore, but the old Blackwater).
Q: But why is it the one exception? They want to eliminate all the other publicly funded agencies, but increase the budget for the military.
George Lakoff: There are a couple of important things here. In the Strict Father morality, force is important. The father must maintain his authority and punish and maintain authority by use of force No backtalk! America should tell everybody else what to do, and have the force to back it up. There’s another part: when you suppoort the military, you support the military-industrial complex, which is supporting corporations. Private corporations which build things, including private army. It fits the idea of masculinity. This is important. Harvey Mansfield wrote a book on masculinity, and was one of the main mentors of the neoconservatives. This is about strict father morality. That’s what the military is about. There’s a reason conservatives opposed gays int he military. They feared gay soldiers would come on to others. They didn’t worry whether male soldiers would come on to female soldiers, b/c sdomination of women is part of the strict father morality.
Q: But they’re able to make the eception on taxation for that purpose alone?
GL: But not for millionaires.
Q: Wondering how you think bout hate and the role that hate plays in right wing discourse, and the use of white supremacy hatred tropes. How might a progressive discourse play with hate as the backdrop of the right wing.
GL: This is not true of all conservatives, but it is very real. One thing I didn’t mention is the moral metaphor. The idea is that the people who are moral should rule. The way you tell who should rule is by looking at who has been ruling in the past. God above man, man above nature, men above women, straights above gays, Christians above non-Christians. There’s a moral hierarchy there. Not all conservatives have all of it. Not all of them are bigots. Nevertheless it’s an extension of the same hierarchy. So the authority of conservatism must be maintained and spread, because the highest value in that system is maintaining the system itself. Why do conservatives change position on ideas that they proposed and were adopted by Obama – and then oppose them? Because anything that might help Obama is bad for conservatism.
Q: In this campaign, seems that Obama is trying to reclaim the mantle of warrior president. Bin Laden is dead, GM is alive. Can you talk about how well that’s going to work?
GL: In US political discourse, there are three kinds of narratives that stand out: The Hero-Villain narrative, the Rags to Riches discourse and there’s the nurturing parent discourse. Obama has all three sewn up. Romney has trouble with the Rags to Riches one, although his grandfather did it, and he has the same grit (you heard that over and over at the RNC). Then he’s heroic because Bain Capital saved Staples (not mentioning the ones they destroyed). This is the general way that this goes. Those are major narratives that you expect politicians to have and the Obama campaign has them. That doesn’t mean they will or won’t work for the election. The interesting thing is the reaction to that in the convention hall. Even people who were more progressive than Obama cheered those narratives. They’re important in our culture, and the campaign is using them. Whether they’ll work, I can’t say.
Colin McDonald, MIT undergraduate student: I read Richard Fehler’s “Nudge” recently – do you agree with his thesis?
GL: It depends on the decisions you’re getting people to make. This is part of what iws being used to decide what medical tests to give people. There’s an argument on cost-benefit terms that women who are 40 should not get tested for breast cancer, you should wait until they’re 50, because there’s only a 3% additional risk. Multiply that out to the female population, and you don’t want to talk about 45,000 deaths, even though it’s only 3%. Some of these uses can be beneficial, some can be the opposite. The idea of using it across the board, I think, is immoral.