Talk:George Lakoff
From Academic Kids
This is the most recent discussion. For very old news, see Talk:George Lakoff/Archive.
This article seems to have been written from someone with a rather odd take on Lakoff. I'm removing a number of passeges that do more harm than good, in addition to doing some reorganizing and rephrasing. A coherent explanation of Lakoff's actual ideas is needed, but I decided I couldn't attempt that before doing some housecleaning.
Here are some things removed:
- [Lakoff is a] cognitive scientist well known for his unorthodox views of the scientific process, and its supposed central position in the culture of developed countries as an assumed neutral point of view.
Removed. Well known to whom? Although Lakoff may be a relativist in certain senses, I don't think Lakoff is an avid critic of the scientific process; without that process, his work is basically meaningless. And what does this have to do with developed vs non-developed countries?
- He is, with Rafael E. Núñez, the primary proponent of the embodied mind thesis:
- "We are neural beings," Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
Removed. First, I don't think Núñez and Lakoff are alone in advocating an "embodied mind thesis". Second, that quote is ok, but it would be much better if it said what book it was from. Finally, I'm not sure this is worth presenting in such a brief, sound-bite form.
- Lakoff seems to discard falsifiability and some basic tenets of particle physics entirely. In particular, he asserts, in an idiosyncratic claim extending those published in "The Embodied Mind", that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias
This is incoherent. Falsifiability of what? Also, don't mention "particle physics" without explaining the connection; I feel this has been inserted only to add credibility to a weak argument.
- "any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is."
Fine, but redundant.
- Despite his attempts at some degree of scientific neutrality, his work shows (and to some extent even admits) the influence of his liberal (in his own sense) view of the world, and tends to be more palatable to those on the American political left.
Oops. I wrote that. It was only referring to Moral Politics, and should have been moved to its article.
- Some members of the anti-globalization movement have been heavily influenced by Lakoff's work, perhaps as much as by that of fellow linguist Noam Chomsky.
Who? I don't see any obvious connections between Lakoff and the anti-globalization folks. Also, I'm curious: assuming there actually are such people inspired by Lakoff, do they actually have a clue what he is talking about?
- Lakoff and Chomsky's respective views of linguistics are almost as different as can be.
I wrote that. I'd say it's true, but it doesn't fit with the current organization of the article, and it's kind of useless if it isn't fleshed out further.
--Ryguasu 23:10 Nov 22, 2002 (UTC)
Yup, still fighting against the mess that 24 created. Amazing how much damage can be done by a single individual. AxelBoldt 04:00 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)
Changed the "Trivia" section which made Robin Lakoff sound trivial. --Dante Alighieri
I don't have any opinions about Robin Lakoff; I just thought it was kind of silly to be talking about husbands and wives of any sort in the introductory paragraph. Sorry. By the way, are you sure Robin and George are married? The dedication from my Where Mathematics Comes From says his wife is named Kathleen Frumkin. --Ryguasu 09:54 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)
Well slap me silly... I guess I've been wrong all these years. :( Must be a coincidence then. I'm removing the link about Robin Lakoff from the George Lakoff page. And don't worry, I didn't think you were intentionally trivializing it, I just thought it was a less than ideal choice of words. :) --Dante Alighieri
Perhaps other people have made the same mistake; the situation certainly sounds plausible. In that case, it might make sense to put back the "trivia" section, and include the fact about who he isn't married to. =) Or maybe that is getting a bit too far afield for an encyclopedia.... --Ryguasu 10:01 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)
I agree, that's a bit far afield... I must say, though, that I feel ESPECIALLY stupid seeing as how I attended UC Berkeley and took several courses in the Linguistics department. Sigh. --Dante Alighieri
I'm trying to assess how idiosyncratic an understanding of Lakoff and Johnson's first book feminist Julie Nelson has. It's a little hard for me to check, since I don't have the book. The passage in question is:
- That is, to the metaphorical connections outlined by Lakoff and Johnson of up-in-center-control-rational we can add "superior" and "masculine," and to the connections of "down-out-periphery-submission-emotional we can add "inferior" and "feminine".
This seems to suggest that, somewhere in their book, Lakoff and Johnson argue for one monolithic concept called "up-in-center-control-rational", and another monolithic concept called "down-out-periphery-submission-emotional", which seems not entirely plausible given my understanding of these guys. Certainly they talk about up vs. down and how this connects metaphorically to other domains (e.g. more vs. less, better vs. worse). But do they discuss these more monolithic concepts as well? --Ryguasu 23:40 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
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"Lakoff would strongly reject a number of formulations of the Strong AI position"
There is a difference between saying that
- 1) the human mind is produced by physical brain processes
and saying that
- 2) a human-like mind could be implemented in computer hardware.
Saying #1 does not automatically rule out #2. Some people may have suggested that it might be possible to understand human-like minds as a general phenomenon by making AI with human-like mental abilities, but it is not clear to me that even this claim need be rejected by someone who is a mind-brain monist.
Does anyone have a source that illustrates rejection of a version of strong AI by Lakoff? JWSchmidt 04:20, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Rejecting a number of formulations of Strong AI position?
<quote> ...embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details". (Thus Lakoff would strongly reject a number of formulations of the Strong AI position.) </quote>
I think that parenthetical statement may be a non-sequitur. I don't know whether Lakoff does or does not reject these formulations, and I'm not arguing here about his views, but neither does the parenthetical statement. It is saying that a consequence of holding the embodied mind view would be to reject a number of the formulations of the strong AI position. While it's not clear exactly which formulations are meant, I do not believe that the emobided mind view should cause us in any way to reject the Strong AI position. Strong AI does not have to mean creating intelligence in exactly the same way that humans have it. And if it did have this as its goal, wouldn't the embodied mind argue against it? No, it wouldn't, for there is no reason why we couldn't also implement those "implementation details" as part of our computational model.
- hi look, re: that - it is all a question of *what* you are "computing". Trivially, *everything in the universe* is computation or expressible in terms of computation (see e.g. Searle). The issue is whether a process is *best expressed* in terms of contemporary computation theory, or some other theory, for example one based on sets of non-linear differential equations (which in practice you would probably model with a digital computer, so as you could integrate them). In general, "embodied mind" folks, of whom there are a huge number now, overlap with the dynamicists in cogntive science. That is what the original poster had in mind I think. "Strong AI", well, you can argue about that if you like, but I think thats coming from a computer science perspective. The real argument is whether there are states in the brain that *represent* "things" in the world.The embodied mind/dynamicist folks would often hold that it does not work that way.
- Most modern theorists reject the assertion that adult human linguistic or symbolic intelligence (as implied by the Church-Turing thesis), or playing chess, is what humans mean when they recognize each other as being concious, wise, or aware. Turing's Test also highlights these questions by suggesting that adult humans perhaps assume too much based on mere language - while paradoxically rejecting or ignoring the intelligence of great apes, who can master 2000-4000 word vocabularies.
- It's the relationship between what mathematicians and scientists understand as "computed" versus what living creatures with bodies walking or swimming around with other bodies in ecologies would say had been successfully decided. Difference between "decided" and "computed" being bodily commitment - "intelligence" can't really exist outside some ecology enabling or requiring action. Key distinction made by body philosophers back to Wittgenstein. Turing and Wittgenstein talked about this but in terms most people don't seem to understand as being "about this"...
- Finally, AI that doesn't respect living creatures with bodies won't respect us either - it's not like we can patch in a moral code when we notice that it wants to slaughter us all as we are slaughtering apes... has to be part of the foundation ontology to recognize certain empathic common grounds... so this is an extension of the insect-makers' argument that you must solve the problems of getting around, finding food, getting along with others of your kind who find the same food in the same place (and maybe fight over it) before you can look at these absurdly abstract problems like chess or "go"... which are meaningless as tests of anything a living being would care about.
- I think AI "progress" is disappointing because it sets up a false goal - honest assessments of intelligence would set the Great Apes up as benchmarks and assume that humans are the deluded ones making up criteria for their own prestige (as a species, or as researchers specializing in that criteria).
Moral Politics
I think the "his book isn't unique" thesis is a bit strongly presented here and not terribly correct. Lakoff's analysis of language and framing goes a bit beyond what Orwell had in mind (and Orwell was not exactly the first person to argue that language determined quite a lot of thought, I am fairly sure) and is quite different from an Orwellian take in many respects (Orwell's position seems to be to have been that language can be used to frame things, Lakoff's is that language is always used to frame things). Jane Jacob's "guardian moral syndrome" and "commercial moral syndrome" looks only superficially like the sort of thing that Lakoff argues in Moral Politics, which is about metaphor analysis. To say that Lakoff is just derivative/duplicative of these works is incorrect and POV at the very least -- you can of course read similarities into all sorts of works (Thomas Kuhn's idea of a paradigm, Foucault's idea of the episteme, etc. etc.) if you want to. Here is seems to serve the point of trying to criticize Lakoff in a not very NPOV way. If these are specific criticisms which have been put forth by prominent critics, then they should be attributed to those critics. Otherwise they should be deleted, if they are just the opinion of a Wikipedia editor. --Fastfission 01:28, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Pronunciation
I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced "Lay-koff". I say this as someone who has taken a class from him, know a number of his close friends, and once organized a talk by him. I've never heard anybody pronounce it otherwise. Any reason to suspect I'm wrong on this? (It would be somewhat mortifying if I was, since I've addressed him as such many times). --Fastfission 20:05, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- You're quite right. In IPA his name would be rendered Template:IPA. — mark ✎ 11:48, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
