Angela writes to Paul Rosenberg:
does lakoff have a take on Freud? or what would you think the comparisons might be?
angela
Doyle No Lakoff doesn't. He writes rather well though on issues of why mathematics over influences thinking on language (the Chomskyan influence), and why that is a problem. Lakoff would be a social constructionist I think in the sense that people would understand that Freud was addressing how society creates mental constructs. But I would imagine since Lakoff is very scientifically oriented that he would not really refer much to Freud. Freud being a historical rather than theoretical influence in science. Lakoff would call himself a connectionist. That refers to the influence of parallel distributed processing thinking upon how we see the mind work. Lakoff's book on "Moral Politics" is brilliant in my opinion for its applications to Marxist thinking. He takes on something like what goes on here on LBO where people argue in these futile attempts to define or consider "civility". Lakoff shows the way in which people broadly will construct "moral" politics and some sense that things change not because one argues logically but that people form their opinions from home life, and that those things are muddles in most of us, but that certain forms such as right wing morality are broken over time because people find ways to make life nicer and sweeter than does the right wing model of the "Stern Leader" Father. yours, Doyle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990211/6f5c4d25/attachment.htm>