Quotessence
Home / Authors / George Lakoff
George Lakoff

George Lakoff Quotes

Linguist

Filter quotes by topic

AllReasonMetaphorPhilosophyPeopleEmbodied MindCognitive ScienceMindBarackBodyPolitical PsychologyTermEmpathyLanguageMedicineMetaphoricalSensesSomaStructureThinkingValues

Famous George Lakoff Quotes

“In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.”

ReasonPhilosophyLogicMetaphorConceptCognitive ScienceEmbodied Mind
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
Create image

“...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.”

ReasonPhilosophyTheoryMetaphorThoughtEmbodied MindEmbodied Realism
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
Create image

“In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.”

ReasonPhilosophyMetaphorAbstraction
Author:George Lakoff
Create image

“A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think. ... Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.”

PhilosophyCognitive Science
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
Create image

“...[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.”

PhilosophyBiasSelf KnowledgeCognitive ScienceConceptual Analysis
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
Create image

“Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object control is the basis of one of the five most fundamental metaphors for our inner life. To control objects, we must learn to control our bodies. We learn both forms of control together. Self-control and object control are inseparable experiences from earliest childhood. It is no surprise that we should have as a metaphor-a primary metaphor-Self Control is Object Control.”

ShouldMindSelfPhilosophyBodyTogetherFormPsychologyFiveChildhoodObjectsShould HaveBasesFundamentalsMedicineSurpriseMetaphorSensesPrimariesSurprisingSelf ControlHolding OnInseparableInner LifeSoma
Author:George Lakoff
Create image