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

“Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.”

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

“Fighting is found everywhere in the animal kingdom and nowhere so much as among human animals. Animals fight to get what they want--food, sex, territory, control, etc.--because there are other animals who want the same thing or who want to stop them from getting it. The same is true of human animals, except that we have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting our way. Being "rational animals," we have institutionalized our fighting in a number of ways, one of them being war. Even though we have over the ages institutionalized physical conflict and have employed many of our finest minds to develop more effective means of carrying it out, its basic structure remains essentially unchanged. In fights between brute animals, scientists have observed the practices of issuing challenges for the sake of intimidation, of establishing and defending territory, attacking, defending, counterattacking, retreating, and surrendering. Human fighting involves the same practices. Part of being a rational animal, however, involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument. We have arguments all the time in order to try to get what we want, and sometimes these "degenerate" into physical violence.”

WarReasonSexViolenceCivilizationArgumentInstitutionsMetaphorRationalControlTerritoryAnimalsHuman Animals
Author:George Lakoff
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

“...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.”

ReasonTruthMetaphorMeaningObjectivityCorrespondenceConceptualizationEmbodied 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

“Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.”

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

“Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.”

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

“Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.”

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

“The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”

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

“One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change-for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.”

PeopleReasonSimpleBrainTeachIdentityAspectStructureNarrativeUnlikelyWorldviewCognitiveCognitive Science
Book:The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics
Create image

“Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.”

PeopleReasonFactsPoliticalTheoryTrumpEnlightenmentAssumingFolksRidiculousConclusionSupposed To BeAssumptionLogicalMetaphorical
Author:George Lakoff
Create image

“Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

PeopleThinkingWellsMatterReasonActionFoundLanguageTermOrdinaryEverydayMarketingMetaphorContraryCharacteristicsEveryday LifeMonday MorningMetaphoricalThoughts And Actions
Book:Metaphors We Live By
Create image