The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) by Pinker Steven

Author:Pinker, Steven [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141015477
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2008-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

A realist interpretation of conceptual metaphor casts a different light on the application of metaphor and framing to politics. True to his cognitive theory, Lakoff states that “frames trump facts” in the minds of citizens, and that the dominant frames are imposed by those in power to serve their interests. It’s a condescending and cynical theory of politics, implying that average people are indiscriminately gullible and that political debate cannot and should not be about the actual merits of policies and people. But Lakoff’s political theory does not follow from the nature of conceptual metaphor any more than his theory of scientific knowledge does. Metaphors and their framings are not “fixed in the neural structures of people’s brains” but can be examined, doubted, and even ridiculed (remember Woody Allen snapping his chin down on some guy’s fist).

One can just imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff’s Orwellian advice and renamed “taxes” as “membership fees.” (Indeed, Orwell himself singled out revenue enhancement as an egregious euphemism for a tax increase in his famous 1949 essay “Politics and the English Language.”) No one has to hear the metaphor tax relief to think of taxes as an affliction; I suspect that that sentiment has been around for as long as taxes have been around. And do frames really always trump facts? Lakoff’s evidence is that people don’t realize that they are really better off with higher taxes, because any savings from a federal tax cut would be offset by increases in local taxes and private services. But if that is a fact, it has to be demonstrated the old-fashioned way, as an argument backed with numbers—and in the face of people’s perception, not entirely deluded, that some portion of their federal taxes goes to pork-barrel projects, corporate welfare, bureaucratic waste, and so on. Many Democrats have chided Lakoff for underestimating voters by trying to repackage 1960s-style leftism rather than coming up with compelling new ideas.50

But isn’t it undeniable that beliefs and decisions are affected by how the facts are framed? Yes, but that is not necessarily irrational. Different ways of framing a situation may be equally consistent with the facts being described in that very sentence, but they make different commitments about other facts which are not being described. As such, rival framings can be examined and evaluated, not just spread by allure or imposed by force. To take the most obvious example, taxes and membership fees are not two ways of framing the same thing: if you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will cease to provide you with its services, but if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. Nor are liberation and invasion factually interchangeable. One implies that the bulk of the populace resents its current overlords and welcomes the arriving army; the other implies the opposite. Debaters who frame an event in these two ways are making competing predictions about unobserved facts, just like scientists who

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.