Dick,
Some questions I have as to Lakoff is to what extent does he refer to such great students of language as Saussure, Helmjev, Wittgenstein, Jakobson etc. or into the modern problematical areas of poststructuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism.
GEM turns on the data of consciousness as integrated with the data of sense and it suggests how "the development of language fuses with the development of knowledge" (Insight 1958, p. 555).
Even a rather good philosopher of language such as Donald Davidson rejects the idea of mental events in. his truth-conditional semantics. He also rejected the conception of linguistic understanding as having to do with conventions or rules. Where does Lakoff stand on that?
I have downloaded Lakoff and Johnson's book but did not see them going deeply into such issues. They seem to address themselves less to an schema of explanatory knowledge (as theory) and more to commonsense life processes. Others on the Lonerganforum have asked such questions.
Already in Verbum, e. g. p. 185, Lonergan went deep into the habits of human intellect as "NOUS, grasping the point, EPISTEME, grasping its implications; reflective SOPHIA and PHRONESIS, understanding what is and what is to be done, and finally TEKNE, grasping how to do it."
While some praise Lakoff's latest book, "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", they also caution that his
approach has certain inherent weaknesses such as the assumptions he makes. See this site
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Lakoff.html from which I here quote:
"Lakoff's approach of developing a general model of cognition on the basis of semantics has certain inherent weaknesses, in spite of its spectacular results. It cannot be taken for granted that semantic categories accurately represent cognitive domains--language may have access only to the output of other cognitive modules, and their domain-specificity may be partly elided by linguistic categories. For this reason, evidence for cognitive domains must be sought and demonstrated independently of language. However, semantics can be utilized as a way of generating hypotheses about domain-specificity, which can then be independently verified.
The presence of cognitive domains also raises the question of how these came about. Lakoff assumes they flow out of our physical constitution and the nature of the world; a more precise way of speaking about this is evolutionary psychology. A consideration of the environment in which humans evolved would permit us to map the source domain onto a proper domain, and thus generate a more detailed list of properties and entailments. Such historical considerations would also allow us to provide principled answers to which domains do not have their own preconceptual structure: namely, domains that either did not exist in the ancestral environment (agriculture, most forms of technology, civilization) or domains that were not available or significant to survival (microbiology, quantum physics, chemistry).
Moreover, Lakoff's notion of metaphor as a mapping from one cognitive domain to another as "one of the great imaginative triumphs of the human mind" has been echoed by the British paleo- anthropologist Steven Mithen (1996), who has suggested that the transition from Neanderthal man to Cro Magnon is marked precisely by the ability to "switch cognitive frames": the paleolithic blossoming in art may be correlated with the ability to think metaphorically.
Lakoff's proposal on metaphor is a particularly pregnant one for literary studies-- not because ordinary speech is mainly literal (it clearly is not), but because literature is a deliberate forefronting of linguistic devices, a cultivation of special effects. Clarifying what is the source and proper domains of a metaphor promises to throw light on the way meaning is constructed in reading".
This latter phrase brings us into the issues of Constructivism in science, ethics, mathematics and also into Gödel's theory of the constructible universe and the foundations of logic which BL does not ignore,
John
