By: Persona

Persona — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:38:34 +0000

Thank you PDT, PhD, for that insightful and honest comment. I read part of one of this man’s books once. I cannot remember who recommended it to me. It was the first time I ever troubled to return a book by U.S. Mail to Amazon, making sure that I received a full refund. The man is a charlatan, peddling rank political trash. It is not difficult to see through him, if you read him, notwithstanding his own high opinion of his mastery of manipulative rhetoric. But it is sad such a fraud should be trotted out before young, manipulable college students as if he were an authority figure. A sign of how low academia’s standards have fallen. He’s no teacher. He’s nothing but a self-promoting huckster of propaganda and spin control “techniques” to political buyers deluded enough to think a university platform amounts to a hill of beans. All it usually amounts to is cheap labor for the “teacher” to exploit in his own self-promotional schemes.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:14:01 +0000

I was an undergraduate psychology major at Cal in the early 90s, and I took a class Lakoff taught called “Mind and Language”. The required readings for the class were all written by him of course. No other readings were required, or even suggested.
One day, about half way through the semester, he made this claim in class that the work he had done with Mark Johnson was the very first work to claim that time, space, and causality were the fundamental categories the mind uses to organize knowledge.
Now, I was also a philosophy minor, and as any good student of sophia knows, Kant said exactly that in Critique of Pure Reason. And I’m sure that Plato probably said it too. So when he paused for questions, I raised my hand and pointed out that Kant had said just what he was claiming to be proposing for the first time. He seemed caught off guard and hastily responded that it was Mark Johnson who was the philosopher and that he (Lakoff) didn’t know anything about the philosophy of it. I was shocked; how could he claim to not know what one of the single more important premises of Pure Reason was?
A week or so later, he began presenting his interpretations of Eleanor Rosch’s work on concepts and categories. I happened to be taking that very class from her that same semester. What he was explaining about them did not at all mesh with what I was learning about her ideas, directly from the source. I asked her about it, what he says about her ideas in “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, and she flat out said he was misrepresenting her ideas and conclusions to further his own ideas. Later that week in Lakoff’s class, I asked him some questions, explaining what Eleanor Rosch herself said were the meanings of some of the ideas of her he was presenting in class. While I don’t remember exactly what he said in response, he was clearly dodging my questions and failed to give any sort of substantive response. As the semester wore on, he would never call on me if any one else’s hand were up during Q&A periods, and even when I was the only one with my hand up to ask a question, he often ignored me.
At the end of the semester, we had to write a term paper analyzing some aspects of the use of metaphor in language and how it relates to cognition, but the assignment was set up such that we had to presuppose the truth and validity of his claims to do the assignment. He was clearly sifting through us as a source for ideas to further his own work. I was going to write a critical paper of some of his main claims in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and use not only Rosch’s own answers to my questions about his ideas to rebut him, but other information I had come across as well. When I took the draft of my term paper to the graduate teaching assistant for the class, she read it over and told me that he was going to be grading the term papers for the class himself, and that even if I had written a dissertation quality paper in Linguistics for the class, I would not earn better than a C in the class because my paper took a position critical of his ideas and claims.
It was a sad awakening for me to the realities of academic politicking. I wanted a good grade, I couldn’t afford to sabotage my GPA so I redid the paper, and towed the line to get the grade I wanted. I was left with an impression that he was one of the most disingenuous and self serving people I have ever had the misfortune to come across in academia. I have no respect for the man what so ever anymore, and I find I can’t take his ideas seriously, or consider them to have any value or merit, even if they actually might because of my experience with how he taught and conducted his classes. He was one of the most intellectually shady people I have ever met in my entire career.
Unfortunately, he’s taken what were initially a good set of ideas to come out of an exciting time and place (the late years of the cognitive revolution at Cal Berkeley) and tried to make a career off of them, extending them beyond their useful or rational bounds. Much as Chomsky has in many ways. It’s ironic, he used to rail on and one against Chomsky in that class, and now as far as I can see he’s become exactly what he was bashing and criticizing all those years ago. Sad really.
PDT, PhD
Psychology Dept.
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
University of California, Merced.

Comments on: George Lakoff and the linguistics wars

By: Persona

By: bowser