Similarly, I don’t see what ‘competing theories in theoretical linguistics today’ has to do with it. As I’m sure you’re aware, no significant work has explicitly been done in GS since the 1970’s. You’d be right to claim that this proves your point about GS ‘losing’, unless it could be shown (and important linguistics claim that it can be shown, and Chomsky has admitted as much) that IS and GS were more similar than different, and that IS subsumed, rather than disposed of, much of the GS research programme. Your post read as if Lakoff challenged the foundations of Chomskyan linguistics. He did not; he demured from an central Chomskyan conclusion while accepting most Chomskyan premises, and indeed, most other Chomskyan conclusions.

Everything is debatable, my friend. That’s why we have the Comments section.

My words: “He didn’t try to take on Chomsky. He did take on Chomsky (and for years after he spent 3 years as a ‘pompous graduate student’). He and several other first-rate linguists, some of the most important of whom were Chomsky’s students. I assume you know something about the debate between Generative and (Chomsky’s) Interpretive Semantics, so I also assume that you are aware that your claim that (Lakoff and) GS ‘lost’ the debate is highly debatable. I further assume that you have read Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates, and that you understand the upshot of the book to be that GS didn’t ‘lose’ on account of theoretical failures.”

Do I assume too much here?

“The minute we introduce a plan, we have to solve the problem” is how one senior Democratic aide explained it to me. “We are the minority party. It’s not our job to fix things.”

Also how many loose cannons there are in the Democrats vs. Republicans? How many nutjobs are there that go way off the party line? Both parties obviously have their nutjobs, but would you say one party is more prone to nutjobbery? I am asking as a foreigner who only has foreign knowledge of the American political scene.

Most big blue campaigns (and I’ve worked on a few) spend a considerable piece of their budget on message consultants, who use focus groups, polling, and other mechanisms to figure out what sort of message is going to get the most favor from the largest number of people. The problem is that the resulting message is always ridiculously vague: something like “security for all Americans” or “a new opportunity plan.”

Democratic candidates usually have no trouble repeating these mantras, but they aren’t substantive and they don’t make for a campaign platform that people will trust, unless said people already hate the Republicans. And the mantras are nowhere near as effective as the Republican mantras, e.g. “they want to kill our babies!”

Lakoff, by the way, is merely providing an academic gloss on what Frank Luntz has been doing for years (not to mention Newt Gingrich fought hard for when he occupied a leadership position in the Republican party).

Yes, I agree with you about Lakoff. But what Frank Luntz does cannot be described by theoretical linguistics, it is more branding/marketing in my humble opinion. This was the bone I had to pick with the technical aspects of the article.

Are the Democrats confused about message? Sure. Here I agree with you and other commentators… Regardless, why repeat praise for the good parts of your post when I can spark a debate on what I’m not convinced by? :-)

That, unfortunately, is a debate I am not willing to get into as it requires some serious academic background. Some interesting reading suggested by Mr. McIntosh above, but once again form and function. The relationship between language and thought is fairly clear in my opinion, but language and culture is where things get tricky.

The thing I came away from in reading this article is the realization of some of the lengths political parties go to get our votes.

Invoke argument by authority, why don’t you? I’m a Harvard grad; this kind of thing stopped working on me midway through my first year.

I made a very specific claim: Pinker’s evolutionary-psychological speculation is pseudo-science; I’m not speaking to any other part of his copious arguments. But I have a very strong anti-evolutionary-psychology bias, so take my opinion here with a grain of salt.

I also have a (more limited) background in branding and opinion research. I agree that Lakoff’s arguments are far too glib, but that’s an entirely different issue from the impact of framing – as you yourself admit. I’ve watched opinion swing radically in a number of settings when different framing strategies are used… in polling, in-depth interviews, and in focus-group research.

Lakoff, by the way, is merely providing an academic gloss on what Frank Luntz has been doing for years (not to mention Newt Gingrich fought hard for when he occupied a leadership position in the Republican party).

Are the Democrats confused about message? Sure. Here I agree with you and other commentators: Republicans have been far more “on-message,” but there are distinct downsides to that kind of discipline. Regardless, why repeat praise for the good parts of your post when I can spark a debate on what I’m not convinced by? :-)

If we consider Colonel Boyd’s OODA loop, we see how the logosphere sometimes effects thought, sometimes not.

If we rely just on intuition then it is unlikely that language plays much role. If we rely on intuition — what Boyd called letting our Orientation “implicitly guide and control” us — then the effects of language probably will be drowned out by genetic heritage, cultural heritage, previous experience, etc. However, the more we try to think logically the more we try to decide — the more linguistic tricks can hurt us. From parables to logic, decision involves the mechanical manipulation of words.

Another reason to trust fingertip feeling: language won’t hurt you so much.

Mr. Nexon, accusing the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and former professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT of practicing psuedo-science deserves a serious presentation of evidence.

I concede that framing is complex, and it may be a simplification to base my reasoning solely on a Whorfian counter-argument. But as someone with academic experience in theoretical linguistics and a professional background in branding and marketing, I thought the technical aspects of the article were crap.

More importantly, and regardless of any arguments about framing or neurolinguistic programming, I thought the article did a good job at describing the level of confusion inside the Democratic party, and that is what I tried to concentrate on in my post. What I am looking for here, is somebody to say the Bushies do it too!

Language Barriers.

The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called “one-two-many”Â?. In this, the word for “one”Â? translates to “roughly one”Â? (similar to “one or two”Â? in English), the word for “two”Â? means “a slightly larger amount than one”Â? (similar to “a few”Â? in English), and the word for “many”Â? means “a much larger amount”Â?. In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.

Read the rest.

I’m not familiar with Pinker’s ideas but in my experience working with gifted students, the dominant modality of a person’s thinking varies considerably from person to person. Some ppl are predominantly image thinkers, others mix in varying amounts of symbolic representation and a spatial or other ” sense”. It was said of Mozart that he “heard” entire complex sets of music in his head and Nikola Tesla claimed flashes of insight that ran the gamut. You and Curzon, accomplished linguists that you both are, probably think in a style somewhat differently than I do given my miserable capacity for learning foreign languages (as well as music).

Lakoff ’s linguistic ” framing” does represent an unconscious psychological prompt for the unwary. However the key variable for this technique being effective is first securing the subject’s attention – not just throwing out a pre-set list of key words ad nauseum. Lakoff’s relying on repetition to do the job because he is not addressing the issue of attention.

Basically, without an effort to consciously devise a ” hook” to grab the mass of ppl who are effectively tuned-out, the people most likely to hear the framing message is the audience already predisposed to hear the message -i.e. the base.

And Pinker does indeed rock!