To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:14:51 -0800
Subject: [s-acc] Lakoff and behavior
Jln (is that what you prefer?):
Thank you for this engaging post.
I can see what you mean -- my statements were not as scholarly as they could have been. I will admit that some of the things I said came from lectures I attended and can not cite. My main source, however, was George Lakoff's The Political Mind.
I have more to say than I can say in one relatively brief response. This is of course not a "scholarly" list since it relates to lived experience and issues of responsibility.
I should start by saying that I attended "Cognitive Science" seminars at U.C. Berkeley for 10 years, and that Lakoff was one of some 10-12 professors responsible for the program.
Lakoff's specialty is cognitive linguistics, the structure of the brain as it relates to language. What he uncovered is that the same person often has conflicting world views in the same mind, each one triggered by key words or concepts. It is the nature of these world views, or models, that touches on this subject.
To be brief, a central project of the S-ACC is to develop the advocacy appropriate to challenging the "behavioral object" system of 'ideation' that prevails in the 'mental health' system and reaches into political thinking more broadly. Loosely put, that's the discrimination that targets our 'dignity'.
Most of my information on civil rights per se is from over 20 years experience in different kinds of civil rights.
Which no doubt will help us with this discussion. :-)
The range of experience on this list is .. extraordinary.Regarding Lakoff, a few comments. Noam Chomsky, I was told in the main course for my psychology major, was the person whose theory of language acquisition showed "definitively" that our minds are not "an accumulation of conditioned reflexes" that reflect "mental behavior." In other words,
science is not behind the behavioral management system that rules "mental health," and that is acknowledged in some form, even in mainstream conventional psychology.Lakoff was a student of Chomsky and his philosophical perspectives carry forward the "disconnect direction" that Chomsky's critique imposes on "mental health 'ideation'." However it's not unique in so doing, and there are a substantial number of others that also "move the chain." In Berkeley Cognitive Science that included the advocacies of Dan Slobin (psychology of Vygotsky), Eleanor Rosch (Buddhist psychology), and
Hubert Dreyfus in existential philosophy.The point is not to argue in contrary to your contribution, only to indicate that for the purposes of this list, we will all do well to try to explain how what we discuss relates to helping us put together the grassroots advocacy for 'dignity'.
Thank you again very much.
Best
Andrew