Greetings Pen 'Ellers, Thanks Joanna for forwarding Lakoff's interview. I've enjoyed reading Lakoff, especially on philosophy and mathematics. Lakoff argues for 'embodiment' which I think helps to clarify the many muddy arguments about cognition and dissipate the mind duality that permeates the culture in the developed countries. Additionally, Lakoff was a student of Chomsky's and participated in the so-called language wars and broke with Chomsky over the issue of inheriting a grammar structure in the brain. So Lakoff to my way of understanding things, continues a solid left historical perspective on thought.
Given that, Lakoff's approach to moral systems seems to me to have some problems. First is interpretation of framing to use in language to bind a social community. It seems to me not so obvious as Lakoff makes his system seem that framing can be used to build a left movement. What seems to me to be missing is a way to map a moral system so we can build with it. My first guess about moral systems is that they reflect values or the structure of emotion that binds cortex structures together. So if we talk about moral systems we have to really have a grasp of emotional structure as well as the language structures of metaphor. Secondly while Lakoff has powerful things to say about metaphor, and extremely useful, it seems to me that the structure of using that is not well addressed. What I imagine in this case is that an architecture of moral systems is possible to consider. This sort of reasoning on my part looks rather like the historical processes that religions try to accomplish. Essentially how to construct societies on the larger and larger scale where everyone can be together in very large units. To give an example if one considers the bible as an example, the prohibitions against killing probably reflected the conflict structure of groups being modified for a larger tribal structure than nomadic peoples previously could not have considered. In other words the emotion structure that previously led to groups killing individuals was being modified to adapt to a much larger social structure. Emotion structure underlies 'moral' systems. Moral systems as I think Lakoff rightly observes are metaphorical, i.e. neural network like, but without an adequate theory of value (emotion structure) using just metaphor is to me a laborious endeavor to track down how words are currently being used. This neglects the change that happens in word usage as well. If one incorporates emotion structure into a metaphorical system I think one could look at that as well as a labor process. So that to take the metaphor of architecture a step further, each person constantly helps build an overall 'moral' system of the whole society. So that we might consider how to automate parts of the architecture to increase productivity. thanks, Doyle
