George Philip Lakoff (b.1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher. He is best known for his hypothesis that people’s lives are significantly impacted by the conceptual metaphors used to explain complex phenomena.
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, Lakoff earned a PhD in linguistics at Indiana University in 1966 and taught at Harvard University 1965–1969 and the University of Michigan 1969–1971. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1971–1972) and a professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, 1972–2016.
Lakoff’s notable works include Metaphors We Live By (1980, with Mark Johnson,) Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (1996; 2002; 2016,) Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004,) Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (2006.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Lakoff
A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.
—George Lakoff
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