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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5233735/671287
"Conservatives and progressives typically support opposite policies because they have opposite moral worldviews—opposite notions of right and wrong. Moral worldviews are important to people, part of their self-identity. People tend to think of themselves as good and moral, not taking into account that there could be an opposite view of what is moral."
"Only a tiny amount of our thought is conscious. A typical estimate is about 2 percent, with about 98 percent of thought unconscious.
Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious. The more that a neural “idea-circuit” is used, the stronger it gets—and may eventually become permanent, effectively “hard-wired.” Hence, most of what we will be discussing in this book occurs at the neural level and is likely to be unconscious."
"Deep and persisting moral worldviews tend to be part of your brain circuitry and tend to become part of your identity. In most cases, the neural wiring—and your identity—stay, and the facts are ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or attacked. It takes extraordinary openness, training, and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. Few members of the general public—or those in politics or the media—fit this profile."
"I work in a discipline that studies how people conceptualize the world. It is called cognitive science, which is the interdisciplinary study of the mind. It is a broad discipline, covering everything from vision, memory, and attention to everyday reasoning and language. The subfield most concerned with issues of worldview, that is, with everyday conceptualization, reasoning, and language, is cognitive linguistics. I have been a cognitive linguist virtually from the birth of the field, and it is my profession to study how we conceptualize our everyday lives and how we think and talk about them. The study of political concepts and political discourse falls under the job description of those in my field, though until now research in the area has been relatively sparse."
"One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science, one that comes from the study of commonsense reasoning, is that most of our thought is unconscious—not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it. We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say. We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts—concepts. When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system.
That is what I study: what, exactly, our unconscious system of concepts is and how we think and talk using that system of concepts. In recent years, my work has centered on two components of conceptual systems: conceptual metaphors and categories, especially radial categories and prototypes. A conceptual metaphor is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously. For example, many people may not be aware that we commonly conceptualize morality in terms of financial transactions and accounting. If you do me a big favor, I will be indebted to you, I will owe you one, and I will be concerned about repaying the favor. We not only talk about morality in terms of paying debts, but we also think about morality that way. Concepts like retribution, restitution, revenge, and justice are typically understood in such financial terms. As we shall see, examples like these are the tip of the iceberg. Much of moral reasoning is metaphorical reasoning, as will become apparent below. It should also become apparent, if this example does not already make it clear, that metaphorical thought need not be poetic or especially rhetorical. It is normal, everyday thought. Not every common concept is metaphorical, but a surprising number are."
"Much of what we read on the daily op-ed pages of our finest newspapers is metaphorical commonsense reasoning. Let us consider a very simple example, taken from a column by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry (as it appeared in the Houston Chronicle, section A, p. 30, February 4, 1995). The column begins straightforwardly enough:
The government of the District of Columbia is reeling from a newly discovered budget shortfall of at least $722 million and there is growing talk of a congressional takeover of the city.
After an example of spending he considers questionable, Raspberry says:
What is about to do us in . . . is the poor but compassionate mother with a credit card. To put it another way, a huge amount of the city’s stupendous debt is the result of the local government’s effort to do good things it can’t afford.
He then gives a list of examples of good things the city government wants to do and which he thinks it can’t afford, and finishes the column as follows:
But a good chunk of the underlying problem is the compassionate mom attitude that says: If it’s good for the kid to have, then I ought to buy it—and worry later about where the money will come from.
Well, Mom not only has reached her credit limit:she’s in so much trouble that scrimping and saving now won’t solve the problem. She’ll need a bailout from Congress. But then, she has to learn to say no—not just to junk food but to quality cuts of meat she can’t afford.
None of Raspberry’s readers have any problem understanding this column. He writes it as if it were just common sense. Yet, it is an elaborate conceptual metaphor, and he is reasoning in terms of this metaphor.
In the metaphor, the government is an overindulgent, impractical mother and the citizens are her children. She has no self-discipline; she is indulging her children irresponsibly, using money she doesn’t have. This is not merely politics, it is a story with a moral. The moral is that Mom will have to learn self-discipline (“to say no”) and self-denial (“to quality cuts of meat she can’t afford”). Only then will she be a good mother.
We all understand this column, and to many readers it will seem like common sense. But why ? Is the metaphor that government is a parent and the citizens are children newly made up ? Or is it familiar, a metaphor we already know ? And why should readers be willing to reason about a government in this way ? Why don’t they just reject the metaphor as ridiculous ? Why don’t readers—all readers—say in response, “What’s all this nonsense about indulgent moms ? Let’s get real and talk about the details of economics and policy.” But readers don’t. The column is “just common sense.” And moreover, it is conservative common sense.
The logical structure of the column is determined by metaphor, not by facts. One could have taken the same budget shortfall and framed it in a different way. One could have observed that Washington, D.C., must have city services beyond its population to serve the large number of relatively well-off civil service workers, lobbyists, and others who live in the wealthy suburbs but work in town. One could also have mentioned that it is the responsibility of Congress to see that the city is maintained properly and that it lives by a humane standard, indeed that it should set a standard for the country. One could then apply the metaphor of the government as parent to Congress, seeing Congress as a deadbeat dad, refusing to pay for the support of his children, the citizens of Washington, D.C. One could then have drawn the moral that deadbeat dad Congress must meet his responsibilities and pay, no matter how tough it is for him. This is just common sense—a different kind of common sense. What, exactly, is conservative common sense ? How does it differ from liberal common sense ? And what role, exactly, does metaphorical thought play in the everyday common-sense reasoning of conservatives and liberals ? As we shall see, the metaphor used in this column, that of the government as parent, has a great deal to do with conservative common sense in general, as well as with what conservatism is as a political and moral philosophy."
"Radial categories are the most common of human conceptual categories. They are not definable in terms of some list of properties shared by every member of the category. Instead, they are characterized by variations on a central model. Take the category mother. The central model is characterized by four submodels. (1) The birth model: the mother is one who gives birth. (2) The genetic model: the mother is the female from whom you get half your genetic traits. (3) The nurturance model: your mother is the person who raises and nurtures you. And (4) The marriage model: your mother is the wife of your father. In the most basic case, all conditions hold. But modern life is complex, and the category extends to cases where only some of these conditions are met. Hence, there are special terms like birth mother, genetic mother, foster mother, stepmother, surrogate mother, adoptive mother, and so on.
Another example of a radial category is forms of harm. The central case is physical harm. But the category also includes kinds of harm that are metaphorically understood in terms of physical harm, e.g., financial harm, political harm, social harm, and psychological harm. Our courts recognize that these are all forms of harm, yet they also recognize the centrality of physical harm, for which the most severe penalties are usually reserved.
Radial categories, with central cases and variations on them, are normal in the human mind. And, as we shall see, the categories of conservative and liberal are also radial categories. This is important to realize because conservative and liberal are very complex categories, with a great many variations. The theory of radial categories allows us to account for both the central tendencies and the variations."
"The central members of radial categories are one subtype of a general phenomenon called “prototypes” [...] There are many types of prototypes and it is important to discuss them at the outset since they will play a major role throughout the book. A prototype is an element of a category (either a subcategory or an individual member) that is used to represent the category as a whole in some sort of reasoning. All prototypes are cognitive constructions used to perform a certain kind of reasoning; they are not objective features of the world.
Here are some of the basic types of prototypes that play a role in American politics and that will recur throughout this book:
1. The central subcategory of a radial category: This provides the basis for extending the category in new ways and for defining variations. Political examples will include central types of liberals and conservatives.
2. A typical case prototype: This characterizes typical cases and is used to draw inferences about category members as a whole, unless it is made clear that we are operating with a nontypical case.
For example, what we consider to be typical birds fly, sing, are not predators, and are about the size of a robin or sparrow. If I say “There’s a bird on the porch,” you will draw the conclusion that it is a typical case prototype, unless I indicate otherwise. If I speak of a typical American, what comes to mind for many is an adult white male Protestant, who is native-born, speaks English natively, and so on.
3. An ideal case prototype: This defines a standard against which other subcategories are measured.
We will be discussing what conservatives and liberals think of as an ideal parent, an ideal citizen, and an ideal person.
4. An anti-ideal prototype: This subcategory exemplifies the worst kind of subcategory, a “demon” subcategory. It defines a negative standard.
Liberals and conservatives have very different kinds of demons, and we will discuss the types and how they are used in reasoning.
5. A social stereotype: This is a model, widespread in a culture, for making snap judgments—judgments without reflective thought—about an entire category, by virtue of suggesting that the stereotype is the typical case.
Social stereotypes are commonly used in unreflective or biased discourse. Examples include the Drunken Irishman (used to suggest that the Irish typically drink to excess), the Industrious Japanese (used to suggest that the Japanese are typically industrious), and so on. Ethnic and gender stereotypes constantly enter into political discourse, as do political stereotypes. Stereotypes can either be based on myth or on individual well-known examples.
6. A salient exemplar: A single memorable example that is commonly used in making probability judgments or in drawing conclusions about what is typical of category members.
It is commonplace in political discourse to use a salient exemplar as if it were a typical case; for example, popularizing the case of a single welfare cheater to suggest that everyone on welfare cheats.
7. An essential prototype: This is a hypothesized collection of properties that, according to a commonplace folk theory, characterizes what makes a thing the kind of thing it is, or what makes a person the kind of person he is.
Essential properties of birds are, among others, that they have feathers, wings, and beaks, and lay eggs. Rational thought is seen as an essential property of human beings. In moral discourse, the notion of character is seen as defined by an essential prototype. Your character is what makes you what you are and determines how you will behave.
None of these should be strange or unfamiliar. All of these are normal products of the human mind, and they are used in normal everyday discourse. There is nothing surprising about their use in politics, but we do need to be aware of how they are used. It is important, as we shall see, not to confuse a salient exemplar with a typical case, or a typical case (say, the typical politician) with an ideal case (like the ideal politician)."
"I found that, using analytic techniques from cognitive linguistics, I could describe the moral systems of both conservatives and liberals in considerable detail, and could list the metaphors for morality that conservatives and liberals seemed to prefer. What was particularly interesting was that they seemed to use virtually the same metaphors for morality but with different—almost opposite —priorities. This seemed to explain why liberals and conservatives could seem to be talking about the same thing and yet reach opposite conclusion —and why they could seem to be talking past each other with little understanding much of the time.
At this point, I asked myself a question whose answer was not at first obvious: What unifies each of the lists of moral priorities ? Is there some more general idea that leads conservatives to choose one set of metaphorical priorities for reasoning about morality, and liberals another ? Once the question was posed, the answer came quickly. It was what conservatives were talking about nonstop: the family. Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning."
"Consider conservatism. What does opposition to abortion have to do with opposition to environmentalism ? What does either have to do with opposition to affirmative action or gun control or the minimum wage ? A model of the conservative mind ought to answer these questions, just as a model of the liberal mind ought to explain why liberals tend to have the cluster of opposing political stands. The question of explanation is paramount. How, precisely, can one explain why conservatives and liberals have the clusters of policies they have ?
Even the basics of conservative and liberal discourse require explanation. Conservatives argue that social safety nets are immoral because they work against self-discipline and responsibility. Liberals argue that tax cuts for the wealthy are immoral because they help people who don’t need help and don’t help people who do need help. What moral systems lead each of them to make these arguments and to reject the arguments of the other ? Why do conservatives like to talk about discipline and toughness, while liberals like to talk about need and help ? Why do liberals like to talk about social causes, while conservatives don’t ?
The answers, I will argue, come from differences in their models of the family and in family-based morality—from the distinction between what I will call the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models. The link between family-based morality and politics comes from one of the most common ways we have of conceptualizing what a nation is, namely, as a family. It is the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of the Nation-as-Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality."
"Because people do not use the same models in all aspects of their lives, a political conservative could very well use the Nurturant Parent model in his family life but not in his political life, just as a political liberal could use Strict Father morality in his family life but the Nurturant Parent model in his political life. Strict fathers can be political liberals and nurturant parents can be political conservatives.
Contemporary conservative politics tries to link the family use and the political use of the models more closely ; to point out that conservatives have the Strict Father model of the family and to convince others with the Strict Father model of the family that they should be political conservatives. I suspect that they are being successful at convincing people who believe in and identify with the Strict Father model of the family to vote conservative. For example, blue-collar workers who may previously have voted with liberals because of their union affiliation or economic interests may now, for cultural reasons, identify with conservatives and vote for them, even though it may not be in their economic interest to do so."
"It is vital to be as clear as possible about the line between what one can discover about morality and politics using the tools of one’s profession and what one’s own moral and political commitments are.
There are those who believe that drawing such a line is impossible, and maybe it is. But I am going to do my best anyway. In the first nineteen chapters of this book, I will be functioning as a cognitive scientist. I will be providing, to the best of my abilities, a cognitive analysis of the moral and political worldviews of conservatives and liberals in contemporary America, an analysis that I hope will be independent of any political prejudice.
But I cannot hide my own moral and political views and I will not try to. In the last few chapters of the book, I will give some reasons for why I am a liberal, reasons based not on liberal ideology itself but on external considerations.
I consider this book to be anything but an idle academic exercise. Because conservatives understand the moral dimension of our politics better than liberals do, they have been able not only to gain political victories but to use politics in the service of a much larger moral and cultural agenda for America, an agenda that if carried out would, I believe, destroy much of the moral progress made in the twentieth century. Liberals have been helpless to stop them, largely, I think, because they don’t understand the conservative worldview and the role of moral idealism and the family within it.
Moreover, liberals do not fully comprehend the moral unity of their own politics and the role that the family plays in it. Liberals need to understand that there is an overall, coherent liberal politics which is based on a coherent, well-grounded, and powerful liberal morality. If liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock on progress in America.
Conservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections have come to seem natural to many Americans, including many in the media. As long as liberals ignore the moral, mythic, and emotional dimension of politics, as long as they stick to policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate, they will have no hope of understanding the nature of the political transformation that has overtaken this country and they will have no hope of changing it."
"Conservatives are largely against abortion, saying that they want to save the lives of unborn fetuses. The United States has an extremely high infant-mortality rate, largely due to the lack of adequate prenatal care for low-income mothers. Yet conservatives are not in favor of government programs providing such prenatal care and have voted to eliminate existing programs that have succeeded in lowering the infant mortality rate. Liberals find this illogical. It appears to liberals that “pro-life” conservatives do want to prevent the death of those fetuses whose mothers do not want them (through stopping abortion), but do not want to prevent the deaths of fetuses whose mothers do want them (through providing adequate prenatal care programs). Conservatives see no contradiction. Why ?
Liberals also find it illogical that right-to-life advocates are mostly in favor of capital punishment. This seems natural to conservatives. Why ?
Conservatives are opposed to welfare and to government funds for the needy but are in favor of government funds going to victims of floods, fires, and earthquakes who are in need. Why isn’t this contradictory ?
A liberal supporter of California’s 1994 single-payer initiative was speaking to a conservative audience and decided to appeal to their financial self-interest. He pointed out that the savings in administrative costs would get them the same health benefits for less money while also paying for health care for the indigent. A woman responded, “It just sounds wrong to me. I would be paying for somebody else.” Why did his appeal to her economic self-interest fail ?"
"Of course, most conservatives have just as little understanding of liberals. To conservatives, liberal positions seem outrageously immoral or just plain foolish. [...]
Liberals support welfare and education proposals to aid children, yet they sanction the murder of children by supporting the practice of abortion. Isn’t this contradictory ? [...]
How can liberals claim to help citizens achieve the American dream when they punish financial success through the progressive income tax ?
How can liberals claim to be helping people in need when they support social welfare programs that make people dependent on the government and limit their initiative ?
How can liberals claim to be for equality of opportunity, when they promote racial, ethnic, and sexual
favoritism by supporting affirmative action?
To conservatives, liberals seem either immoral, perverse, misguided, irrational, or just plain dumb. Yet, from the perspective of the liberal worldview, what seems contradictory or immoral or stupid to conservatives seems to liberals to be natural, rational, and, above all, moral."
"Words don’t have meanings in isolation. Words are defined relative to a conceptual system. If liberals are to understand how conservatives use their words, they will have to understand the conservative conceptual system. When a conservative legislator says, in support of eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), “It’s alright to have a soft heart, but you’ve gotta have a strong backbone,” one must ask exactly what that sentence means in that context, why that sentence constitutes an argument against continuing AFDC, and what exactly the argument is. In Dan Quayle’s acceptance speech to the Republican convention in 1992, he said, in a rhetorical question arguing against the graduated income tax, “Why should the best people be punished ?” To make sense of this, one must know why rich people are “the best people” and why the graduated income tax constitutes “punishment.” In other conservative discourse, progressive taxation is referred to as “theft” and “taking people’s money away from them.” Conservatives do not see the progressive income tax as “paying one’s fair share” or “civic duty” or even “noblesse oblige.” Is there anything besides greed that leads conservatives to one view of taxation over another ?
Here are some words and phrases used over and over in conservative discourse: character, virtue, discipline, tough it out, get tough, tough love, strong, self-reliance, individual responsibility, backbone, standards, authority, heritage, competition, earn, hard work, enterprise, property rights, reward, freedom, intrusion, interference, meddling, punishment, human nature, traditional, common sense, dependency, self-indulgent, elite, quotas, breakdown, corrupt, decay, rot, degenerate, deviant, lifestyle.
Why do conservatives use this constellation of words and phrases in arguing for political policies and exactly how do they use them ? Exactly what unifies this collection, what forms it into a single constellation ? A solution to the worldview problem must answer all these questions and more. It must explain why conservatives choose to talk about the topics they do, why they choose the words they do, why those words mean what they do to them, and how their reasoning makes sense to them. Every conservative speech or book or article is a challenge to any would-be description of the conservative worldview.
The same, of course, is true of the liberal worldview. Liberals, in their speeches and writings, choose different topics, different words, and different modes of inference than conservatives. Liberals talk about: social forces, social responsibility, free expression, human rights, equal rights, concern, care, help, health, safety, nutrition, basic human dignity, oppression, diversity, deprivation, alienation, big corporations, corporate welfare, ecology, ecosystem, biodiversity, pollution, and so on. Conservatives tend not to dwell on these topics, or to use these words as part of their normal political discourse. A description of the liberal and conservative worldviews should explain why.
As I mentioned above, conservatism and liberalism are not monolithic. There will not be a single conservative or liberal worldview to fit all conservatives or all liberals. Conservatism and liberalism are radial categories. They have, I believe, central models and variations on those models. I take as my goal the description of the central models and the descriptions of the major variations on those central models."
"Where conservatives are relatively aware of how their politics relates to their views of family life and morality, liberals are less aware of the implicit view of morality and the family that organizes their own political beliefs."
"At the center of the conservative worldview is a Strict Father model:
This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules. The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Children must respect and obey their parents ; by doing so they build character, that is, self-discipline and self-reliance. Love and nurturance are, of course, a vital part of family life but can never outweigh parental authority, which is itself an expression of love and nurturance—tough love. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn.
Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Their self-reliance gives them authority over their own destinies, and parents are not to meddle in their lives.
The liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, the Nurturant Parent model:
Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Support and protection are part of nurturance, and they require strength and courage on the part of parents. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of the fear of punishment. Good communication is crucial. If their authority is to be legitimate, parents must explain why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. Questioning by children is seen as positive, since children need to learn why their parents do what they do and since children often have good ideas that should be taken seriously. Ultimately, of course, responsible parents have to make the decisions, and that must be clear.
The principal goal of nurturance is for children to be fulfilled and happy in their lives. A fulfilling life is assumed to be, in significant part, a nurturant life—one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, and the maintenance of social ties, which cannot be done without the strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance that comes through being cared for. Raising a child to be fulfilled also requires helping that child develop his or her potential for achievement and enjoyment. That requires respecting the child’s own values and allowing the child to explore the range of ideas and options that the world offers.
When children are respected, nurtured, and communicated with from birth, they gradually enter into a lifetime relationship of mutual respect, communication, and caring with their parents.
Each model of the family induces a set of moral priorities. As we shall see below, these systems use the same moral principles but give them opposing priorities. The resulting moral systems, put together out of the same elements, but in different order, are radically opposed.
Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (the self-control and self-discipline to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on. Moral self-interest says that if everyone is free to pursue their self-interest, the overall self-interests of all will be maximized. In conservatism, the pursuit of self-interest is seen as a way of using self-discipline to achieve self-reliance.
Nurturant Parent morality has a different set of priorities. Moral nurturance requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties. And one must be happy and fulfilled in oneself, or one will have little empathy for others. The moral pursuit of self-interest only makes sense within these priorities."
"What we have here are two different forms of family-based morality. What links them to politics is a common understanding of the nation as a family, with the government as parent. Thus, it is natural for liberals to see it as the function of the government to help people in need and hence to support social programs, while it is equally natural for conservatives to see the function of the government as requiring citizens to be self-disciplined and self-reliant and, therefore, to help themselves."
-George Lakoff, Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think, The University of Chicago Press, 2016 (1996 pour la première édition).
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5233735/671287
"Conservatives and progressives typically support opposite policies because they have opposite moral worldviews—opposite notions of right and wrong. Moral worldviews are important to people, part of their self-identity. People tend to think of themselves as good and moral, not taking into account that there could be an opposite view of what is moral."
"Only a tiny amount of our thought is conscious. A typical estimate is about 2 percent, with about 98 percent of thought unconscious.
Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious. The more that a neural “idea-circuit” is used, the stronger it gets—and may eventually become permanent, effectively “hard-wired.” Hence, most of what we will be discussing in this book occurs at the neural level and is likely to be unconscious."
"Deep and persisting moral worldviews tend to be part of your brain circuitry and tend to become part of your identity. In most cases, the neural wiring—and your identity—stay, and the facts are ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or attacked. It takes extraordinary openness, training, and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. Few members of the general public—or those in politics or the media—fit this profile."
"I work in a discipline that studies how people conceptualize the world. It is called cognitive science, which is the interdisciplinary study of the mind. It is a broad discipline, covering everything from vision, memory, and attention to everyday reasoning and language. The subfield most concerned with issues of worldview, that is, with everyday conceptualization, reasoning, and language, is cognitive linguistics. I have been a cognitive linguist virtually from the birth of the field, and it is my profession to study how we conceptualize our everyday lives and how we think and talk about them. The study of political concepts and political discourse falls under the job description of those in my field, though until now research in the area has been relatively sparse."
"One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science, one that comes from the study of commonsense reasoning, is that most of our thought is unconscious—not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it. We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say. We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts—concepts. When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system.
That is what I study: what, exactly, our unconscious system of concepts is and how we think and talk using that system of concepts. In recent years, my work has centered on two components of conceptual systems: conceptual metaphors and categories, especially radial categories and prototypes. A conceptual metaphor is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously. For example, many people may not be aware that we commonly conceptualize morality in terms of financial transactions and accounting. If you do me a big favor, I will be indebted to you, I will owe you one, and I will be concerned about repaying the favor. We not only talk about morality in terms of paying debts, but we also think about morality that way. Concepts like retribution, restitution, revenge, and justice are typically understood in such financial terms. As we shall see, examples like these are the tip of the iceberg. Much of moral reasoning is metaphorical reasoning, as will become apparent below. It should also become apparent, if this example does not already make it clear, that metaphorical thought need not be poetic or especially rhetorical. It is normal, everyday thought. Not every common concept is metaphorical, but a surprising number are."
"Much of what we read on the daily op-ed pages of our finest newspapers is metaphorical commonsense reasoning. Let us consider a very simple example, taken from a column by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry (as it appeared in the Houston Chronicle, section A, p. 30, February 4, 1995). The column begins straightforwardly enough:
The government of the District of Columbia is reeling from a newly discovered budget shortfall of at least $722 million and there is growing talk of a congressional takeover of the city.
After an example of spending he considers questionable, Raspberry says:
What is about to do us in . . . is the poor but compassionate mother with a credit card. To put it another way, a huge amount of the city’s stupendous debt is the result of the local government’s effort to do good things it can’t afford.
He then gives a list of examples of good things the city government wants to do and which he thinks it can’t afford, and finishes the column as follows:
But a good chunk of the underlying problem is the compassionate mom attitude that says: If it’s good for the kid to have, then I ought to buy it—and worry later about where the money will come from.
Well, Mom not only has reached her credit limit:she’s in so much trouble that scrimping and saving now won’t solve the problem. She’ll need a bailout from Congress. But then, she has to learn to say no—not just to junk food but to quality cuts of meat she can’t afford.
None of Raspberry’s readers have any problem understanding this column. He writes it as if it were just common sense. Yet, it is an elaborate conceptual metaphor, and he is reasoning in terms of this metaphor.
In the metaphor, the government is an overindulgent, impractical mother and the citizens are her children. She has no self-discipline; she is indulging her children irresponsibly, using money she doesn’t have. This is not merely politics, it is a story with a moral. The moral is that Mom will have to learn self-discipline (“to say no”) and self-denial (“to quality cuts of meat she can’t afford”). Only then will she be a good mother.
We all understand this column, and to many readers it will seem like common sense. But why ? Is the metaphor that government is a parent and the citizens are children newly made up ? Or is it familiar, a metaphor we already know ? And why should readers be willing to reason about a government in this way ? Why don’t they just reject the metaphor as ridiculous ? Why don’t readers—all readers—say in response, “What’s all this nonsense about indulgent moms ? Let’s get real and talk about the details of economics and policy.” But readers don’t. The column is “just common sense.” And moreover, it is conservative common sense.
The logical structure of the column is determined by metaphor, not by facts. One could have taken the same budget shortfall and framed it in a different way. One could have observed that Washington, D.C., must have city services beyond its population to serve the large number of relatively well-off civil service workers, lobbyists, and others who live in the wealthy suburbs but work in town. One could also have mentioned that it is the responsibility of Congress to see that the city is maintained properly and that it lives by a humane standard, indeed that it should set a standard for the country. One could then apply the metaphor of the government as parent to Congress, seeing Congress as a deadbeat dad, refusing to pay for the support of his children, the citizens of Washington, D.C. One could then have drawn the moral that deadbeat dad Congress must meet his responsibilities and pay, no matter how tough it is for him. This is just common sense—a different kind of common sense. What, exactly, is conservative common sense ? How does it differ from liberal common sense ? And what role, exactly, does metaphorical thought play in the everyday common-sense reasoning of conservatives and liberals ? As we shall see, the metaphor used in this column, that of the government as parent, has a great deal to do with conservative common sense in general, as well as with what conservatism is as a political and moral philosophy."
"Radial categories are the most common of human conceptual categories. They are not definable in terms of some list of properties shared by every member of the category. Instead, they are characterized by variations on a central model. Take the category mother. The central model is characterized by four submodels. (1) The birth model: the mother is one who gives birth. (2) The genetic model: the mother is the female from whom you get half your genetic traits. (3) The nurturance model: your mother is the person who raises and nurtures you. And (4) The marriage model: your mother is the wife of your father. In the most basic case, all conditions hold. But modern life is complex, and the category extends to cases where only some of these conditions are met. Hence, there are special terms like birth mother, genetic mother, foster mother, stepmother, surrogate mother, adoptive mother, and so on.
Another example of a radial category is forms of harm. The central case is physical harm. But the category also includes kinds of harm that are metaphorically understood in terms of physical harm, e.g., financial harm, political harm, social harm, and psychological harm. Our courts recognize that these are all forms of harm, yet they also recognize the centrality of physical harm, for which the most severe penalties are usually reserved.
Radial categories, with central cases and variations on them, are normal in the human mind. And, as we shall see, the categories of conservative and liberal are also radial categories. This is important to realize because conservative and liberal are very complex categories, with a great many variations. The theory of radial categories allows us to account for both the central tendencies and the variations."
"The central members of radial categories are one subtype of a general phenomenon called “prototypes” [...] There are many types of prototypes and it is important to discuss them at the outset since they will play a major role throughout the book. A prototype is an element of a category (either a subcategory or an individual member) that is used to represent the category as a whole in some sort of reasoning. All prototypes are cognitive constructions used to perform a certain kind of reasoning; they are not objective features of the world.
Here are some of the basic types of prototypes that play a role in American politics and that will recur throughout this book:
1. The central subcategory of a radial category: This provides the basis for extending the category in new ways and for defining variations. Political examples will include central types of liberals and conservatives.
2. A typical case prototype: This characterizes typical cases and is used to draw inferences about category members as a whole, unless it is made clear that we are operating with a nontypical case.
For example, what we consider to be typical birds fly, sing, are not predators, and are about the size of a robin or sparrow. If I say “There’s a bird on the porch,” you will draw the conclusion that it is a typical case prototype, unless I indicate otherwise. If I speak of a typical American, what comes to mind for many is an adult white male Protestant, who is native-born, speaks English natively, and so on.
3. An ideal case prototype: This defines a standard against which other subcategories are measured.
We will be discussing what conservatives and liberals think of as an ideal parent, an ideal citizen, and an ideal person.
4. An anti-ideal prototype: This subcategory exemplifies the worst kind of subcategory, a “demon” subcategory. It defines a negative standard.
Liberals and conservatives have very different kinds of demons, and we will discuss the types and how they are used in reasoning.
5. A social stereotype: This is a model, widespread in a culture, for making snap judgments—judgments without reflective thought—about an entire category, by virtue of suggesting that the stereotype is the typical case.
Social stereotypes are commonly used in unreflective or biased discourse. Examples include the Drunken Irishman (used to suggest that the Irish typically drink to excess), the Industrious Japanese (used to suggest that the Japanese are typically industrious), and so on. Ethnic and gender stereotypes constantly enter into political discourse, as do political stereotypes. Stereotypes can either be based on myth or on individual well-known examples.
6. A salient exemplar: A single memorable example that is commonly used in making probability judgments or in drawing conclusions about what is typical of category members.
It is commonplace in political discourse to use a salient exemplar as if it were a typical case; for example, popularizing the case of a single welfare cheater to suggest that everyone on welfare cheats.
7. An essential prototype: This is a hypothesized collection of properties that, according to a commonplace folk theory, characterizes what makes a thing the kind of thing it is, or what makes a person the kind of person he is.
Essential properties of birds are, among others, that they have feathers, wings, and beaks, and lay eggs. Rational thought is seen as an essential property of human beings. In moral discourse, the notion of character is seen as defined by an essential prototype. Your character is what makes you what you are and determines how you will behave.
None of these should be strange or unfamiliar. All of these are normal products of the human mind, and they are used in normal everyday discourse. There is nothing surprising about their use in politics, but we do need to be aware of how they are used. It is important, as we shall see, not to confuse a salient exemplar with a typical case, or a typical case (say, the typical politician) with an ideal case (like the ideal politician)."
"I found that, using analytic techniques from cognitive linguistics, I could describe the moral systems of both conservatives and liberals in considerable detail, and could list the metaphors for morality that conservatives and liberals seemed to prefer. What was particularly interesting was that they seemed to use virtually the same metaphors for morality but with different—almost opposite —priorities. This seemed to explain why liberals and conservatives could seem to be talking about the same thing and yet reach opposite conclusion —and why they could seem to be talking past each other with little understanding much of the time.
At this point, I asked myself a question whose answer was not at first obvious: What unifies each of the lists of moral priorities ? Is there some more general idea that leads conservatives to choose one set of metaphorical priorities for reasoning about morality, and liberals another ? Once the question was posed, the answer came quickly. It was what conservatives were talking about nonstop: the family. Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning."
"Consider conservatism. What does opposition to abortion have to do with opposition to environmentalism ? What does either have to do with opposition to affirmative action or gun control or the minimum wage ? A model of the conservative mind ought to answer these questions, just as a model of the liberal mind ought to explain why liberals tend to have the cluster of opposing political stands. The question of explanation is paramount. How, precisely, can one explain why conservatives and liberals have the clusters of policies they have ?
Even the basics of conservative and liberal discourse require explanation. Conservatives argue that social safety nets are immoral because they work against self-discipline and responsibility. Liberals argue that tax cuts for the wealthy are immoral because they help people who don’t need help and don’t help people who do need help. What moral systems lead each of them to make these arguments and to reject the arguments of the other ? Why do conservatives like to talk about discipline and toughness, while liberals like to talk about need and help ? Why do liberals like to talk about social causes, while conservatives don’t ?
The answers, I will argue, come from differences in their models of the family and in family-based morality—from the distinction between what I will call the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models. The link between family-based morality and politics comes from one of the most common ways we have of conceptualizing what a nation is, namely, as a family. It is the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of the Nation-as-Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality."
"Because people do not use the same models in all aspects of their lives, a political conservative could very well use the Nurturant Parent model in his family life but not in his political life, just as a political liberal could use Strict Father morality in his family life but the Nurturant Parent model in his political life. Strict fathers can be political liberals and nurturant parents can be political conservatives.
Contemporary conservative politics tries to link the family use and the political use of the models more closely ; to point out that conservatives have the Strict Father model of the family and to convince others with the Strict Father model of the family that they should be political conservatives. I suspect that they are being successful at convincing people who believe in and identify with the Strict Father model of the family to vote conservative. For example, blue-collar workers who may previously have voted with liberals because of their union affiliation or economic interests may now, for cultural reasons, identify with conservatives and vote for them, even though it may not be in their economic interest to do so."
"It is vital to be as clear as possible about the line between what one can discover about morality and politics using the tools of one’s profession and what one’s own moral and political commitments are.
There are those who believe that drawing such a line is impossible, and maybe it is. But I am going to do my best anyway. In the first nineteen chapters of this book, I will be functioning as a cognitive scientist. I will be providing, to the best of my abilities, a cognitive analysis of the moral and political worldviews of conservatives and liberals in contemporary America, an analysis that I hope will be independent of any political prejudice.
But I cannot hide my own moral and political views and I will not try to. In the last few chapters of the book, I will give some reasons for why I am a liberal, reasons based not on liberal ideology itself but on external considerations.
I consider this book to be anything but an idle academic exercise. Because conservatives understand the moral dimension of our politics better than liberals do, they have been able not only to gain political victories but to use politics in the service of a much larger moral and cultural agenda for America, an agenda that if carried out would, I believe, destroy much of the moral progress made in the twentieth century. Liberals have been helpless to stop them, largely, I think, because they don’t understand the conservative worldview and the role of moral idealism and the family within it.
Moreover, liberals do not fully comprehend the moral unity of their own politics and the role that the family plays in it. Liberals need to understand that there is an overall, coherent liberal politics which is based on a coherent, well-grounded, and powerful liberal morality. If liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock on progress in America.
Conservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections have come to seem natural to many Americans, including many in the media. As long as liberals ignore the moral, mythic, and emotional dimension of politics, as long as they stick to policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate, they will have no hope of understanding the nature of the political transformation that has overtaken this country and they will have no hope of changing it."
"Conservatives are largely against abortion, saying that they want to save the lives of unborn fetuses. The United States has an extremely high infant-mortality rate, largely due to the lack of adequate prenatal care for low-income mothers. Yet conservatives are not in favor of government programs providing such prenatal care and have voted to eliminate existing programs that have succeeded in lowering the infant mortality rate. Liberals find this illogical. It appears to liberals that “pro-life” conservatives do want to prevent the death of those fetuses whose mothers do not want them (through stopping abortion), but do not want to prevent the deaths of fetuses whose mothers do want them (through providing adequate prenatal care programs). Conservatives see no contradiction. Why ?
Liberals also find it illogical that right-to-life advocates are mostly in favor of capital punishment. This seems natural to conservatives. Why ?
Conservatives are opposed to welfare and to government funds for the needy but are in favor of government funds going to victims of floods, fires, and earthquakes who are in need. Why isn’t this contradictory ?
A liberal supporter of California’s 1994 single-payer initiative was speaking to a conservative audience and decided to appeal to their financial self-interest. He pointed out that the savings in administrative costs would get them the same health benefits for less money while also paying for health care for the indigent. A woman responded, “It just sounds wrong to me. I would be paying for somebody else.” Why did his appeal to her economic self-interest fail ?"
"Of course, most conservatives have just as little understanding of liberals. To conservatives, liberal positions seem outrageously immoral or just plain foolish. [...]
Liberals support welfare and education proposals to aid children, yet they sanction the murder of children by supporting the practice of abortion. Isn’t this contradictory ? [...]
How can liberals claim to help citizens achieve the American dream when they punish financial success through the progressive income tax ?
How can liberals claim to be helping people in need when they support social welfare programs that make people dependent on the government and limit their initiative ?
How can liberals claim to be for equality of opportunity, when they promote racial, ethnic, and sexual
favoritism by supporting affirmative action?
To conservatives, liberals seem either immoral, perverse, misguided, irrational, or just plain dumb. Yet, from the perspective of the liberal worldview, what seems contradictory or immoral or stupid to conservatives seems to liberals to be natural, rational, and, above all, moral."
"Words don’t have meanings in isolation. Words are defined relative to a conceptual system. If liberals are to understand how conservatives use their words, they will have to understand the conservative conceptual system. When a conservative legislator says, in support of eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), “It’s alright to have a soft heart, but you’ve gotta have a strong backbone,” one must ask exactly what that sentence means in that context, why that sentence constitutes an argument against continuing AFDC, and what exactly the argument is. In Dan Quayle’s acceptance speech to the Republican convention in 1992, he said, in a rhetorical question arguing against the graduated income tax, “Why should the best people be punished ?” To make sense of this, one must know why rich people are “the best people” and why the graduated income tax constitutes “punishment.” In other conservative discourse, progressive taxation is referred to as “theft” and “taking people’s money away from them.” Conservatives do not see the progressive income tax as “paying one’s fair share” or “civic duty” or even “noblesse oblige.” Is there anything besides greed that leads conservatives to one view of taxation over another ?
Here are some words and phrases used over and over in conservative discourse: character, virtue, discipline, tough it out, get tough, tough love, strong, self-reliance, individual responsibility, backbone, standards, authority, heritage, competition, earn, hard work, enterprise, property rights, reward, freedom, intrusion, interference, meddling, punishment, human nature, traditional, common sense, dependency, self-indulgent, elite, quotas, breakdown, corrupt, decay, rot, degenerate, deviant, lifestyle.
Why do conservatives use this constellation of words and phrases in arguing for political policies and exactly how do they use them ? Exactly what unifies this collection, what forms it into a single constellation ? A solution to the worldview problem must answer all these questions and more. It must explain why conservatives choose to talk about the topics they do, why they choose the words they do, why those words mean what they do to them, and how their reasoning makes sense to them. Every conservative speech or book or article is a challenge to any would-be description of the conservative worldview.
The same, of course, is true of the liberal worldview. Liberals, in their speeches and writings, choose different topics, different words, and different modes of inference than conservatives. Liberals talk about: social forces, social responsibility, free expression, human rights, equal rights, concern, care, help, health, safety, nutrition, basic human dignity, oppression, diversity, deprivation, alienation, big corporations, corporate welfare, ecology, ecosystem, biodiversity, pollution, and so on. Conservatives tend not to dwell on these topics, or to use these words as part of their normal political discourse. A description of the liberal and conservative worldviews should explain why.
As I mentioned above, conservatism and liberalism are not monolithic. There will not be a single conservative or liberal worldview to fit all conservatives or all liberals. Conservatism and liberalism are radial categories. They have, I believe, central models and variations on those models. I take as my goal the description of the central models and the descriptions of the major variations on those central models."
"Where conservatives are relatively aware of how their politics relates to their views of family life and morality, liberals are less aware of the implicit view of morality and the family that organizes their own political beliefs."
"At the center of the conservative worldview is a Strict Father model:
This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules. The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Children must respect and obey their parents ; by doing so they build character, that is, self-discipline and self-reliance. Love and nurturance are, of course, a vital part of family life but can never outweigh parental authority, which is itself an expression of love and nurturance—tough love. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn.
Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Their self-reliance gives them authority over their own destinies, and parents are not to meddle in their lives.
The liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, the Nurturant Parent model:
Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Support and protection are part of nurturance, and they require strength and courage on the part of parents. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of the fear of punishment. Good communication is crucial. If their authority is to be legitimate, parents must explain why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. Questioning by children is seen as positive, since children need to learn why their parents do what they do and since children often have good ideas that should be taken seriously. Ultimately, of course, responsible parents have to make the decisions, and that must be clear.
The principal goal of nurturance is for children to be fulfilled and happy in their lives. A fulfilling life is assumed to be, in significant part, a nurturant life—one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, and the maintenance of social ties, which cannot be done without the strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance that comes through being cared for. Raising a child to be fulfilled also requires helping that child develop his or her potential for achievement and enjoyment. That requires respecting the child’s own values and allowing the child to explore the range of ideas and options that the world offers.
When children are respected, nurtured, and communicated with from birth, they gradually enter into a lifetime relationship of mutual respect, communication, and caring with their parents.
Each model of the family induces a set of moral priorities. As we shall see below, these systems use the same moral principles but give them opposing priorities. The resulting moral systems, put together out of the same elements, but in different order, are radically opposed.
Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (the self-control and self-discipline to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on. Moral self-interest says that if everyone is free to pursue their self-interest, the overall self-interests of all will be maximized. In conservatism, the pursuit of self-interest is seen as a way of using self-discipline to achieve self-reliance.
Nurturant Parent morality has a different set of priorities. Moral nurturance requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties. And one must be happy and fulfilled in oneself, or one will have little empathy for others. The moral pursuit of self-interest only makes sense within these priorities."
"What we have here are two different forms of family-based morality. What links them to politics is a common understanding of the nation as a family, with the government as parent. Thus, it is natural for liberals to see it as the function of the government to help people in need and hence to support social programs, while it is equally natural for conservatives to see the function of the government as requiring citizens to be self-disciplined and self-reliant and, therefore, to help themselves."
-George Lakoff, Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think, The University of Chicago Press, 2016 (1996 pour la première édition).
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Ven 3 Sep - 10:31, édité 1 fois
