George Lakoff Quotes

Myth 7: Everyone Can Pull Himself or Herself Up by the Bootstraps.

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

These assumptions lead progressives into other traps: assuming that hard facts will persuade voters, that voters are "rational" and vote in their self-interest and on the issues, and that negating a frame is an effective way to argue against it. 5.

Since language is used for communicating thought, our view of language must also reflect our new understanding of the nature of thought. Language is at once a surface phenomenon and a source of power. It is a means of expressing, communicating, accessing, and even shaping thought. Words are defined relative to frames and conceptual metaphors.

If you have cancer and you don't have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die. If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don't have health care, you are not free – you may be disabled for life, or die. Even if you break your leg, do not have access to health care, and cannot get it set, you are not free. You may never walk or run freely again. Ill health enslaves you. Disease enslaves you. Even cataracts that rob your vision and can easily be healed by modern medicine will enslave you to blindness without health care. When states turn down funds for Medicaid, that is a freedom issue – both for people who are being denied health care, and for everyone else to whom a curable disease can spread when health care is denied to a significant number of the people they interact with everyday.

Liberals: Liberty-loving liberals founded our country and enshrined its freedoms. Dedicated, fair-minded liberals ended slavery and brought women the vote. Hardworking liberals fought the goon squads and won workers' rights: the eight-hour day, the weekend, health plans, and pensions. Courageous liberals risked their lives to win civil rights. Caring liberals have made the vulnerable elderly secure with Social Security and healthy with Medicare. Forward-looking liberals have extended education to everyone. Liberals who love the land have been preserving our environment so you can enjoy it. Nobody loves liberty and life more than a liberal. When conservatives say you're on your own, we liberals know we're all in this together. "Liberal

One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change-for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide - freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open.

Since the Strict Father model is what holds Strict Father morality together, interference with the pursuit of self-interest threatens the foundations of the whole Strict Father moral framework - from the efficacy of moral strength to the validity of the moral order. The

Physical. In other words, we are understanding one thing in terms of something else of the same kind. But in conventional metaphor, we are understanding one thing in terms of something else of a different kind. In "Inflation has gone up," for example, we understand inflation (which is abstract) in terms of a physical substance, and we understand an increase of inflation (which is also abstract) in terms of a physical orientation (up). The only difference is whether our projection involves the same kinds of things or different kinds of things.

Conservatives tend not to want to fund early childhood education. First, they see it as a government program to be destroyed. Second, they are concerned about what would be taught - perhaps not the subject matter of what would be taught in a strict father household. They want to be sure that children are taught a conservative way of looking at the world. Children

What takes the place of the strict rules of the Strict Father model is clarity of expectations and empathy. What takes the place of reward and punishment is interdependence, communication, and a true desire to remain affectionately connected to those you live with. F

Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you - the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.

Conservatives talk constantly about the centrality of morality and the family in their politics, while liberals did not talk about these things until conservatives started winning elections by doing so.

Bad apple frame. Consider the saying "A bad apple spoils the barrel." The implication is that if you remove the bad apple or some small number of bad apples, the others will be fine. The rot is localized and will not spread. Rot here is a metaphor for immorality. In a case where there is immoral behavior, it points blame at one person or a few people - and not to any broader systemic immorality, an immoral policy, or an immoral culture. This

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

Given the central position that the Morality of Reward and Punishment has in the conservative moral system, it is no surprise that conservatives in most cases prefer retribution over restitution as a form of justice, as a way of balancing the moral books. It is therefore no surprise that conservatives are in favor of the death penalty. It is a form of retribution, a life for a life. Liberals,

Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood. The

Privatization and deregulation constitute the outsourcing of democratically elected government with a moral mission to corporations that have a profit-making mission. The effect is to turn democracy into corporatocracy. PROFIT

Conservatives take the opposite approach. They start from the idea that self-discipline is fundamental. A lack of property to conservatives indicates a lack of discipline, and hence a lack of morality. Therefore, giving people things they haven't earned creates dependency, which traps people in welfare programs and poverty and thus robs them of their freedom. Not only that, but the taxes that pay for programs like Social Security and universal health care infringe on the freedom of the taxpayer, since taking his money is imposing on his freedom. What

An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class.

Defenders of the morality of abortion are usually defenders of early abortion: abortion of the embryo or of a fetus well before it is viable outside the womb, usually in the first trimester. That is, they are defenders of the morality of removing from a mother a group of cells that is not an independent, viable, and recognizable human being. Opponents

It is these conditions that form the grounding for our system of moral metaphors. Since it is better to be rich than to be poor, morality is conceptualized in terms of wealth. Since it is better to be strong than to be weak, we expect to see morality conceptualized as strength. Because it is better to be healthy than sick, it is no surprise to see morality conceptualized in terms of health and attendant concepts like cleanliness and purity. Since it is better to be cared for than uncared for, it seems natural to find morality conceptualized as nurturance. And because, in normal cases, children tend to be better off if they obey rather than disobey their parents, we expect to see morality conceptualized as obedience. What

We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?

Indeed, some cynical liberals have even questioned the sincerity of pro-life advocates as not really being in favor of "life" as an absolute, since they support the death penalty. Other liberals have questioned the morality of pro-life advocates who want to save the lives of some unborn babies (those who would be aborted) and not save the lives of other unborn babies (the great many who die of inadequate pre-and postnatal care). To a liberal, it is both illogical and immoral for someone to want to save the life of an unborn baby whose mother does not want it, but not to want to save the life of a baby whose mother does want it. I

The government is commonly conceptualized as a business. If it is seen as a service industry, taxes can be seen as payment for services provided to the public. Those services can include protection (by the military, the criminal justice system, and regulatory agencies), adjudication of disputes (by the judiciary and other agencies), social insurance (as in Social Security and Medicare and various "safety nets"), and so on. Under

Conservatives are also against unions and want to legislate them out of existence via what are called "right to work" laws. Such laws see employment through a Strict Father lens: as simply a matter of individual responsibility by the employee. Conservative enmity against unions follows from the moral hierarchy: Rich Over Poor; Employer Over Employee. Unions are actually agents of freedom - freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery. Without unions, employees have to individually take what is offered, usually far less than they would get with a union: not just pay but worker safety, health care benefits, pensions, reasonable working conditions and hours, reasonable vacation time. What is "reasonable"? What the union members can negotiate. Unions create freedom. Austerity

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

What all this adds up to is the view that nature is there as a resource to be used by man for his self-interest and profit. But, frugality being a virtue, the resource should be "conserved" as much as possible.

This contrasts sharply with the progressive view that markets must respect human dignity and serve the common good while pursuing profit.

By Strict Father morality, harsh prison terms for criminals and life imprisonment for repeat offenders are the only moral options.

It is important to realize that the Social Nurturance metaphor and the Moral Nurturance metaphor may sometimes contradict each other, even though they form a natural pairing. This occurs when you have to maintain social ties with people in your community who do not believe in or operate by the Moral Nurturance metaphor. Compromising with such people for the sake of maintaining social ties may require compromising on moral nurturance. M

Effective campaigns must communicate the candidates' values and use issues symbolically - as indicative of their moral values and their trustworthiness. Recall

This initiative requires one major change in government policy: Shift the massive subsidies that currently find their way to agribusiness and use that taxpayer money to create the infrastructure for a healthy, affordable food system. This will not happen overnight; it is a long-term initiative that could eventually bring us a sustainable agricultural system. Let's

New ideas are never entirely new. They must make use of ideas already present in the culture. No conspiracy of the ultrarich explains why conservative ideas make sense to people and what sense they make. Fourth,

What is punishment and theft to conservatives is civic duty and fairness to liberals. There

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?

What is meaningful are not the words, the mere sound sequences spoken or letter sequences on a page, but the conceptual content that the words evoke.
Meanings are thus in people's minds, not in the words on the page.

Transit-for-all is about values. Improving public transportation is about giving all Americans the freedom of equal access to social and economic opportunities that enhance our quality of life. Investing in alternative transportation is using the common wealth for the common good. It is an expansion of freedom, creating more diverse transportation. Transit-for-all is a progressive strategic initiative to advance many of our goals at once. It's an economic issue. It would increase mobility of goods and labor. It would revitalize neglected neighborhoods. And it would spur growth and attract development. It's a labor issue.

The Public provides freedom ... Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases ...

The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life.

Since future times are facing toward us, the times following them are further in the future, and all future times follow the present. That is why the weeks to follow are the same as the weeks ahead of us.

We will begin with three analytic failures by liberals: 1. Conservatism is "the ethos of selfishness." 2. Conservatives just believe in less government. 3. Conservatism is no more than a conspiracy of the ultrarich to protect their money and power and to make themselves even richer and more powerful. T

That is why conservatives are attacking the infrastructure of public education in the country. They have no choice. They are up against an infrastructure full of nurturers, and they don't like it one bit - and they shouldn't like it one bit.

Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.

There exists no Fregean person-as posed by analytic philosophy-for whom thought has been extruded from the body. That is, there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. The correspondence theory holds that statements are true or false objectively, depending on how they map directly onto the world-independent of any human understanding of either the statement or the world. On the contrary, truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather, our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.

In the strict father model, the "free market" plays a significant, implicit role. The market is a competitive system where the disciplined are rewarded through profit, and the undisciplined (and hence immoral) are punished through poverty. The market is an instrument of morality.

Conservatives deny that the private depends on public resources. Citing Ronald Reagan's credo that "The Government is the Problem," conservatives are constantly trying to eliminate public resources and to privatize as much as possible.

The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world" and what David Abram refers to as "the-more-than-human-world." Our body is intimately tied to what we walk on, sit on, touch, taste, smell, see, breathe, and move within. Our corporeality is part of the corporeality of the world.

Charles Fillmore has observed (in conversation) that English appears to have two contradictory organizations of time. In the first, the future is in front and the past is behind: In the weeks ahead of us . . . (future) That's all behind us now. (past) In the second, the future is behind and the past is in front: In the following weeks . . . (future) In the preceding weeks . . . (past) This appears to be a contradiction in the metaphorical organization of time. Moreover, the apparently contradictory metaphors can mix with no ill effect, as in We're looking ahead to the following weeks. Here it appears that ahead organizes the future in front, while following organizes it behind.

The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world.

In short, Strict Father morality requires perfect, precise, literal communication, together with a form of behaviorism. Thus, Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met: 1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category. 2. Literality: All moral rules must be literal. 3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate. 4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punishments. Cognitive

Pragmatic conservatism is less idealistic than central conservatism. The goal is to get ahead, to serve your self-interest. The idealistic parts of conservatism are seen as effective means to achieve that goal.

The rich are thus not just more powerful than the poor, they also have moral authority over the poor and with it the moral responsibility to tell the poor how to live: build self-discipline, work hard, climb the economic ladder, and so become self-reliant. M

In Nurturant Parent morality, the teenage girl is "in trouble," she needs help and deserves empathy (moral-action Category 2 - helping).

Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives

Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America. If you join a country club or a community center, you pay fees. Why? You did not build the swimming pool. You have to maintain it. You did not build the basketball court. Someone has to clean it. You may not use the squash court, but you still have to pay your dues. Otherwise it won't be maintained and will fall apart. People who avoid taxes, like corporations that move to Bermuda, are not paying their dues to their country. It is patriotic to be a taxpayer. It is traitorous to desert our country and not pay your dues.

Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?

Discrimination is a denial of freedom.

When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia, beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above plus the immeasurably vaster constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all.

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.
The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program.

There is nothing inherently metaphoric about such claims of basic experiential morality as "Health is good," "It is better to be cared for than uncared for," "Everyone ought to be protected from physical harm," and "It is good to be loved."
However, as soon as we develop such claims into a full-fledged human morality, we find that virtually all of our abstract moral concepts-justice, rights, empathy, nurturance, strength, uprightness, and so forth-are defined by metaphors. That is why there is no ethical system that is not metaphorical. We understand our experience via these conceptual metaphors, we reason according to their metaphorical logic, and we make judgments on the basis of the metaphors. This is what we mean when we say that morality is metaphoric.

Why didn't the Democrats accomplish more right after the 2006 elections that gave them control of Congress? It wasn't just that they didn't have votes to override a presidential veto or block a filibuster. They didn't use their mandate to substantially change how the public--and the media-- thought about issues. They just tried to be rational, to devise programs to fit people's interests and the polls. Because there was little understanding of the brain, there was no campaign to change brains. Indeed, the very idea of "changing brains" sounds a little sinister to progressives-- a kind of Frankenstein image comes to mind. It sounds Machiavellian to liberals, like what the Republicans do. But "changing minds" in any deep way always requires changing brains. Once you understand a bit more about how brains work, you will understand that politics is very much about changing brains-- and that it can be highly moral and not the least bit sinister or underhanded.

This overall picture is quite damning for the Strict Father model. That model seems to be a myth. If this research is right, a Strict Father upbringing does not produce the kind of child it claims to produce. Incidentally, this picture is not from one study or from studies by one researcher. This is the overall picture gathered from many studies by many different researchers (see References,

In all aspects of life ... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

The heart of the objectivist tradition in philosophy comes directly out of the myth of objectivism: the world is made up of distinct objects, with inherent properties and fixed relations among them at any instant. We argue, on the basis of linguistic evidence (especially metaphor), that the objectivist philosophy fails to account for the way we understand our experience, our thoughts, and our language. An

For example, from 1968 to 1992 (with the exception of the Carter presidency), the voters selected a fairly conservative president and a fairly liberal Congress, creating what might be seen as a Strict Father executive and a Nurturant Mother Congress, thus reproducing a classic family model in the government, with strictness at the top and caring right below. Thus,

It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many "red state" voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works.

What have been called "women's issues" are freedom issues. Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.

Nurturance implies empathy, self-nurturance, the nurturance of social ties, the cultivation of happiness, and self-development. When one understands Morality As Nurturance metaphorically, a host of other metaphors are entailed: Morality As Empathy, Moral Self-Nurturance, Morality As the Nurturance of Social Ties, Morality As Happiness, and Morality As Self-Development. The Nurturant Parent model of the family gives this whole category of moral schemes its highest priority. M

Consider a cognitive scientist concerned with the empirical study of the mind, especially the cognitive unconscious, and ultimately committed to understanding the mind in terms of the brain and its neural structure. To such a scientist of the mind, Anglo-American approaches to the philosophy of mind and language of the sort discussed above seem odd indeed. The brain uses neurons, not languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions in a mathematical
logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a transformational grammar.

In the system of conservative moral categories, government regulation falls under interference with the pursuit of self-interest by people trying to make a living, people using their self-discipline to become self-reliant (and, if possible, rich). These are the good people in our society. We want to encourage people like them and it is wrong to put roadblocks in their way. The

The Strict Father model takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.

The self-righteous person's superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a self-righteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes self-righteous people particularly infuriating to talk to. F

New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.

Most conservatives are conservatives because they think they are morally correct.

[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.

The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

We are proposing that the concepts that occur in metaphorical definitions are those that correspond to natural kinds of experience. Judging by the concepts that are defined by the metaphors we have uncovered so far, the following would be examples of concepts for natural kinds of experience in our culture: LOVE, TIME, IDEAS, UNDERSTANDING, ARGUMENTS, LABOR, HAPPINESS, HEALTH, CONTROL, STATUS, MORALITY, etc. These are concepts that require metaphorical definition, since they are not clearly enough delineated in their own terms to satisfy the purposes of our day-to-day functioning.

There are three principal conservative descriptions of conservatism. 1. Conservatism is against big government. 2. Conservatism is for traditional values. 3. Conservatism is just what the Bible tells us. We

First, they follow the model of their parents' behavior. Second, through being securely attached to their parents, they become attuned to their parents' expectations and try to meet them. If the parents are careful about making their expectations realistic and appropriately challenging - rather than overdemanding or nondemanding - the children will be able to meet them and develop mastery. The

The relationship between nurturance and moral self-interest can be seen most clearly in nurturant forms of business practice. It involves the humane treatment of employees, the creation of a safe and humane workplace, social and ecological responsibility, fairness in hiring and promotion, the building of a work community, the development of excellent communication between employees and management and between the company and its customers, opportunities for employee self-development, a positive role in the larger community, scrupulous honesty, a regard for one's customers and for the public, and excellent customer service. Policies such as these have increased the productivity and success of many businesses. They are models of how Nurturant Parent morality can function to help businesses be successful and to allow owners, investors, and employees to seek their self-interest within this moral system. Moral

To be able to see the world through other people's values and truly empathize with them means that you cannot see all people who have different moral values than yours as enemies to be demonized. There

To the conservative, immoral behavior is attributable to individual character, not to social causes: What is right and what is wrong are clear, and the question is whether you are morally strong enough to do what's right. It's a matter of character. Conservatives believe that if an extreme conservative commits a crime, say killing people, in the name of vigilante justice, then conservatism itself cannot be held to blame, nor can those who spew hate over the airwaves. The explanation instead is that that individual had a bad character, that is, a bad moral essence; either that or he was crazy, craziness being a different kind of moral essence.

Crucial to this is what conservatives see as the essence of America - the Ladder of Success myth. As long as free enterprise flourishes and anyone with enough self-discipline and imagination can become an entrepreneur, the Morality of Reward and Punishment will hold and all will be well. The logic of conservatism locates so-called "social" problems within people, not within society. For this reason, it would make no sense to conservatives to use class and social forces as forms of explanation and justification for social policy. Nature

Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.

Strict Father morality requires that there are natural, strict, uniform, unchanging standards of behavior that must be followed if society is to function. Another

Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.

Progressives should argue progressivism. We need to get out of issue silos that isolate arguments and keep us from the values and principles that define an overall progressive vision. 2.

Our categories arise from the fact that we are neural beings, from the nature of our bodily capacities, from our experience interacting in the world, and from our evolved capacity for basic-level categorization - a level at which we optimally interact with the world. Evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as at the basic level, and so we are not.

Liberals conceptualize government regulation as the protection of those who cannot protect themselves - protection of citizens, workers, honest businessmen, and the environment against possible harm by unscrupulous or negligent businesses and individuals. Government regulation of business is there to be sure that businesses don't hurt or cheat anyone.

Another argument: The rich are job creators. They are helping the poor. If their taxes are cut, they can create more jobs. Ah, facts again. The rich actually tend to keep their money by buying prime real estate, yachts, art, and the like - things that will appreciate in value without giving back much to the economy as a whole. Moreover, the rich don't just give jobs out of the goodness of their hearts. Look at economics from the perspective of work: Working people are profit-creators. The rich only create jobs when they can get employees who can create profit for them. The poor create profit for the rich. Conservatives

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.

The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.