A few weeks ago, commenting on open access, your host savaged Michael Silverstein for hiding particularly ugly partisan sentiments behind a supposedly scholarly tome. Mark Liberman reasonably construed this as missing the point about the serious work embodied in Silverstein's pamphlet. In fairness to myself, two points could reasonably be made: 1) the issue about politics was somewhat incidental to a larger point that while you can't judge a book by its cover, a few pages might be enough to fix that deficiency, and 2) there was a certain amount of unstated baggage that no reader was possibly going to deduce from what was actually written there.
In response to 2, your host has spent far too much time going through multiple drafts of a post (still not up!) addressing his general skepticism towards people who purport to use their specialized scientific field to analyze politics, and in the process -- lo and behold -- they discover that people who don't agree with them don't just disagree, they're crazy to boot. This is exactly the move that George Lakoff made in this article, a precursor to Moral Politics, and it did a lot to diminish SC's respect for him. The book itself is an audacious attempt to demolish conservative thought by demonstrating that the underlying metaphors turn out to be dangerously wrong, but they both fail because Lakoff ultimately can't break free of the notion which motivated him in the first place -- that because he's right about everything, disagreement with him must be motivated by something pathological (this is a claim which the editors of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences would heartily endorse, and which we'll address elsewhere). It's precisely when he moves from attempting to analyze the metaphors and rhetoric to analyzing motives that he goes off the rails, but as your host plans to show, this is part of a larger failing across academic disciplines that starts from a presupposition that conservatism is pathological.
Prof. Liberman, being a very fair-minded gentleman, defends Lakoff and Silverstein thusly:
However, Lakoff is not talking about ideas as rationally-constructed opinions, convictions or principles, but rather about metaphors, images, and evoked scenarios with emotion-laden roles like victim, hero, villain, crime, strict father and so on. Although he has partisan goals, this mode of analysis is politically neutral, at least with respect to current American political parties...Like Lakoff, Silverstein is promoting a mode of analysis that applies to any human communication, political or otherwise. What he has to say about image, style and message can be applied to positive or negative evaluations of any politician, or for that matter to your relatives, your friends or yourself.
In large part, SC wants desperately to agree. That's why your host has effusively praised his methods. Unfortunately, while these claims of working out a dispassionate methodology to analyze political speech sound good in theory, your host has been distinctly underwhelmed by their application in fact. If he was too harsh on Michael Silverstein, it's because reading Lakoff's earlier works convinced him that this application of linguistics is a sucker's game. Putting the punchline up front didn't buy Prof. Silverstein any additional credibility.
So at first, SC had no plans to bother with Don't Think of an Elephant!. However, since your host's quarrel is with Lakoff's application of the theory (but not the underlying principles), and it's a book primarily about the application, it's uniquely appropriate for it to be reviewed in this space. Look for it after the weekend.
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