George Lakoff

This chapter considers the mystery of how art presents gaps, disparities, and improvisations that invite—and even insist on—our participation in the act of reconciliation or completion and connection. Art seems ultimately to be about playing as if we human beings could step outside the bounds of our physical limitations by opening the imagination to take on the rote of seeing and being others. Of special interest here is the power of intensive visual focus for young artists and the potential correlation of such visual attentiveness with verbal fluency. Every piece of art not only is, but also is of, something. With this recognition, we have only a short distance to go before we understand that art across cultures functions to transport viewers and listeners outside themselves and beyond the immediacies of space and time.

The now-classic _Metaphors We Live By_ changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science.... Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist.

Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed.

“Language and Emotion” (2016) showed a number of nonobvious ways in which the nature of emotion can be studied via the way that emotions are expressed, mostly unconsciously, in language. The results given there have come mostly from cognitive linguistics, structured neural computation, and embodied cognition taken together. The references given, survey those results and their empirical basis. The commentators have each made contributions to our ultimate understanding of emotion, each from a different field with a different set of assumptions and research techniques. But they are not up on contemporary embodied cognitive linguistics. As a result, most missed points made in the article. The good news is that each got a chance to introduce their own research to our readership.

Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns.