Editing Conceptual metaphor (section)

== Linguistics and politics ==
Lakoff, Johnson, and Pinker are among the many cognitive scientists that devote a significant amount of time to current events and political theory, suggesting that respected linguists and theorists of conceptual metaphor may tend to channel their theories into political realms.

Critics of this ethics-driven approach to language tend to accept that [[idiom]]s reflect underlying conceptual metaphors, but that actual grammar, and the more basic cross-cultural concepts of [[scientific method]] and [[mathematical practice]] tend to minimize the impact of metaphors. Such critics tend to see Lakoff and Jacobs as 'left-wing figures,' and would not accept their politics as any kind of crusade against an [[ontology]] embedded in language and culture, but rather, as an idiosyncratic pastime, not part of the science of linguistics nor of much use. And others further, such as [[Deleuze]] and [[Guattari]], [[Michel Foucault]] and, more recently, [[Manuel de Landa]] would criticize both of these two positions for mutually constituting the same old ontological ideology that would try to separate two parts of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Lakoff's 1987 work, ''[[Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things]],'' answered some of these criticisms before they were even made: he explores the effects of cognitive metaphors (both culturally specific and human-universal) on the grammar per se of several languages, and the evidence of the limitations of the classical logical-positivist or [[Analytic philosophy|Anglo-American School]] philosophical concept of the category usually used to explain or describe the scientific method. Lakoff's reliance on empirical scientific evidence, ''i.e.'' specifically [[Falsifiability|falsifiable]] predictions, in the 1987 work and in ''[[Philosophy in the Flesh]]'' (1999) suggests that the cognitive-metaphor position has no objections to the scientific method, but instead considers the scientific method a finely developed reasoning system used to discover phenomena which are subsequently understood in terms of new conceptual metaphors (such as the metaphor of fluid motion for conducted electricity, which is described in terms of "current" "flowing" against "impedance," or the gravitational metaphor for static-electric phenomena, or the "planetary orbit" model of the atomic nucleus and electrons, as used by [[Niels Bohr]]).

Further, partly in response to such criticisms, Lakoff and [[Rafael E. Núñez]], in 2000, proposed a [[cognitive science of mathematics]] that would explain mathematics as a consequence of, not an alternative to, the human reliance on conceptual metaphor to understand abstraction in terms of basic experiential concretes.