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It's part of the reason I went into philosophy via linguistics... Have you read any George Lakoff? I took a course from him at Berkeley. That’s the closest I

• jfengel 6y ago
  Lakoff's work is incredibly important, and his work on the way language shapes our public discourse has been very prescient. A lot of what's going on right now is well understood through Lakoff's lens. I think that his work on cognitive linguistics is incredibly insightful, but potentially (ahem) dangerous. Language illustrates the mind, but I've come to believe that the ability of semantics to get us over the bridge between speech and cognition is limited. We certainly do use metaphors to frame our thinking, but I think that's building on top of a non-verbal cognitive system that the verbal system coopts. Coopts so thoroughly it's easy to be misled into thinking that's all of it. That's not what Lakoff is doing, of course. He's largely going the other direction, to show how language manipulates us. Very important stuff. Just less epistemological than I used to believe.