Pinker vs. Lakoff

I think what’s confused in Nunberg’s critique is Nunberg’s use of the word “model” and the subsequent misattribution to Lakoff of a set of claims that Lakoff doesn’t seem to make. I do not find it fair to Lakoff to suggest that Lakoff has reduced “the model of the family to two broad types.”

Nunberg’s description seems to have truthiness but it isn’t true. If you attribute a strong claim to a writer it might be a good idea to make sure you have the strength of that claim well-measured.

What Lakoff does is look at the family and the model of the family as it already has been reduced by the dominant character of the way people speak and write. Lakoff isn’t doing any reduction of the family or its model; it has been done well in advance of him. Further, to my knowledge he nowhere makes a claim as to the realism of the reduction nor does he invent it. The model is already in place; it’s the divided-in-two American political landscape, divided between liberal and conservative, between the traditional family and its supposedly more liberal analogues. Those are constructs Lakoff could hardly provide for us. He might be reinforcing them, but the denominator before him is so large that anything Lakoff does in the numerator is insignificant.

In his Moral Politics Lakoff claims that American politics is organized around the notion of marriage. Nowhere is he saying it should be or shouldn’t be. He is instead telling us how it is, and then helping us respond to how it is.

If someone wanted the data to support any reason for why marriage has been centralized, I think Lakoff would suggest you ask conservative thinktanks and media leaders for the data supporting the construction of such a frame.

I think the primacy is strikingly obvious: it’s a dose of realism, it’s saying, “this is simply the way it is, now deal with it.” It’s hardly an extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence; rather any claim to the contrary would need extraordinary evidence. I haven’t seen evidence of a dominant tripartite divide, or a division of any other number dominating popular speech or thinking, so assuming the model takes binary form isn’t extraordinary. Of course we could debate whether nominalism may be a better alternative to any sort of reduction-mapping but I suspect that gets even further removed from issues of public discourse and frankly throws away a powerful way of thinking. Now as to whether the more common term for national public discourse should be marriage or something else may be more debatable. But hasn’t public discourse of public officials already been reduced by notions of the domicile, the civil union, the family, the marriage? So no one’s saying it “should” be marriage. It already is and Lakoff doesn’t have to say much to make that clear. Not much more is needed than a nod to the items already and constantly in plain sight.

Simply put, Lakoff doesn’t need to give us evidence for the nation-as-family metaphor. He didn’t do this to us. Clearly. It’s already been done.

As Numberg says, there are many models of the nation at work in the American psyche:

The nation can be a body with a head, stomach, heart, and arms, or a person who is young, grows old and sick, and dies. The nation can be a ship, as poet Walt Whitman portrayed it, which sails on, loses its moorings, drifts, or has to be righted. It can be a theater, where people and issues wait in the wings, take center stage, or lay an egg. It can be a house, crumbling at the foundations or built to withstand the buffeting of the winds. It can be a city, as both Ronald Reagan and Mario Cuomo described it, though with different images of what was going on in its various neighborhoods. It can be a party (to which everyone must be invited). Or as David Brooks suggests, it can be a high-school cafeteria where each clique has its table. And sometimes it’s just a nation: not all the vocabulary we use to talk about national life has its conceptual origin in some other domain.

What is the evidence that the “nation-as-family metaphor” is so overwhelmingly dominant?

And, as Nunberg also says:

The argument … rests on two assumptions: first, that there is a conceptual coherence to the conservative worldview, and second, that you can uncover it if you can tell a story (or “build a model,” as linguists like to put it) where everything fits into place.

As an anthropologist, I find this second point even more damaging. It harks back to a kind of Parsonian sociology that I don’t feel very comfortable with.