Having studied a bit of microanalysis at the University of Illinois, I find paying attention to cognitive patterns fascinating. Aaron writes below about some of George Lakoff's work. Based on what he's saying, I think I would enjoy reading his ideas. Only for more time!
George Lakoff is a prominent cognitive scientist whose central insight (which is not to say that the idea originates with him) is that we can learn about the structure of our thoughts by looking carefully at the words we use to express them. For example, we think of time as a line, as you can see through phrases like "time line", "looking forward", "further in the past", etc. Similarly, we thinking is thought of as a kind of seeing: "do you see what I mean?", "pulled the wool over your eyes", "as you can see from the book", "his talk was unclear", "that sentence is opaque", etc.
Lakoff used these techniques to write a series of books describing the structures of various ideas (Metaphors We Live By, Philosophy in the Flesh, Where Mathematics Comes From, etc.) but after the Republican Revolution of 1994, he turned the technique on politics, resulting in his 1996 classic Moral Politics, which tries to explicate the cognitive models of Democrats and Republicans.
After the election of Bush2, Lakoff began talking about how Republicans were better at "framing", or using language to get people to agree with them, than Democrats. Lakoff that the process goes both ways: language causes your mind to think of certain concepts which create certain pathways in your brain. Thus Republicans, he said, through massive repetition of certain phrases, were literally changing the brains of the electorate to be more favorable to them. ("If this sounds a bit scary," he writes, "it should. This is a scary time.")
Around the 2004 election, Lakoff skyrocketed to fame among Democrats, who were convinced by his argument that fighting Republicans required not just giving into Republican frames, but reframing the debate themselves. He rushed out the slender book Don't Think of an Elephant, a cobbled-together guide on his basic ideas and how progressives could use them. The book stayed on the New York Times' bestseller list for weeks.
Now Lakoff is back with a more studied work, Whose Freedom?, which tries to focus in more detail on the differing views of one particular concept: freedom. Lakoff starts the book by noting that in his 2004 speech at the Republican convention, Bush used "freedom", "free", or "liberty" once every forty-three words. Most progressives think of this simply as a stunt -- using feel-good symbols like flag and words like freedom to distract from the real issues. But Lakoff argues something much deeper is going on: Bush is trying to change the meaning of freedom itself. ...
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