DISQUS

At first glance of your commentary, I was solidly impressed with your rebuttal. However, after reviewing Lakoff's rebuttal to Pinker's criticisms, I find myself less impressed with your commentary.

Let's dissect what you have to say:
"Lakoff’s argument builds on yet another exposition of his intriguingly comprehensive armchair theory of a metaphor-saturated mind"

I do believe that what you say hear rings a bit shrill at best. Lakoff's arguments stand on atleast well respected premises in terms of the two schools of thought of cognitive science theory. He mentions this in his rebuttal about classifying the old school of thought like Descartes' 17th Century rationalism to the newer school, ..."The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames, image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms."

Certainly there is disagreement in the cognitive science school of thought, but it doesn't necessarily weaken his premise, nor does it make it "empirically ill-supported". This is a theoretical discussion that atleast merits a bit more cogent criticism.

Later in your criticism, you compare Lakoff and Nunberg to "low-octane liberal versions of communist philosophers Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci".

Again, this seems pretty shrill. I would argue that your criticism hear is a better example of "empirically ill-supported" logic than is Lakoff's extrapolation of his own theories.

Not very impressive.