DISQUS

When I was in grad school for piano, people who got "sponsorship" -- a wealthy person or foundation to cover their living expenses so they could keep their life to practicing, performing, and making connections at wine and cheese parties -- were considered lucky. I always considered such people unlucky, because this process ensured that any further development of their sense of themselves would be stunted. ItI think it perfectly healthy to, at 18, think that your calling is to play Chopin and that's all you want to do and could possibly do. But it's equally healthy, at 24, to have further information modulate that concept -- so, for example, if you realize that hundreds of other graduates of other schools every year play Chopin as well as you, and maybe your goal is less "you" than you thought; if you gut out making a living for a couple of years commuting an hour each way to the suburbs, to teach kids who don't practice, to subsidize your concert career; then you get a different sense of whether playing Chopin is "you". It might still be. It may be that you realize that what you really loved about music is more differentiated, that you love the compositional structure, or the climate of ideas of that time, or reinventing Chopin for today, or you just like applause. So maybe it's a lot more fulfilling and less grueling to do the booking for a great concert series, or be a music history professor, etc.

I don't see why the development of "talent" doesn't contain the same basic properties of indeterminacy as embryology or neurology. No one gene or neuron connects to any particular final outcome; the whole thing develops in a contextual, nonlinear way. The unfolding of "talent" may obey similar principles.

I've often wondered whether the rise of Lakoff had more to do with his 'tactics' or just the desperate need of the Democratic Party establishment to glom on to a strategy that doesn't involve facing the reality that so many of their ideas are dated, tired, and wrong in the eyes of a critical mass of the American electorate, with their only hopes of power coming from the Republicans behaving so badly that the vital center feels obliged to vote contra.

In Pinker's review he sounds less like a libertarian to me and more like a Clintoninte Democrat, reflecting the usual exasperation of Democratic centrists with a graying establishment that can't see past their own 60s nostalgia and accept the empirical results of the last 30 years.

Lakoff's original set of theories are awfully good, and supported heavily by those who advocate a selectionist view of neuroembrology, neurodevelopment, and consciousness. In fact, if one were to take Gerald Edelman's TNGS and ask, what would our concepts be like in practice if his and, to pick one other, Esther Thelen's ideas were true, one would basically bump into Lakoff and Johnson's theories. In my opinion the smart money for the neurological future is on the selectionists -- I've certainly based my on method of therapy on it, as well as presentations I give on the subject.

Unfortunately Lakoff has taken a hazy, armchair approach to applying these ideas to political theory and made a "run for the end zone" of glory that sells his original insights short and will probably ultimately discredit him. On the other hand, I'm sure Paul Krugman, who pulled the same trick, still gets to go to all the best cocktail parties.